Organising and promoting an event can be difficult at times.  Sometimes it seems impossible to get the right crowd to attend.

There is no doubt that event promotion can be very frustrating.  You have a great event organised but only a few people turn up.  When this happens I have found it’s something very basic that has gone wrong.

Often before you get your message out to your potential audience, your have to at least check off  a handful of the basic marketing and promotional items:

• Promote the Event

  Like anything you need to be heard on as many mediums as possible.  You may think covering it off via email, the web and a few poster drops is all you need.

  Think again.

  What happens if people ignore or don’t read the email.  What if they don’t visit your website.   Don’t assume your audience is just going to be waiting around for your email or website update.

  Remember you need to get the word out about your event to as many places that your audience frequents, from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, various forums and so on.  Yes it’s a pain, but it respects that your audience has different views than you do.

  You need to ensure that the event is lodged with these social media services.   In a way you need people to be tripping over information about your event all over the place.

  This can be a little hit miss until you find the right online networking mix, but it is very important you consider the widest possible spread.

• Cross Promote

  It’s also not just about online promotion.

  In every industry there are related groups, professional meetups or organisations.  These sister groups can be used to help promote your event.

  The key here is to have something to offer and approach the other group very early on to setup a MoU on the cross promotion of your and their events.

  I have found, from experience, the larger the organisation the harder it often is to get a quick decision on cross promotion of anything.   Be prepared for this, factor in at least  x4 time factor for the this type of thing. Sometimes it can even take months.  Often it’s a game of politics and negotiation.

  Sometimes it’s also not about just contacting them, but contacting the right person to setup even an ongoing relationship.

• Use Online Event Services

  If you have access to an online  event services that will setup and collect event RSVPs then use them.

  These make running regular events a lot easier.  They also usually open you up to potential new audience.

  The key is to only use one for the events service management, as using 2-3 can lead to confusion over the attendee numbers.

• Be Consistent

  If your event is at a regular time and location, try and keep it always the same.

  This makes it easier for regulars to put it in their calendar and not forget it.

  If the event is ad-hoc, consistency of branding can be more important as it’s this event branding that will bring people back if they had a good experience the last time.

  You are building your reputation either way.

• Offer Free Stuff

  Now for the smaller events this can be hard, but people really do want something for nothing.

  It’s a fact we have to face it, the free stuff will bring people in.

  It can just be a round of beer, nibbles, or knowledge in the form of formal  presentation to leading a round table discussion.   If you are organising food only delegate to people you trust, as this can go very wrong, very quickly.

  Getting sponsors can help here.  But remember sponsors need to have a reason to hand over their cash too.

  You don’t want to end up with limited numbers as this just becomes a social gathering,

  This social event will very quickly alienate any new attendees.

  Basically you just need a reason for people to attend.

• Tell the Right People

  There is  a group of people in any dynamic that will promote and even evangelise your event for you for free.

  They are usually people that are well connected and are seen as a yard stick as to whether an event is worth going to.

  These community leaders are the ones that you really need to engage with.

  They will give you a level of credibility for your event from their reflective community reputation.

• Tell People in Advance

  Now this is one I see way too often.

  Tell people about your event at least a week in advance, maybe 6 weeks if its a low cost paid event, 3-4 months if they have to get budget approval to attend (eg conferences).

  Anything short of this is waste of time.

  Don’t send out an email a few hours before a regular event to say its been cancelled.

  Similarly don’t put our any promotion for an event that’s just hours away.

  You will find most people are just not sitting around doing nothing, waiting for your email or Facebook update so they can rush out to your event.

  Keep it real, people too have busy lives, respect that, give them advance notice.

Good promotion does work.

I have seen one event with good organisation and promotion get over a 100 people and another just get 4.   All based around the same industry.

Rating:

3

Gamification seems to have been the big thing for a while. Maybe we have heard too much of it. Some would say we have been over sold on gamification, making it the wonder child that will make your websites work and attract and keep customers.

Gamification by Design – by Gabe Zichermann and Chris Cunningham is the recommended discussion seed book for UXPerth this month (April 2012). I don’t often review the books for UXPerth, unless they are amazingly outstanding or something a lot worse.

