Sketches from an exercise in Sunni Brown’s “The Art of Graphic Facilitation”.

Were you graced with a golden ticket to UX London 2011? No? Not to worry—UX Booth was there to document all the wisdom shared so that we could pass them on to you. Now isn’t that nice?

For information about Day 1 of UX London, be sure to check out Andrew’s own eyewitness account.

Below is a glimpse into each workshop I attended. When available, I’ll post slides and pictures from the workshop, along with links to other resources about the workshop and speaker. Happy reading mes amigos!

Kim Goodwin: Leading UX

I did have an initial interest in Kim’s workshop, Leading UX, but after hearing her keynote, hers was clearly the workshop to attend. It wasn’t so much her subject matter that was persuasive; it was, rather, her approach in delivering information in a clear, linear way that built up to big, thoughtful conclusions. She’s also one of those people you spend a little time with and think, “I would love to work with this person some day.” For those who felt the same way, the best we could do was attend her workshop. Not a bad alternative.

My initial interest in Kim’s workshop had come from a difficult experience in not only selling UX design at an organization that badly needed it, but also effectively inserting a method within to design for and deliver it. Certainly, Kim has the kind of wisdom-granting experience that could help anyone who’d gone through a situation like mine make a bit of sense of it and offer some tangible direction in “Leading UX” somewhere else down the line. She did not disappoint.

Kim tells us that all great companies have two thing in common: Great Leadership and Great Culture. If it’s your responsibility to lead UX in your company, you have to learn how to be a great leader. Leadership isn’t some inherent trait only bestowed on a lucky few. It’s a learned, practiced, special set of skills. Your effective leading will be the engine that drives culture change. Culture shifting is important, difficult work that can take years to accomplish, but the outcome is an organization full of happy people that produce great work.

On leadership

Kim makes a distinctive point that leaders don’t manage, they influence. Great leaders turn passive employees into inspired “volunteers” who feel empowered and valued. Making decisions and conversations are what Kim calls the “leader’s medium.” In this medium, leaders need to focus on building trust with their volunteers. Trust is earned by being honest, fair, and acting with integrity and consistency between your words and actions. This may sound oversimplified, but in practice, it’s not always easy to follow through on. Hearing this from Kim, an expert in this domain, allows us to trust this advice and believe that it’s always the right thing to do. For example, if you don’t know the answer to a question in some conversation but feel you should, you’ll gain more trust by being honest about it and saying, “I don’t know”, than BS-ing your way through it.

Communicating the value of talent and well-being of your employees might seem like squishy, warm-and-fuzzy business, but it’s an important part of being a great leader and successfully building culture. Money isn’t what deeply motivates most people to show up and produce great work. It’s feeling that what you do matters, that your production has meaning. It’s up to you as leader to help foster and maintain those feelings in your volunteers.

On culture

Culture change not only requires support from the top, but also the absolute belief that the organization depends on said culture to be successful. It requires shared vision that’s clearly delivered to all employees. Those who don’t believe in the vision might simply pack up and move on. And that’s ok—sometimes change requires that. Those who do believe in the vision now understand the framework and the purpose for their participation in it. A well-developed culture is a powerful motivator for turning employees into volunteers.

Types of cultures that build great experiences:

• Adaptive: favors learning and growth.
• Accepting of (reasonable) risk: willingness to try something new and untested.
• Accepting of (reasonable) failure: willingness to be wrong and learn from mistakes.
• Committed to quality: respects the brand, products, and customers.
• Willing to prioritize: focuses on what needs to get done first.
• “Other”-focused: customer focused; not self-serving.

So, what does all this have to do with UX design exactly? That question might have more to do with the definition we offer “UX” than anything else. For me, UX design is big-picture-oriented and involves most parts of an organization. Because of that, implementing UX design as a core competency means the statement of its importance has to be spread far and wide. That requires a strong leader who understands the craft to artfully embed it into the heart and soul (i.e. the culture) of an organization.

There’s certainly more to this story. For more info and details, you can find the slides to Kim’s workshop below.

Kevin Hoffman: Selling design: How meetings and process can save your best ideas

Have you ever designed a meeting or series of meetings for a project’s entire life-cycle? Kevin Hoffman of Happy Cog approaches projects with big-picture management and design process in mind. He maps out and organizes a series of meetings for each project that have specific attendants, goals and deliverables attached. Being able to see each design process stepping stone clearly laid out sets clear expectations, puts those involved at ease, and allows them to prepare for what’s coming next. It also allows for discussion and collaboration around how the design process for the project might go.

With the big-picture still in mind, the key to Kevin’s “selling design” approach is by making clients a participant in the design process, particularly early on. This does a number of positive things but the point is that it’s easier to sell great ideas if the people you’re selling them to are a part of their development. After all, people will generally buy-in to their own ideas.

Most of the workshop focused on meeting design and putting it to practice. He offered us a framework that works for him and his Happy Cog team. Meeting attendants have roles with rules associated to each. There are four roles:

• The Leader: Designs the meeting. Selects attendants. Decides on goals. Functions as a group member.
• The Facilitator: Coordinates and manages the meeting. Doesn’t evaluate. Doesn’t contribute.
• The Recorder: Creates group memory. Records publicly. Is silent. Does not contribute. Follows up afterwards.
• The Group Member: Participates in the discussion, evaluation, and generation of ideas.

In the group discussion, Kevin says it’s critical to participate in divergent, then convergent, thinking. Pulling back (divergence) and allowing yourself to consider many possible factors or solutions to a problem allows for healthy exploration. From there, focusing back in (convergence) and thinking more linearly allows you to then act on possible solutions.

How many times have you heard people you work with say, “Meetings are such a waste of time! I just need to go get things done.” Kevin is sympathetic to this as he, like most of us, has been the victim of poorly run meetings with no agenda or conclusion. A meetings shouldn’t be a casual happenstance for the sake of open, directionless conversation. Meetings should be used to reduce ambiguity, not breed it.

Be thoughtful about what’s needed during a project’s life cycle to keep things moving forward in a positive direction and plan meetings accordingly. Each meeting’s agenda and purpose should be defined, which will help you decide who needs to attend. The participant framework Kevin offers allows for healthy discussion that leads to some sort of conclusion, all which is captured and shared by The Recorder for future reference.

There are all sorts of exercises and tricks for getting what’s needed out of those attending the meeting. Kevin Hoffman has a resource Website for that very thing at goodkickoffmeetings.com.

Todd Zaki Warfel: Prototyping

This workshop may have been more appropriately titled “Prototyping in Code: Why HTML5 and CSS3 are the Only Tools You Need”. Todd Zaki Warfel’s book Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide is far more broad in scope and suggests a “match-the-tool-to-the-problem” approach when it comes to prototyping. In the workshop, he even stated that the best tool for prototyping is the tool you know how to use. If that’s the case, his next point must have been that HTML5 and CSS3 are the tools you should know

Todd focused on convincing work-shoppers that learning HTML5 and CSS3 is critical. He lured them by demonstrating the simplicity of the HTML5 syntax, along with the kinds of graphical fit and finish you can pull off using CSS3. He also regaled in stories of CEOs flinging Blackberrys across boardrooms from excitement after seeing an HTML5 prototype with some simple jQuery magic in it.

Much of Todd’s convincing comes by way of what seems like a smooth of product development work-flow. Todd and his team always start a project on paper with sketching sessions that involve the entire team. More on how his team actually does this would have been nice, but he didn’t get into it. Todd says the sketches only get the ideas about 70% of the way there. Agreed-upon approaches seen in the sketch phase give his team enough fidelity to move right into HTML5 prototyping. Coding now, as opposed to more fidelity in some static form like a Photoshop comp, allows his team to test their ideas what will be the native environment—a browser.

Todd and his team at Message First make it a point not to stylize the prototypes interface: no color, no graphical treatments. This allows them and their clients to focus on more important aspects of the work, like information architecture and work-flow. They prototype only what they need to allow themselves, their clients, and testers to experience a fairly thorough simulation. From there they iterate and refine the prototype until the project is complete.

Does jumping into code so early leave the experimentation and exploration phase a bit in the dust though? Does an intense UI sketch-phase allow for enough consideration for out-of-the-box, creative solutions? Shouldn’t the solution frame the code and not the other way around? These are the questions I was left tossing around. No doubt though, there’s plenty of value in prototyping in HTML5 and CSS3. Practically speaking, the business a lot of us are in is pleasing clients, which doesn’t always mean coming up with highly innovative, original solutions.

Sunni Brown: The art of graphic facilitation

So, what is “Graphic Facilitation”? Judging by Sunni’s workshop, it’s the art of facilitating a meeting where you engage attendants by graphically representing the meeting’s conversation with words and pictures. This, she says, optimizes creative output of the group and helps attendees retain information gleaned from the meeting.

A lot of what we do is to facilitate the design process—a continuum of conversations and artifacts that heuristically leads us down a path to (hopefully) spectacular solutions. It’s partially up to us to harness the mental wattage in an organization, particularly when it comes to solving big company or customer problems. Considering lots of ideas sheds light on the good/right ones. But how do we do this effectively? How does one kick off a design process to take full advantage of all the available brains in the room? How does one engage them to the point that they’re spitting out tons of great, contextually appropriate ideas? Well, massive sheets of paper, markers and a few clever exercises just might do the trick.

An example of Sunni’s Graphic Facilitation work.

To engage attendants in the meeting, it’s very important that they participate. A hurdle in this participation for many is the notion that they can’t draw. Sunni tells us we need to get over this idea. If a three year old can draw, so can you. Most illustrators agree with Sunni; drawing is a learned skill and not an ordained talent. Yes, some do have a natural ability, but that doesn’t mean everyone can’t use pictures to represent and communicate their ideas. Take a look through Sunni’s slide below. There are a few good exercises to help you see what it takes to draw in the kind of forum Sunni’s workshop tries to teach us. Can you draw a line? An angle? An oval? It really doesn’t get more difficult than that.

There’s an important point to make about “graphically facilitated” meetings that came out of a question one workshop attendant asked: “How important is it that we participate in the meeting to get value out of it? Can we later consume the artifacts and derive the same value?” Sunni’s answer was a clear “NO” – that it’s extremely important to be a participant. Very little value is derived after the fact. How might we might make these meetings a bit more “green”. This may not be very relevant but it reminded me of the video below. Maybe there’s an answer in there somewhere.

Sunni Brown’s “The Art of Graphic Facilitation” workshop was a gift. If you ever have a chance to attend her workshop, do so. Review the slides below and give some of the exercises a shot. Aim at actually facilitating a design kick-off meeting using some of these techniques. You might be surprised.

And then there were none…

Conferences like this one can, on the surface, seem like a waste of time. They’re expensive, far away, and [insert inconvenience here].But really, when it all boils down, UX London gave all its designer attendees some particularly great opportunities to meet some bright minds in the community, as well as learn a thing or two.

One of the biggest UX events of the year recently came and passed. Were you there? In case you weren’t, we’ve compiled a two-part writeup sharing all that we learned. Here’s our summary of this year’s UX London event.

To help report from the front lines, I recruited local, Boston-based designer, Sean Duhame. His background in set design and prop construction – and his degree in illustration – ensured that we gave readers markedly different perspectives on the event. Sean’s coverage of the UX London workshops will follow in a later article.

Getting there

Getting over to jolly ol’ London proved quite simple, despite a few hiccups. Sean had never been to the UK before and I booked two separate, overnight flights to London’s Heathrow airport. Naturally, we departed from Boston on Monday evening to arrive dreadfully early on Tuesday morning (UK is 5 hours ahead of us on the East Coast). That alone wouldn’t have been too bad, except that I realized our cell phones didn’t work only after we arrived. D’oh. We were subsequently left to wander around Heathrow airport looking for one another, all on very little sleep.

We eventually did find one another, though. Eighteen pounds (30-ish dollars) and a short taxi ride later we had arrived. And boy, was it beautiful.

Getting settled

As soon as you set foot in The Cumberland Hotel, it’s obvious that ClearLeft has paired a great event with a great venue. Nestled comfortably next to London’s Marble Arch (not to mention an ample shopping district) with convenient access to the London Underground, The Cumberland has it all – even moderately-hard-to-use, slightly over-designed bathroom fixtures! Fixtures notwithstanding, the art-deco inspired Cumberland Hotel conveys an air of prestige that all attendees will appreciate.