Game Design and Beyond

This book was published in 2011 so it seems to have been written late 2010. This is a telling factor on some of the examples given in the book, more on that later. As with most titles of this type it is very US centric, which really should have been looked at.

It deals with an introduction to gamification techniques, at 170 pages, it’s a quick read, even more so if you skip sections.

The book discusses aspects of loyalty generation, motivation both intrinsic and extrinsic, overall game mechanics, engagement and reinforcement techniques. Pretty much all the major techniques are covered off reasonably well.

A good quarter of the book is a developmental tutorial involving step wise (using ruby) code examples of gamification. Which I didn’t find to be that useful at all.

The final chapter is nothing more than a sponsored insert, like those brought “sponsor” talks at conferences, this was a waste of space.  Plus it dealt with badges, which are the worst aspect of gamiification.

When you read this book you aren’t really sure if you are reading a book on gamification or game design.  So many times the examples quoted where just pure games, games that people would use as distractors or time fillers rather than example of commercial sites or applications using the same techniques for commercial gain.

The case studies that I was hoping to be a core aspect of the book, seemed to be too brief or in several cases dated very quickly; such as Yahoo Answers or Quora. However the examples dating is often an issue with light weight tech books.

Maybe this is a US thing, but Yahoo Answers have never been relevant here. It just seemed overloaded with bad information, even years ago. Quora well that’s really slid into a place of all noise no information in the last year.

Also some case studies I have never heard of.. like Health Month, again I’ll assume it’s a US thing like Starbucks or the like.

A good deal of the time a found myself wanting to see the research, or the data at least, behind the bold statements on behaviour on this or that technique, now I’m sure Zichermann has them, but why aren’t they in the book.

After a while it just became a very frustrating read.

In fact if I hadn’t been using an ebook version I know I would have thrown this book across the room a good number of times.   As a UX consultant I read lot, and frankly this book although technically good,  just lacked supporting documentation. I would have normally discarded this book into the reject pile within the first few chapters.

A Word on Gamification

Maybe I’m not the best person to review this book. I’m not a current gamer. I used to be, then I discovered life is too precious to be wasted on mindless addictive games that don’t get you anywhere.

So when the authors talk about engaging people, about hooking them in with leader boards, achievements or other methods, I understand the concept, but just don’t get as to why people would be sucked in.

Sure I understand the techniques, but on a personal level what’s not to stop the person returning to the real world and abandoning this silly internal quest an app or site has set for them.

Maybe I need to see this happening with real people with some user testing.

There really has to be something in it for the user beyond stupid badges – yes I do mean Four Square – another poster child in this book.  A good deal of the good assumes it know why the techniques are working, but doesn’t show any details.

Then there is also a the ethics of all this tobe considered, with addictive gamification hooking a user into a almost gambling like habit isn’t really that ethical.  Its nice the way this book neatly sidesteps the issue. Not even referring to ethical aspect left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Being aware of ethical of nay UX manipulation of an audience is something  any UX professional needs to be aware of.

Gamification Didn’t Invent the World

Anything in the UX world that is a design pattern or now standard technique for engagement or audience retention has it seems has suddenly become a gamification aspect. For example from forum post ranking to star rating to summary control panels these are all now gamification.  Years ago in 2000 they were called community engagement.

Now I have followed, seen, used and designed  lots of these techniques as they have developed over the years, I can tell you they didn’t appear suddenly from the world of games design.

There seems to be an over zealous desire to label everything as being from “game design”  in this book.

Overall

If you are a developer or designer is this book any good?  Well yes and no.

It’s a good introduction text in relation to the techniques and what behavioural effects they are meant to have.  But I would take the examples with a grain of salt.

As a UX consultant I could have lost half the book without noticing.

It’s not a badly written book. It does show you the techniques and methods used in gamification, for that I’ve given it 3 stars. If you just want the core information, then yes this book does supply that. Some say it’s the number one book in gamification, this isn’t my view.

I have this feeling throughout the book maybe the editor should have been a little more questioning of the references than the code.

If you do buy this book, please go get the cheaper ebook. Save yourself some money.

Of late I have noticed a very disturbing trend.  Some designers no longer draw or sketch on paper.