There’s only two other mentionables regarding the Cumberland Hotel. First, the wireless in the hotel is paid-access only. Because the conference didn’t begin until Wednesday, this left the early birds wanting for an entire day. Not to worry, though; there’s a coffee shop around the corner with free access. Additionally, ClearLeft provides free wifi on the days of the event.

Second, it worth be noting that the coffee served at the event is quite good. On most days it was served piping hot, strong and delicious. Maybe it’s just because I attend more than a couple of conferences throughout the year, but the quality of a conference’s coffee matters to me. Three cheers to both The Cumberland Hotel and ClearLeft for hitting a home run there.

Getting Started

The morning of, a full, English breakfast was included for those that stayed at the Cumberland. For those that didn’t, pastries and coffee fit the bill. Around 9am Andy Budd welcomed everyone to the event and prepped us all on the massive learning ahead.

The rest, as they say, is history. Sean and I live-tweeted updates from the @uxboothlive twitter account. (For those of who that tuned in: what did you make of it?) I noticed, also, that the event was collaboratively outlined and added to over on Lanyrd.com. See UX London 2011′s Lanyrd page for a crowd-sourced version of this writeup.

Without further adieu, though, here’s my account of the presentations from the second row of UX London, 2011:

Alan Cooper

These Sketch notes illustrate some Alan’s major points: efficiency, collaboration, and autonomy.

© Amanda Wright 2011. Used with permission.

Alan’s (@mralancooper) presentation was the perfect way to begin this year’s UX London event. Inspiring as it was insightful, Alan’s “It’s All Us,” described where we’ve come from, the challenges we presently face, and what we’re going up against as a design community. It’s worth noting how useful this sort of recap is for those of us who are new to this profession. The software world has seen a tectonic shift in the past two decades, whether we were there for it or not.

Alan called our attention to its effects. An economy of atoms – based on efficiency – has given way to an economy of bits – based on efficacy. Management structures that worked for the former don’t necessarily hold for the latter. Today, our products are defined what makes them different. And “you can’t get that right [by managing] from a distance,” Alan says.

Successful software teams marry the best parts of Interaction design and Agile development processes to manage themselves. The natural yin/yang struggle between them adds a healthy tension – and a means of accountability – to the creative process. Today’s contemporary, agile approach reintegrates deciding and doing. It doesn’t need yesterday’s managers. And therein lies our call to action: “it’s all us, there’s no ‘them.’”

Lou Rosenfeld

Promptly after Alan finished his presentation on the possibilities afforded to today’s designers, Lou (@lourosenfeld) – of Polarbear book and Rosenfeld media fame – took the stage and changed our minds regarding the “traditional” design process.

For those of you unfamiliar with Lou Rosenfeld and Alan Cooper, both of these presenters are luminaries in the world of UX Design. They’ve each written a landmark textbook in their respective fields. But whereas their views often overlap with regards to user-centered design, their presentations could not have differed more. In contrast to the empowering, even liberating views proffered by Mr. Alan Cooper, Lou’s “Redesign Must Die” forced us to ask some very tough questions.

Namely, Lou contends that some of today’s laziest designers offer their clients (what amounts to) little more than half-baked redesigns of their existing sites. He says this from experience, at least vicariously. His own alma mater, The University of Michigan, has tried over 12 different variations of their first website with no end in sight.

If it’s a universally acknowledged project anti-pattern, why does it persist?

The problem with the “redesign it” approach is that its easy to prescribe and hard to avoid (at least from a competitive standpoint). Redesigns can successfully ignore the difficult, systemic issues that often lie beneath our clients’ more readily apparent woes.

Lou explains that we must collectively refine our client’s approach to Design rather than approach their design outright. If it’s the right thing to do we should help clients dive deeper and refine what’s they’ve already got. Lou reminds us that “[websites] are moving targets built upon moving targets. Their problems… their goals, necessarily change based on the context of the design effort.” By helping our clients understand the design context they embody, we can move them to make more prudent decisions long after we’ve walked away.

Kim Goodwin

A former VP of Design at Cooper (Mr. Alan Cooper’s firm), Kim spends her days providing research, design, coaching and training to a variety of clients – all the more reason for freelance and in-house designers alike to listen up. Fortunately, this couldn’t have been easier. Because Kim spends her days working with clients both big and small, her presentational style is altogether relaxed and engaging.

In Making Personas Work… Without Breaking the Bank, Kim accompanied her talk with no less than sixteen (16!) persona case studies – about fifteen (15) failed attempts and one (1) successful one. Ouch. Common issues – such as over or under budgeting, lack of trust or buy-in, and documentation to excess – were all addressed.

To help us derive better personas, Kim recommends we:

• Derive personas (and test them) based on behavior rather than job titles or demographics.
• Consider a staged approach for larger research projects, whereby existing or initial personas inform future ones.
• Be mindful. Personas are only as good as the change they facilitate. Don’t create them if they won’t stick.
• Be rigorous. Coach your team in order to create a shared understanding of what personas can and can’t do.
• Budget wisely. Spend money on your designs rather than your design tools.

The title of Kim’s talk comes from a Forrester research study on personas, conducted in 2003. In their report, Forrester found that not only were one third of the people surveyed using Personas unhappy with them, the average cost of developing Personas was around $80,000 dollars. Eighty thousand dollars? Yikes! Kim says that clients with those kinds of research budgets shouldn’t hesitate to contact her so that she can change their minds.

Oliver King

Oliver, Oliver King. What a curious presentation you gave. For more than a few of us in the room, Oliver’s bright vision for the future of Service Design was vaguely reminiscent of past Interaction and IA Summit events. Isn’t this all the same stuff as UX Design? Well, not exactly. But, then again, that’s the point of Oliver’s talk “Service Design and User Experience: same or different,” to elicit this very question.

Because both Service Design (SD) and User Experience Design (UXD) deal with the emotional and functional affects of our design artifacts – in other words, what happens as a consequence of the things we create – there are dozens of similarities between them. Oliver says there is no mistaking that UXD, SD, product design, etc. are all on converging paths. Where they differ, however, are their respective approaches.

Service designers (in much the same fashion as Lou advocates…), look at an organization’s procedural hierarchy; specifically, how variables at one level affect the whole. They then hypothesize how to affect the change they want, play with the variables, and observe/modify their impact. Yes, I said play. Service designers occasionally employ improvisational acting to see how curious differences affect an entire system.

Service Designers are called upon to refine any a number of processes that run an organization. Oliver points out that, to the untrained eye, Service Designers will often appear to be management consultants. However, whereas management consultants would focus on managers as their element of change, Service Designers are more apt to designate a Call Center employee, for example.

Although the subject of Oliver’s presentation was difficult (I imagine) for most in the room to contend with, it was nonetheless valuable and relevant. Oliver showed SD’s impact throughout. When service designers were called in to overhaul the BBC 2′s entire listener engagement program, their comprehensive, user-centered process was the only way to find out. And that’s something everyone can agree on.

These Sketch notes illustrate some Kate’s major points: strategy, clarity, and authenticity.

© Amanda Wright 2011. Used with permission.

Kate Rutter

Returning from lunch, it was Kate Rutter’s Strategy Patois: Language and Tools to Connect Design and Business Value that got everyone back on track. In many ways, Kate’s presentation reminded me of Sarah Nelson’s 10 Secrets from a UX Design Strategist’s Toolbox, which I first saw at An Event Apart San Francisco back in December, 2009. Both of these women insist that facilitating collaborative design is essential to cementing design’s credibility, its viability, within an organization’s process – and I couldn’t agree more. “Your colleagues [simply] won’t throw their weight behind something they don’t believe in,” she adds.

Another undercurrent to Kate’s talk was that designers shouldn’t focus too much on their own panache. Instead, they do well to consider how their artifacts affect their company’s product strategy. Strategic, actionable deliverables are infinitely more valuable than hi-resolution, beautiful ones because they serve as conversation pieces; they evoke forward-thinking responses. Kate recommends that we use Isikawa diagrams, product evolution maps, and prioritization maps as jumping off points.

By tempering the change we seek with empathy for our business-minded colleagues, we actually gain more control over leading our company’s design charge. In the end, Kate reminds us to practice our elevator pitch, find a business buddy to pitch ideas to, and, most importantly, not to lose our souls.

Robert Fabricant

The penultimate presentation, Robert Fabricant’s The Behaviour Chain provided a bevy of “heady” issues for our altogether fatigued minds. Therein, Robert addressed Interaction Design, or “design with a capitol D.” This vantage point that was first brought to my attention in Jon Kolko’s wonderful book Thoughts on Interaction Design. To wit:

Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, service, or system. This dialogue is usually found in the world of behavior—the way someone may hold his knife and fork while cutting into a steak, or the way one chooses to purchase a beautiful chair, trading off cost for beauty or brand for convenience. Structuring dialogue is difficult, as it occurs in a fourth dimension—over time.

Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

Time, then, was a recurrent theme throughout the presentation.

Robert began his talk by asking for a show of hands: “Do you work online?” “Do you work in mobile services?” “Do you design physical products? environments? processes?” Robert’s line of questioning suggests that Design is a universal agent of change. We – the designers – are only bound by our ability to transcend our own labels and work outside of our media. In his own words, “we’re responsible for shaping the connective tissues that binds [our] systems together.”

© Amanda Wright 2011. Used with permission.

Robert pointed to powerful examples of the cultural impact of design: graphic equalizers have forever changed how we visualize music and ZipCar has forever changed how people think about renting cars. Robert’s own work, too, manifests change. His team, Frog Design, recently created a device that allows people in South Africa to respond to their own AIDS and HIV concerns in a private, prudent way. Although the path that led them to their final product was certainly protracted, its results were readily apparent.

In the wider context, designers are all-too-often forgotten about as agents of change – their designs get all the attention. When we look for the greater impact of design, though, it lies not in fashion or fad. Instead, it’s in behavior, in a cultural, cognitive shift. Robert concludes with an apt quote from fellow UX Designer Joshua Porter: “What you are seeing is [the change] you designed for.”

Matt Jones

Even before Matt Jones got settled onstage, he openly acknowledged that he served as UX London’s beer barrier. “You know that guy standing between the audience and the pub? Yeah, that’s me,” he said. Therefore, Matt promised to make it brief. Given the upbeat timbre of his presentation, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, though, I doubt anyone noticed if he went a little long.

© William Cho 2011. Used with permission.

Jones exudes a quirky vibe as he speaks. Standing on the balls of his feet, he sort of bounces around stage, calling to and fro a wide variety of sights and sounds to pique your interest and direct your thoughts. Curiosities witnessed include: A robot that emotes your iChat status (Matt made this just for fun), a video of Mary Poppins (“Imagine she’s a time traveller and you end up with a cross between Neo and Sarah Conner,” Matt says), a clip of R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, a video of robots playing tennis, and a video of Roombas carrying kittens.

Throughout his talk, Matt encouraged designers to reconsider how far we must go to create objects to which people will relate. All of the sights and sounds Matt presented shared this common thread. Sure they’re silly and they’re simple but, more importantly, they’re captivating.

Matt notes that the brains, the computer chips, inside GoGo Pets (a toy similar to a Furbie) cost about $0.07, yet people play with them for months. Why? “Instead of designing for artificial intelligence, we’ve designed for art. We’ve designed for empathy,” he says. Matt believes that designers have a responsibility for playing with things and discovering how people will respond.

Our role, then, is not so much to design a predictable system but to cultivate an adapting, changing entity. One of Matt’s favorite quotes is: “Lying about the future makes history.” Merely creating the conditions for interpretation, for storytelling cultivates empathy. It allows people attach their own meaning to the artifacts we create.

For more information on this topic, Matt recommends the book after which his presentation was named: “The Lifecycle of Software Objects,” by Ted Chiang. There’s also another slightly-obscure blog that I can’t remember. Does anyone have this?

Getting excited

What more is there to say? My UX London experience was something I’ll never forget. In between the fantastic presentations and the thorough, hands-on workshops, there was bowling, karaoke, and some great, low-key parties. In fact, it’s hard to imagine a better place for experience designers to share their passion.

One of the best parts about the event was its atmosphere. Working as a consultant on many of my projects, I find that I have to explain what I do again and again. No more at UX London. People there get it and want to engage in progressive conversations. By the end of the first day my head was spinning. My wrists were cramping, too, but I couldn’t wait to get up and do it all over again.