Have we been seduced by the shiny digital world, sure low-res paper prototyping is still popular, but what of sketching.

Not pretty sketching where we aren’t focusing on the heart of the interaction issue, but real sketching where finding the solution is the focus. I’ll discount Inkling sketching as it’s still pen and paper.

We seem to have a collect of designers that just go straight for photoshop, illustrator, Balsamiq or Omnigraffle.  

We used to tell developers not to rush to start coding, to step away from the computer. In fact developers I have seen are doing this, they are sitting down any drawing out the wireframes etc on paper.

Digital is Bad.

Designers, however are rushing headlong to the computer, trembling to open Photoshop and draw some nice neat lines or the like.

Stop it!!

To make matters worse there seems to be a trend to producing the first idea out of our heads as the preliminary digital sketch.

There are a lot of things that I find very disturbing about this:

• Same Environment.

  When you sketch, away form you computer, you free yourself of the trapping of your own design, likes and dislikes and allow yourself to focus on the likes and dislikes of the audience you are designing for. It’s just a change of mental space.

• Too Precious.

  Going digital, no matter how sketchy it looks, still has an air of “time and resources” have been expended on this, it’s precious. All that time used on making it pretty, could have be used sketching another alternative.  We all know that neat and pretty leads to a biasing of a design on critique.

• Too much Fussing.

  We tend to fuss over the precision of our digital work. Sketching is about finding ideas and the journey not the end product.  It’s about finding structure, not fussing over fine details, you can look at those later. Product designs avoid the digital and detail till the end, why don’t we.

• No Accidents or Mistakes.

  Accidents can happen with pen and paper which are not seen digitally, these generate ideas. The free flowing nature of quick design generation on paper will often lead to a misplace line here and there and this will often allow you to abstract out another design direction.

• Immediate Ideas are Lost.

  Sketching is about the immediate and trying out new ideas, drawing up that interaction now before you forget it.  Doing this digitally just takes too long, no matter how good you are.

• First Design is Last Design.

  Too often the first design produced ends up as the last and only design.  With sketching you can iterate over the design, not worrying  about the outcome.

  I know sometimes the boss wants it all done digitally. Well screw them, you are being paid to come up with good designs fast, churning out the same theme of a photoshop design is not designing. Do what you are being paid for, create something new fast, on paper.

• Can’t Draw.

  Okay this shocked me. But I’m from the old school.

  As a designer it’s not a bad idea to at least be able to draw basic shapes and know how to shade. These skills you can practice and master in a few hours.  We all have atrophied pencil drawing skills.  But never let it get to the point that your can’t draw at all.

• Sketches are Messy.

  Still after doing all the right things your sketches are a mess. When you show them to your colleagues and peers they just don’t communicate the intent you want. This is an issue that a lot of people have. They just fall back to the digital world to escape it.

  Yes your initial sketches maybe a mess. That’s okay, lots of younger UX people have this issue. Don’t run away from it.

  Just practice. You could use any of the various series of UI stencils available if you like. But remember these are really just tools to assist you while your skills improve.

• Collaborative Magic is Lost.

  There is a special magic that happens when you sketch ideas in front of a client on paper.

  They will often want to draw too.  Sketching then becomes this collaborative communication tool.  This synergy you get is just priceless.  Somehow that just doesn’t work on a computer or even a tablet.

Paper is Good.

So let’s just STOP pretending to sketch on the computer, tablet, laptop, whatever.  Try going analogue for once.

1. Get some paper, a pencil or drawing pen,
2. Go sit at another desk, table or on the couch, just away from computers,
3. Put on your favourite music,
4. Go draw, sketch away,
5. Let your mind wander, try different ideas, just iterate rapidly taking the best bits from previous ideas.

You have permission to make a mess, if you boss walks in and asks what your doing, tell him you’re designing.

Don’t be precious over the ideas, just let them flow.  If it goes well you may have 10-40 ideas within an hour.

There is a wonderful aspect of “flow” that happens when you design this way.  It’s not something that you can do digitally.  Mainly because digital is just to restricted to the pixel, to perfect, to clean.