Your thoughts?

One final question for you guys: if you attended, what was the most important thing you learned? If you didn’t, what did you miss that we didn’t cover?

Books mentioned during the event

• 
  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
• 
  
  The Lifecycle of Software Objects
• 
  
  Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers …
• 
  
  Remote Research
• 
  
  Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered …

Most designers know they should attend conferences. Working in organizations that aren’t known for impeccable design – or worse yet, working on their own – these designers can feel incredibly isolated. Part of the cure to the common design rut involves discussing ideas with others, learning something new, and changing their perspective.

So discussion is obviously a good place to start. But what about paid workshops? informal break-out sessions? un-conferences, even? Because there are simply so many options around getting the conversation started, it’s easy to understand how some conference organizers get it wrong. Luckily, most get it right.

In the past, some of our favorite conferences have included An Event Apart, dConstruct, and, of course, UX London (which we’re excited to be sponsoring this year). But in the spirit of making good things even better, we’ve begun to discuss the particulars of conferences with their organizers, thinking of ways to improve these fantastic events.

The “perfect” conference

If it existed, the “perfect” conference would obviously bring with everything we love about the aforementioned conferences: inspiring speakers, fantastic venues and, of course, amazing after parties. Moreover, it would help clarify the impact of design to those unfamiliar with it (like TED). But maybe that’s just me. On the homepage of UX London, Don Norman describes his prior experience with such an event:

I came. I listened. I stayed. Great event, great speakers, great crowd, great venue. Learn, network. enjoy. Isn’t that what great conferences are all about?

Don Norman

Which makes me think: “oh yeah, there’s networking!” We all have reasons we love conferences, and organizers are constantly trying to improve. What are your thoughts?

Share your thoughts and win

Because we’re not terribly experienced with organizing these kind of events (though the idea has crossed our minds…), I wanted to know: what might potential attendees—in this case, our readers—like to see? Potential choices include:

• Target audience Does it cater to newbies or advanced practitioners?
• Tracks Does the conference offer multiple sessions at the same time?
• Time span Is it held over just one day or two?
• Subject matter What kinds of topics does it cover?
• Speakers What speakers—from what backgrounds—would you expect to see/meet?
• Additional Options Are there workshops? City tours? Breakout sessions?

To help get the party started, if you will, our friends over at Clearleft and O’Reilly are upping the ante, providing an Amazon Kindle for your time. Well, make that two Kindles.

Here’s how to enter

For your chance to win one of these fantastic prizes, just:

1. Follow UX Booth and UX London on Twitter
2. Leave a comment on this post detailing your perfect conference might look like. Be sure to include your twitter handle!
3. We’ll announce winners on February 3rd, contacting you via Twitter.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that these kindles come pre-loaded with over $100 of O’Reilly titles? Chock-full of books related to design and development, they’re easily worth about $250 apiece.

By sharing your thoughts, you’re much more likely to attend an event catering to your desires. We’ll see you in the comments below, and at UX London in April!

The winners have been chosen! Congratulations to Mike Houghton & Andrea Moed!

Did you know that today is World Usability Day? Events have been organized around the world that you can attend in recognition of a very worthy cause—”increasing awareness for designs, products, and services that improve and facilitate conversation around the world,” as outlined in the event’s mission statement.

World Usability Day (WUD) was founded in 2005 by The Usability Professionals’ Association. On the second Thursday of November the UPA reports that 200 events are organized in over 43 countries to celebrate this day. Each year comes with a theme, with communication being the theme for World Usability Day 2010. “World Usability Day 2010 will serve as an impetus to creating greater awareness for designs, products and services that improve and facilitate communication around the world,” said Elizabeth Rosenzweig, founder of WUD.

The UPA’s WorldUsabilityDay.org website includes a map of events that may be happening in your area. If you’re lucky enough to live in Portland, OR, you may be consider participating in their first-ever PDX Usability Scavenger Hunt.

What’s happening online?

Even if there are no events planned in your area, there are a lot of events planned online that you can be part of. Here are a few of them:

Optimal Workshop’s World Usability Day Redesign Bonanza

This bundle of tools is a value of $5,000 for only $1,350. It includes some wonderful products ranging from Loop11′s remote testing tool to Clearleft’s Silverback App.

World Usability Day 2010 Virtual Seminar

This virtual seminar by UPA international will cover “Communicating the Brand: Where Marketing Meets Users” in honor of the 6th annual World Usability Day. This seminar costs $99 for non-UPA International members.

What are you up to?

What are you doing to celebrate World Usability Day? What events or special online happenings did we miss?

via aprilzosia on Flickr

Did you vote last Tuesday and question the layout of the ballot, the experience and the strange machines with unlabeled buttons? You’re not the only one!

What’s your image of voting? My mental model is deceptively simple. Remember in elementary school when you put your head down on the table and raised your hand? Filled out a ballot for student body president on paper and put it in a box? Electoral voting should feel that simple and smoothly run from the voter’s (user’s) perspective, but instead, the complexities of the American system come through and make the experience feel challenging. How has such an intuitive process become so unintuitive?

The Help America Vote Act: Mandating design changes

Since the passage of the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, the voting experience has changed with each national election. HAVA, the Congressional response to the 2000 election problems, mandated various requirements for voting machines, ballots and security. All fifty states have begun to put these changes into effect. My home state, New York, was one of the last.

HAVA made sense at the time of its creation and it does now. The bill had a few loopholes, which Congress has attempted to fix on various occasions, with limited success. Rather than the bill itself, it is the state Boards of Election who have failed our citizens through poor design and implementation.

HAVA voting system standards:

• All states must replace punch card and lever voting systems with new technologies.
• The voter can verify the votes selected before the ballot is to be cast.
• The voter must have an opportunity to correct any error or be provided a replacement ballot.
• The system must notify the voter of overvotes and provide an opportunity to correct such errors. (An overvote is when a voter chooses more than one candidate or option in a specific race. An undervote is when no candidate or option is selected.)

Voting: The design challenges

Do the rules from HAVA sound familiar? Have a passion for form design and usability? The voting experience may just be one of the greatest design problems facing our government. The nature of election law provides a few unusual constraints that could throw any UX Designer for a loop:

• Design by Committee: Yes, nearly all election technologies, legislation and design decisions are made by local, state and federal Commissions. We, as UX Designers, like to design in teams, but definitely not by committee.
• Design for the 100%, not 80%: We hold a widely accepted belief that it is enough to design for the majority of our users, rather than design for edge cases and let the majority suffer the consequences. In election law, and rightfully so, the focus is on 100% of the audience.
• Most people vote once a year, if not less. Many vote only once every four years. System familiarity is uncommon.

Challenge: The Full Experience

It took eight years for New York to replace its lever machines with new technology. Our new system is mediocre at best. Upon arrival, you sign in and are handed a ballot. You then proceed to a privacy booth, where you fill in the ballot, a bubble form. Next you walk the ballot over to a scanner, where it is inserted and you will be notified that the vote has been counted or if there are any errors.

There were three lines, first to sign in, second to fill out the ballot and finally, to insert the ballot into the optical scanner. The NYC Board of Elections now requires all voters be given a “privacy sleeve,” a folder in which to keep your vote choices unseen, when walking across the room.

A more efficient method would require more machines, no privacy sleeves. The machines are an expense that the state likely could not afford.

Challenge: Readability & Ballot Design

The new system in New York requires that all choices appear on one single sheet. With various races and ballot questions, how did New York solve this problem? Size 6 font. Yes, really, size 6.

Sample Ballot From NYC Board of Elections via Vote The New Way

In certain judicial races, we pick two or three choices, not one. The ballot uses each row to designate one choice. Sometimes rows are left blank when there are too many candidates to fit in one row and it spills over into a second row, on the right-hand side.

The formatting on the ballot was inconsistent and difficult to read, even for those with perfect vision.

Two ballot questions on the back could easily go unnoticed if a poll worker did not instruct you to turn the page over. There were no markings on the front to indicate that there was more content on the backside.

Challenge: Even More Constraints

Some of the problems I faced on Tuesday as a knowledgeable voter are much less challenging than in other states. What does your ideal ballot look like? What is the full experience? Consider the following potential constraints:

• In New York, there were two policy questions posed on the ballot. What about states where there are 20, 30 or even 50 questions? How does ballot design work then?.
• Multi-lingual support, which does not have to be met by printing multiple languages on one ballot.
• Verifiable paper records of all votes. Touch-screen voting has long been perceived as a major security risk because the voting records are not easily verified or recounted at a later date.
• Fast recording and reporting technology. Voters expect results within minutes of when polls close. Any system must provide immediate vote totals.

Moving forward…

Frustrated about bad design infringing on our great democracy? In light of recent elections, what problems did you encounter while voting?

A special hat tip to Dana Chisnell, whose SXSW 2011 panel will cover these topics in much more depth.

The Brennan Center for Justice has released various studies on voting rights, including its work on Ballot & Election Material Design.

UX Lx was a jam–packed three day event in Lisbon featuring many of the leaders in our field. I was lucky enough to be in Portugal for the conference and attended many of the workshops. There were four tracks running the first two days, while the third day was back-to-back keynote speakers.

Day 1

Luke Wroblewski: Influencing Strategy by Design

This was a great seminar to kick off a UX conference. Luke W (@lukewdesign), one of my heros in the design world, encouraged us to rethink the way we engage as UX professionals. Specifically, it is our responsibility to stop being prima donnas complaining about how nobody understands UX and jump in at the strategy phase of the project. It is our job to work with the business teams and collaborate on solutions to the business challenge, not just the design challenges.

For the interactive part of the workshop, Luke engaged us in an exercise called Slide Madness (also called Battle Decks or PowerPoint Karaoke). He flipped through a series of bizarre and unrelated slides and asked volunteers to string together a lucid and persuasive talk for the class. This is harder than it sounds, but what a fun exercise to practice the art of thinking on your feet and remaining calm. Luke’s delivery was first-rate; mine was more like one of those long, painful children’s piano recitals.

Luke generously posted all of his workshop material, including a great exercise for Influencing Strategy by Design and a section entitled Further Reading with talks from other industry leaders. And if you don’t have Luke’s book on form design, Web Form Design: Filling In the Blanks, get a copy. It will save you many, many hours over the course of your career.

Séamus Byrne: What’s the Story? The Craft of Storytelling

Of course I had to catch this session, since I rely almost entirely on stories for teasing out requirements, designing interactions and IA, and building prototypes. One of the more interesting parts of this talk was thinking about the difference between linear and non-linear stories. I always channel customer narratives into a linear process. Since I design productivity applications, this works well because it matches the normal flow of a user working to accomplish a single goal. However, in the world of site design, especially social sites, stories are non-linear. Take a look at Seamus’s (@seamusbyrne) talk on SlideShare and learn how stories can go right or wrong (very wrong).

Dr. Susan Weinschenk: Designing Usable and Persuasive Websites

Susan (@thebrainlady) is an engaging speaker, even after a big lunch of traditional Portugal fare (lots of sausages). Thankfully, she used laymen’s terms to describe the brain and how it responds. She then illustrated how we can leverage this knowledge when crafting designs.
Her recent article on UX Magazine, The Psychologist’s View of UX Design, summarizes the 10 key points from her workshop. For an even deeper look, get her book Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click and subscribe to her blog What Makes Them Click.

Bill Scott: Designing with Patterns

I didn’t actually attend Bill’s workshop but I’m pretty familiar with the material (wink), so I can summarize the six key principles for rich interaction design:

• Make It Direct
• Keep It Lightweight
• Stay on the Page
• Provide an Invitation
• Use Transitions
• React Immediately

Each principle is illustrated with dozens of patterns from rich applications. Bill’s talk is available on SlideShare and we have a new Designing Web Interfaces Master Class with O’Reilly that encompasses these interaction patterns, as well as application, screen, and control patterns and UI anti-patterns (my favorite part). Also subscribe to our Designing Web Interfaces blog.

Day 2

Steve Krug: Do-It-Yourself Usability Testing

Why skip testing when it’s so fast and easy? Test your site on your mom, your neighbor, your kid. I’ve always refrained from testing my own designs, but if you follow these steps you can even test your own work. Steve (@skrug) also spoke about what to do with the information gathered during the tests, and how to reasonably pursue changes.