So next time you have to start a design I don’t want to see you reach for a mouse or a tablet.

Use pencil and paper, please.

Fostering even a moderate level of UX design in any team or project can at times be an impossible task.

Often there are things that we do that can stifle and sometimes even oppose UX techniques we are trying to support.

In a way, it’s as if we are by accident forcing UX people to leave or just warp back into simple pixel pushing designers or worse photoshop operators.

1. No Contact with Users

   It has been said that the opinion of a UX designer doesn’t count at all, it is the opinion of the users that are the most important element of any design.

   Not allowing contact with any users really doesn’t help in the research or evaluation process.   The entire knowledge which the design is based just becomes second hand with all the issues that are associated with this.

   Any UX design has to have users engagement, often as early as possible, in fact the more the merrier.   Stop doing this and well its not really user focused, more expert or self design.  Which is okay, however its not why a UX designer is hanging around.

2. No Collaboration

   A good deal of UX professionals tend to be very sociable people.  We often joke a good way to send us over the edge is to force us to work alone with no access to our peers.

   UX people need to collaborate, talk over concepts and ideas, if only to just confirm issues.   Working in isolation will stunt their skills and abilities over time.

   Even just being forced into a strict communication structure can be an issue, as you tend not to be allowed to discuss and talk over issues that may arise.

   It’s a little like the old “throw the design” over the wall approach.  Which sadly is still alive and well.

3. No Critiquing of Design

   The ability of have any design or idea critiqued fairly, with understanding is a great tool for the advancement of a design.

   Now I’m not talking about the usual management style of, “I don’t like that”, or “That isn’t what I’m looking for.”

   The critique needs to explain why a design is good or bad, provide evidence, or even alternatives to progress the design.   Force a UX person into the situation where they are just given no direction or not allowed to improve by having their design examined and suggestions made to improve the design. Then they are just going to stagnate and get bored.

   Don’t expect someone who is bored to stick around.

4. No Space or Time to Think

   Creativity is not about group thinking or brainstorming.

   Sure these things are good for getting some ideas on the table.

   However the real creative work happens when someone is alone, focusing on the problems, the design, the issues and playing with the outcome, examining the alternatives.

   It is then at this time that someone is designing at their best, although to the untrained eye they may appear non productive.  This is when those crazy ideas are found.  To do this they need the time and space to focus to be alone, not easy in the cubical city that modern management loves so much.

   Our obsession with having people appear productive is just plain cost ineffective.

   Having people doing mindless tasks just because we need them to appear to fill their hours of the work day is just an inefficient use of their resources.  It’s an old school industrial workhouse ethic that we just need to loose.

5. No Time to Iterate

   There is nothing worse than having the first generation of an idea or interface go into production.

   Particularly when you know that will a little more time, sometimes just a few hours, the interface could have been iterated and improved on.

   However the budgeted time is just too short so the first round of concepts becomes the final one.   I have seen this happen time and time again.  It really is very sad and everyone (except the client) knows it’s not their best work.

   In the design world being able to fix issues, correct assumptions and design mistakes is required to find the perfect design.   Design isn’t a precision art where the right interface can be found by following a formula.  It takes iterations, time to craft the perfect UI.  We have to allow for this time.

6. No Failure Allowed

   Design is very much about failure, especially UX or product based design, as you really want to fail as many times as you can and improve things as you go.   All those failures are just minor issues compared to what would happen if they were encountered after a product was released.

   So we have to find them and fail a little in the design process.  This is normal.

   It’s often not the fault of the designer as to why the product or interface fails.   After all we can’t expect every person to be masters at their craft and be able to see perfectly into the minds of the audience.

   Personalisation of failure, instead of taking it back to the fault of the design and looking for a solution, is the outcome.  We know it’s wrong, but still it continues, make mistakes in mockups or draft wireframes just isn’t allowed.

7. No Designing

   If you ‘re employing a designer, be it on contract, as a client, or in-house, the best thing you can do is let them design.

   After all isn’t that what you are paying them for.

   Just driving the design and it’s direction from a management stand point will generally get you poor results.   Think about it are you allowing people to really design or are you dictating the design to them and they are just software operators.