Save 35% on his new book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, with the code KRUG2010.

Dan Saffer: Brainstorming and Design Principles

Another very interactive workshop led by Dan Saffer (@odannyboy). Participants worked in groups following some rules and tips for a consistent Brainstorming session. It is very interesting seeing how each and every participant had completely a different way to really apply these concepts. Some of them were new concepts; others were well known but not so well applied in the “real world.”

Brian Fling: Designing Mobile Experiences

Probably my favorite talk of the whole conference. Now, I am biased towards Mobile at the moment, but even so, Brian (@fling) is a great speaker. And his slides are beautiful! My favorite quote of the talk was “Mobile design doesn’t start with Photoshop.” If you do any design related to mobile, get Brian’s book, Mobile Design and Development. I got copies for all my designers and half my clients.

Harry Brignull: What you need to know about Eye Tracking

I love talks that start out with a story, which is a great technique for getting a 20 minute talk to stick in people’s minds. Definitely worth 5 minutes to flip through. Follow Harry on Twitter.

Sarah Morris: Seduction Design: Forget the Art of Persuasion

Certainly one of the best 20 minute talks of the conference. Sarah (@sarahbear28) used an analogy of Casanova being the first UX designer. He finds a needy woman, helps her overcome her problems, becomes her hero at which point she falls for him (then he gets bored and takes off). Skipping that last part, we have a pattern for seductive design. How can you design Casanova-quality experiences? Start on page 7 of her talk to learn more:

Manuel Lima: The Experience of Visualization

This workshop after the mobile worksop in the morning made the whole conference for me. Some people in the class were a bit overwhelmed by the level of detail in the first half of the class, but everyone enjoyed the second part where we divided into teams to create a better visualization for this Facebook diagram.

I personally relished the first half of the course. Two of my current clients are exploring network visualization options, so this was quite relevant for me. Manuel hasn’t posted the talk from UxLx yet, but look through this earlier talk and explore his site, VisualComplexity. Another good data visualization site worth exloring was mentioned in Susan Weinshenck’s class, FlowingData.

Day 3

Bill Scott: Designing with Lenses: Lessons from other Design Crafts

While I was in San Jose earlier this year, Bill (@billwscott) was excited about this lense idea. He had ordered the The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses and was busy brainstorming all the lenses applicaple to the field of UX. Basically a “lense” allows you to view the user experience through the eyes of a single design principle. He’s pulled it all together in this talk:

Dan Saffer: Designing for (and with) New Technologies

Good run down of what we will be facing over the next couple of years and how to make the best of it. First, designing for new technologies will take more time. Second, prototype early, and don’t guess at what will work or fail. Then it may be up to you to sell this (not to end consumers, but internally) so choose your words carefully. Then test.

The next part of his talk, Pattern Recognition, really resonated with me. Dan (@odannyboy) spoke to a number of reasons we find predictability soothing. He uses some poignant quotes to reinforce the message, one of my favorites being:

Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction.

Christian Lindholm

This is not unique to companies; as designers we try to light the world on fire instead of designing for affordance and recognition. In your next project, it might be a good idea to step back and see whether you are designing to get a wow, or an “of course”…

Donna Spencer: Design Games

Next, the funny Donna Spencer (@maadonna) got a laugh from the audience by showing the original ways of elaborate design ideas. With several Design Games, it is possible to captivate even the most skeptical to work on creative concepts and share them with their teams.

Donna is organizing UX Australia this fall, a 3-day design conference in Melbourne. Sounds like the perfect excuse to head down under for awhile (conferences are a tax write-off, right?).

Luke Wroblewski: First Person User Interfaces

Luke ( @lukewdesign) showed the history of User Interfaces and how it has progressed throughout the last 50 years. We are currently in the Natural User Interfaces period, still developing new ways to interact with the users. But First Person User Interfaces are now starting to grow, like Google Street View, and are believed to be the new generation of interfaces. The presentation brought up a lot of questions and opinions among the audience, sometimes dividing us, but in the end we all had to agree with Luke.

For a closer look at this topic, take a look at his article in Smashing last year: Enhancing User Interactions with First Person User Interfaces, and his slides from this talk.

Steve Krug: The Lazy Person’s Guide to a Better World

What a line up—I wish I had video of the whole day 3. Following a pre-recorded session with Alan Cooper, Steve Krug (@skrug) talks about what to do with all the results for your down-and-dirty usability testing. He points out that you can find far more problems in a day than you have the resources to fix.

Usability testing: Finding more than you can fix

Contrary to the old “low hanging fruit” axiom, Steve recommends fixing the hardest problems first. Take a look at the slides from his talk for detailed recommendations on how to approach this with the least amount of pain and grief.

Jared Spool: Dawning of the Age of Experience

The conference ended on a light note with Jared Spool’s (@jmspool) entertaining keynote. Even though I have been in this field 10 years, I sat back and realized I still have a lot to learn. And what a beautiful thing to be in a field that encourages us to explore and push technology every day.

Wrap up

So I left the conference exhausted, lugging bag of goodies and a poster the size of my office wall with me, and a bunch of design books to read during vacation. Overall the conference was very well organized, the speakers were down to earth and great to chat with and the location couldn’t have been better. Thanks to the conference organizer Bruno Figueiredo and the speakers for a memorable event.

For additional reviews of the conference, David Malouf, one of the speakers, did a fantastic write-up for Johnny Holland: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3; and Lucy Spence captured many of the talks with her sketch notes on Flickr.

Happy Holidays and Seasons Greetings from all of us at the UX Booth!

We’re working on fine tuning our publication to better fit your wants for 2010, and your feedback will really help us kick off the new year in the right direction. We’ll be taking a more extensive survey in the near future, but for now we have one simple question:

What Do You Want to See on UX Booth?

We’d love to hear what you love (or hate) about the UX Booth to help us improve in the future. Basically it boils down to these things:

• What do you like most about UX Booth?
• What do you dislike about UX Booth?
• Are there any features you’d like to see in the future?

If you can take just one or two minutes to answer these questions in the comments below, we would really appreciate it! Thanks, and have a wonderful Holiday season!

Love,

The UX Booth

UX Booth is excited about its quickly approaching one-year anniversary coming this November. To celebrate our shiny new digs and our first birthday, we’ve assembled some amazing prizes for our valued community.