   Designers usually love constrains and a tricky problem, but if you restrict the playing field too much and they can’t  design, you may find they have just decided to move on.

So that’s my short list, a few things to consider, I’m sure we have all worked in those environments or unknowingly caused them.

If you have any I missed, just pop them below.

A part of Lean is Hoshin Kanri (HK). It is a form of policy development or strategic planning.

Like any good strategic planning process it deals with the mapping out of how the business can get to the desired outcome.

Translating the long term vision into manageable objectives and actions.

Hoshin Kanri is based around the idea that we are all domain experts within your own fields, and hence have something to contribute no matter where we stand in the organisation.

For it to work effectivity, senior and middle level management must be prepared to delegate some authority and trust.

It’s about participation by everyone from the CEO to the lower ranks of the organisation, providing a top down and bottom up directions of communication of measurables.

A3 Reporting

A3 Reporting is a way of implementing Hoshin Kanri, it forms the communication process.  Now don’t consider this as a top down stepped approach but a cyclic iterative approach.

Simply put a CEO will want to implement a critical business direction change based on improved customer service.  This direction change has to be backed up with research and empriical evidence, not just a gut instinct or a previous way of doing things.

If it’s the later the CEO can expect to be called out to explain why.

• The CEO outlines his request on one A3 page, this the “What” that is required. It’s distributed to the next level of management.
• The next level then considers the “what” in terms of their division and sends out various focused “what” requests to the divisions middle level management.
• In turn the middle level management send another A3 page with their specific focused “what” request.
• This continues with A3 page requestes with increasing granularity until it reaches the lowest level of the organisation.
• At this point a report on “how” the request would be done or not done or alternatives is sent on a single side of an A3 page  back up to lower management and so on.
• Management collecting and summarising the approaches as they go up the corporate structure.
• At the end of the process the CEO is presented with a single sided A3 page from each division on “How” they would implement the outcome.
• This allows the CEO to review the directions and make informed planning decisions.

The major fall back with this is the element of trust that is required up and down the communication chain and the acceptance of peoples domain expertise by management.

Traditional management and organisational structures will not like this approach as it’s not about wins and achievements on a personal level but collaborative team efforts.

The key to A3 Reporting is limiting the reporting space. It all has to happen on one side of a single A3 sheet of paper.

Some place even reduce this by having the downwards “what” in the top A4 (half) of the A3 page and the “how” on the bottom of the page.  There is no limit to how the material is displayed: text, tables figures, graphs, drawings or storyboards.

As you can see the “what” can become the goals, sub goals and objectives,  with the return being process, measurements and review points to achieve the goal.

UX usage

Application of Hoshin Kanri into the UX process is a little harder.

Communication and design discussion documentation aside, which is most of what we produce, the A3 Reporting at its core could to used in terms of restriction of the reporting process.

However the core of Hoshin Kanri is the movement up and down the structure of the translation of the long term vision.   In UX environments the movement is to almost socialistic agile teams where there is no king, no management. So this maybe an issue in adapting this.

If we take  an issue and breaking it down into components for process and then returning a solution all within a limited spacial scope that may have merits to allow us to focus on the facts and outcomes alone.  Using system cards and only allowing a solution or outcome item (say research) or the like to be expressed on a small card would simulate this somewhat.  However this is very similar to existing agile processes as well.

Mind you the entire process of Hoshin Kanri is very close to the UX cycle anyway – well kind of.

So does Hoshin Kanri or A3 Reporting have anything we can steal for UX, or are we already doing the good parts.  You tell me?

Well it’s getting around to that time of year when conference submission are due.

Now, I go through this process a few times a year, it doesn’t change.

What to submit?

When you take into consideration the process and the timeliness of the talks, blogs on the topic and  similar talks, is it really worthwhile.

I often wonder if the benefits outweigh the outlay of time and effort.  Does your talk really change things, even just a little, for the people attending.

The Speaker

It’s not just getting a submission together that is the hard part, the entire process can be time intensive.

• Finding a Topic.

  First off, I struggle to find a topic,  I think other people will find interesting.    Often I find that my short list of ideas has been done already at a US conference or I know some who can/will do the topic a lot better than I can.

• Referencing Your Case Studies.

  Often I’m not blessed with big budget projects. There tends to be a large number of short intense projects, mainly it’s just mundane stuff that we all do.  The ones that work but the outcome isn’t ground breaking.

• Submission.

  Pitching a project to a client usually isn’t an issue, but to your peers, this has to be perfect, more than prefect.  So  putting together the submission can be a lot of work.

• Preparing the Talk.

  If you get the nod to speak, it doesn’t end there.   Often for people that are freelancing writing that talk is going to be on your own time, while you are doing it you’re not earning money.  Usually I find that it takes a minimum of an hour per minute of the talk. Hence 40 minutes of talk is a minimum of 40 hours to prepare.

• Presenting.

  Presenting for me isn’t an issue, conference audiences are a lot friendlier than any board room. Anyway I really enjoy presenting.

• Post Presentation.

  After the presentation is done, there is the post  presentation work, like a blog write up, assuming you are not reusing it.

Now that’s a lot of work if you add it all up.  Do you think it’s worth it?

The Organiser

Now lets consider the process from the organisers view.

Consider most conferences organise their program at least 6 months, sometimes 8 months out from the event.   This means the talk submissions are at least 6-8 months old by the time they are presented.   In most cases talks will be about case studies that happened around 6 months before submission, so when the conference happens the talk is working off things based on 12-18 months ago.

This means that in the intervening time, options can change, similar talks will be presented, the presenter can even change their view on what they submitted.

It’s a constant on going issue.  Sometimes I know conference organisers will leave 20% of the program to fill at the last minute, selecting the best “current topics”, and hoping they can find a speaker available.

Or the speaker may hedge, and put in a projects that haven’t finished, in the blind hope they conclude well before the conference happens.

The Question

You know when you attend a conference, you really want to ensure that every session you see is of maximum value.

Now when you are speaking at a conference in some ways you would often prefer to see the person you are opposing on the program – why does this always happen!

Makes you think is it really worth the effort  all that above) when you maybe taking up a slot another speaker you really want to see could be presenting in, After all most good conferences only have a limited number of sessions.

It comes down to present or relax and watch someone else’s preso goodness?

Webstock 2012 is my second Webstock, my first being for Webstock 2011, but you know what the people at Webstock are so friendly that it feels like I have been going forever.

What I like about this conference it isn’t overloaded with streams, vendors or the like, it’s just kept simple, one main stream, and a minor secondary stream for a limited number of sessions.

With a range of the best speakers from around the world, talking about their passions.  It’s like every talk is a keynote, yes the quality is that high.

What is cool about Webstock is the attention to details from the bags, to the table layout, the coffee or the wonderfully different food. There is an under current that Tash and Mike love Webstock with all their heart and it shows.

The funniest thing is that you talk to New Zealanders about Webstock and they are often surprised that people like me will come from the other side for Australia to just “old Webstock”.

They have no idea what they have here – a world class conference on their doorstep.

There is a  complete set of sketchnotes for Webstock 2012 available.

Kathy Sierra – MBU: Building the Minimum Badass User

I have been waiting to hear Kathy speak for a long time.

Her style is  purposeful, however it’s not very interactive, more a preaching from the expert.  I suspect she gets very nervous talking.  Note Kathy also gets a little ranty on gamification, understandable, but it’s sometimes a little overboard in my view.

That’s not to say what she said wasn’t without merit.  Kathy was discussing ways to improve the potential experience of a product or service focusing on making the user feel “awesome” as a result of their experience.

This is achieved by transforming the user into an expert in the opinion of their peers. It’s about allowing users to transform their vision of the world into a high resolution one.

I attended the workshop on the same topic – which I frankly hate, as I feel ripped off a little having the talk the same as the workshop.  You know after doing the workshop for a day, I’m still not sure HOW to implement Kathy’s idea of instilling the expert knowledge into the user.

Jeremy Keith – Of Time and the Network

I hadn’t seen Jeremy talk in ages, I had forgotten what a good speaker he is.  After personally greeting just about every attendee through the door that morning Jeremy mused over our pretext that the “internet is forever”, and the information will always be available.