Update: Contest is now closed

Thanks to those who entered! We will be contacting the winners shortly.

How to Enter

Scroll through the prizes below. Pick out your favorite prize and click the orange tweet tag (“I want this!”) next to that prize. This will take you to twitter. Post this tweet and that’s it, you’re in the running for an awesome prize!

Just for clarification, if you want a particular book from a particular publisher, we’re going to be awarding prizes on a first come, first served basis— so the sooner you enter, the better. Lastly, be sure to only tweet about one prize as we’d like everyone to have an equal chance.

Make sure to select your favorite prize and tweet about it by Friday, October 2nd. We’ll collect entries and announce winners next week. Good luck!

The Prizes

Open Hallway Premium Plan

I want this!

Open Hallway, a very simple usability testing solution, has offered our readers an amazing prize! We have a 6 month subscription to their Premium Plan, valued at $1,200!

This plan includes the following:

• Unlimited Tests Within Your Storage Limit
• 30 Hours of Recording Storage
• Enhanced security (SSL data transmission)
• Download test result videos! (mp4 format)
• Enterprise security (additional encryption)

Read more about Open Hallway | Tweet to enter

Axure Single User License

I want this!

Axure RP is a wireframing, prototyping, and specification tool that allows you to design applications and websites faster and easier than with your current tools. Axure has offered our readers a single user licensed valued at $589!

Axure is used by UX professionals, business analysts, and application designers from Global 1000 companies, and leading agencies. It is created to help you do the following: design more efficiently, experience dynamic prototypes, and communicate ideas more clearly.

Take a tour of Axure | Tweet to enter

ThemeForest Credits

I want this!

The kind folks over at Theme Forest have brought us an excellent prize to offer to our viewers! We have five $25 “forest bucks” (think the name will catch on?)!

From HTML Templates, to the loved WordPress templates, and even Javascript and PHP scripts, Theme Forest has a lot to offer!

Check out Theme Forest now and gawk over their hot redesign | Tweet to enter

MailChimp Credits

I want this!

The Atlanta-based email marketing company, MailChimp, is not only beautifully designed but also an amazing email marketing tool. MailChimp does it all. Build and manage your list, design HTML emails, send emails that are sure to get through filters, and track and analyze the results.

Let MailChimp help you with your email lists and marketing | Tweet to enter

Books from Rosenfeld Media

I want this!

Rosenfeld Media publishes short, practical, and useful books and webinars on user experience design. Rosenfeld has donated some great books to help expand your UX knowledge. We have two copies of each of these titles for our readers:

• Mental Models by Indi Young
• Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
• Design Is the Problem by Nathan Shedroff
• Card Sorting by Donna Spencer

Learn more about Rosenfeld and the awesome books you can win here. | Tweet to enter

O’Reilly Books

I want this!

O’Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, research, and conferences. You may know them as the publisher of the iconic “animal books” for software developers. Here are the O’Reilly books we have for you:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
• Web 2.0 Architectures: What entrepreneurs and information architects need to know
• Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become
• Web Navigation: Designing the User Experience
• Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design
• Designing Web Navigation: Optimizing the User Experience
• Programming the iPhone User Experience
• Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
• High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers
• Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions

Check out O’Reilly online | Tweet to enter

Go enter! And Welcome to the New UX Booth.

Excited? Choose your favorite and click the tweet tag to the left. Then be sure to come back next week when we announce winners.

Oh, and did we mention the redesign? We’re still polishing off areas, but we’re happy to share our new look. Be sure to leave us a comment with your thoughts about the design! :)

Tomorrow. Wednesday at 7PM. Here. Make it.

Get ready for our first ever UX Booth Town Hall tomorrow, September 16th at 7PM EST.

We’re hosting a group discussion to go over some exciting new things around UX Booth, to hear your feedback, and get to know the community a bit better. If you’re interested in connecting with others in the community, improving the booth, and having your voice heard—this is the place to be tomorrow night.

We’ll be hosting the chat at UXBooth.com/chat tomorrow night at 7PM EST. If you make it, you’ll get a sneak peek at what’s coming very soon to UXBooth.com, and even have the opportunity to influence the way things are done around here in the future!

So again: Mark your calendars, set an alarm, or do whatever you gotta and be here tomorrow night at 7PM sharp. We can’t wait to see you there!

Feedburner recently improved their Free RSS-to-Email syndication service, and now offers simple customized subject lines.

In May, I spoke about why you shouldn’t use FeedBurner to syndicate content to email subscribers. Since then, FeedBurner has made an important step in the right direction that can bring a much more relevant experience to email subscibers—a change that if taken advantage of could greatly increase the number of subscribers who view your content.

Custom Headlines

Custom Subject lines are sort of the bread and butter for a successful email campaign. Up until Feedburners recent changes users were stuck with a static subject line, a flaw that lacks personalization and doesn’t communicate any valuable information to the user prior to opening an Email.

Now with FeedBurner you can include the ${latestItemTitle} variable to add the title of your latest item in the subject line. Additionally, if you have multiple posts in the same email, you can use the ${m} variable which shows how many additional items there are in the email or ${n} to show the total number of items in the email.

Feedburner now offers 3 dynamic variables in it’s Email Branding for Subject Lines.

It Can Make a Huge Difference

While Feedburner still offers a lot less than other services (ie: MailChimp, iContact, AWeber) this is a big step in the right direction, and the results of a simple customization can be amazing.

On a blog where Email is a common subscription option, it’s entirely possible that a customized subject will improve the number of times an email is read or clicked by 100%. With users already struggling to keep up with their inboxes, helping them know what’s inside the message before opening it can be a huge relief.

Consider other services

While FeedBurner has become a more viable option for some websites, it’s still not able to compete with the feature sets of other email campaign services. If resources allow, investing in such a service can bring a much more full experience to users outside of your website.

That said, we’re thrilled to see FeedBurner finally making some vital changes to their own free service. There is still a lack of personalization (ie: including a persons name in an email, or complete control over what content is sent to what user), and there remains to be very few design customizations… but we can always hope FeedBurner plans to make changes to those features in the future!

Have you integrated custom subjects into your RSS-to-Email Syndications yet? What sorts of improvements have you seen as a result?