It was a good talk, I could nearly feel a number of my archivist friends tapping me on the shoulder during this talk saying “told you so… nothing is forever”.

Jeremy walked up through the information recording mediums, the possibilities, the failures; and the way it all seems to die.

The only way to maintain the ageing web is for us to take charge and at least personally archive it.  We need to think for the longer term not 5 years but 20, 30, 50 years.  Very inspiring talk. Maybe I should bring back some of my very old sites.

Danah Boyd – Danah dreams of Valentino

Danah is another speaker I had been looking forward to seeing speak.

She talked on the culture of fear that we are unknowingly designing.  How by social media and our desire to completely fill our attention span we  are now pushing the boundaries in order to meet this need. Problem is the “news” resource is very scarce.  To the point we now push into the unethical.

Technology was meant to bring us all enlightenment, when in now all we have is Governments promoting fear and trying to control the information flow.

We really need to take stock. Stop, take care, filter the bubble of information that we design. Build it so we can control it, because everything being visible is not always good, we socially need to have some boundaries. Privacy is important. We should not discount it.

This talk made me think are we opening people up too much to the web, maybe some privacy is a good thing.

Estelle Weyl – Mobile: Don’t Break the Web

I was to in two minds to go to Estelle’s talk or not.   I’m glad I did go.   It make me realise I really miss building stuff!  Now to find some cool projects, where I can build and design.

Estelle present an honest, non zealot based presentation on mobile performance issues. The type that you will encounter with an average site, the gold is that she showed how to get round them with various  tricks  and hacks.

The little hack, for example, for embedding locally  on one page and saving to local storage was ideal.

Lot’s of goodness in this talk, some givens, but overall very informative.  Watch out for the video.

Erin Kissane – Little Big Systems

Erin presented a talk that I didn’t expect.  It’s wasn’t something I was against, just it surprised me.

She talked on the value of craftsmanship.

How we often are we just  cookie cutting and churning out products without providing the love the passion and engagement. Soulless things that lack the care to attention to detail of a product that has been sweated over.

It is easier in the digital world to just stream out a product without due regard to the quality. Cut and paste is almost the enemy.

Discussion focused on the corporate CMS and why this beast has been allowed to exist.  Solutions lying in making project managers learn to love quality and the craftsmanship of their industry.

Nick Mihailovski – Acting on Data

Okay I’ll be frank I didn’t like Nick’s talk.  I considered it to be the lowest point of Webstock.

Nick talked on using Google Analytics and aligning it with your business KPIs and goals.   He showed the highlights of the Google Analytics functionality.  Pointing towards little used elements like error message pages, conversation paths and social media sources. Personally there was nothing inspiring or new here.

There wasn’t much to this talk, it should not have been on the main stage. I really hope this wasn’t a paid speaker slot.

Matt Haughey – Lessons from a 40 year old

Matt Haughey talked on the lessons he has learnt over the years.   This was a great talk in my view, very much honestly from the heart.   I found myself nodding in agreement with a great deal of what Matt was talking about.

He talking on spending too much time at work and not focusing on family.  Oh, Matt I know all about that one.  He reflected that you really need to focus on the smaller aspects and things that are important, the money will come, but really if it does, you don’t really need it anyway.

He took the view that unfunded startups are like unsigned bands, more control, more freedom, more agile.  Cashed up startups are like signed bands – you sell your soul, become a brand.

Very sobering talk.

Lauren Beukes – Kinking Reality

Up till this point I had never heard of or read anything by Lauren Beukes.  I’m no longer a big SciFi reader, I leave that to my sister.   So when Lauren took the stage I had no idea what she was going on about for a little while into the talk.  Then it became a little clearer.

Presenters please take note – your audience is not full of fans, some of us have no idea about who you are, assume nothing!

I must say Lauren’s story was amazing, the lengths she went to in order to capture the realism, the feeling for her stories is a template for writers everywhere.

She used her journalistic skills to the maximum to find the rigth people and circumstances to mirror the situations and environments for her fictional world.

It was the attention to the details that mattered to Lauren, and this talk reflected that passion.   It also presented a good number or storytelling methods that would be very useful for any UX professional.

Amy Hoy – Change the Game

Amy did a wonderful job given the short notice she had to step up as a relief speaker.

She talked on the 3 invisble rules that are all around us.  How we try our best to avoid having to think, how you just apply social and proceedual patterns that we have learnt in place of having to think.

The rules focused on being conservative, doing what you are expected to do, and getting the approval of your peers.

Everything that I personal can’t stand. Which is why I enjoyed this talk as Amy systematically broke the rules down and destroyed them.

Amy suggests we just find the smaller paths, less todden and take those, break invisible rules.

Matthew Inman – How to get a buttcrapload of people to read what you write

Matthew is the guy behind the web comics by Oatmeal.   He reminds me of a good number of my old cartoonist or comic artist friends.  The quiet disposition, a somewhat shyness.

His story was filled with the under dog going against the system, and yet focusing very clearly on just making things good, funny and likeable.  Making it reactionary, short and snappy… maybe with more pop.. and pink, don’t forget pink!

Matthew was the last talk for the day, he stood between us and beer.  Mind you he is a PITA to sketchnote, hard without copying his work.

Also note to organisers it gets dark in the main hall, not good for taking notes or drawing.

Jared Spool – The Anatomy of a Design Decision

Jared had the hangover slot, the first talk of day two. When everyone is a little tired, and the coffee, even a triple shot, just doesn’t cut it.

He took us on a journey through the various types of design styles from unintentional design to experience focused design (trendy new Jared speak for UX), with an explanation of  their  strengths and what makes them work. All this will a side trip to Lings Cars.

The core of Jared’s talk is the comparison of informed design vs process design.   Process design is the one where you use a methodology, produce guidelines, processes, and methods, or just dogma on how to do things.  Well according to Jared’s research this just fails.

Our major problem we are in the corporate world using  process based approach. Going from failure to failure.

The better way is to empower people with knowledge on how to react to a design problem.

You do this by teaching them the relevant techniques and even tricks or hacks around problems, help them be informed how to overcome the issue themselves.  This works mainly because you have to understand the problem to over come it.

You are not just blindly applying a methodology “hoping” it will work.

Gabriella Coleman – In Lulz We Trust

OMG – this talk that Gabriella gave was very intense.

I had to focus really closely to this one to even follow the context and the understand it.  This was a talk that I think you would get extra information out of  by re-listening to it twice.

Her talk was on Anonymous and the  LULZ  of the movement.  It dealt with the aspect of the real and the unreal or shadow players in Anonymous and their overall base desire to maintain the LULZ.

She systematically recounted the take down of Visa and Mastercard in operation payback, as well as the Church of Scientology, and the Arab Summer.  Amazing what a few well placed DDOS attacks and hacks can do.

It was interesting to see the chaotic Anonymous thinking and multiple headed hyrda approach to things, and yet they didn’t present a solution to all the issues, just disrupting things such that we have time to rethink on the issues being controlled by government or big corporates.

It will be very interesting to see the direction Anonymous takes as a “fractured” movement going forward.

Scott Hanselman – It’s not what you read, it’s what you ignore

Scott’s talk was one of those timely reminders that you are a slave to your own workflow.

His rules for dealing with workflow, were a little GTD, but overall they were interesting.

Simple things like don’t  check you’re email in the morning, don’t look at stuff you are CC on, in fact just file it.  Only reply with a 5 sentence reply for emails, use templated replies – yes it just saves time.

If you are going something and it’s not improving your life – drop it.

Was a very much a wake up call type of a talk, certainly made me rethink the way I was doing things.

Wilson Miner – When We Build

Having seen Wilson’s talk before (online), I was keen to see him live, and really see if the talk had been updated any.  Would this talk be as good as a legendary TED talk.

It was a good talk. Nothing amazingly new from a design or ethical direction perspective.

If you are a developer it maybe new.  But a lot of the bigger picture aspects of this talk I have been considering for years.

Wilson took us up through the worlds of why we design the way we do, to reflect our image, our totems.

How we have progressed in our interfaces from paper to screens. How everything we interactive design for and our use of an interface has to be learnt. Usually by investigation, trial and error.

In the world we produce we have been running headlong into a stream of shorter and shorter time periods for  society to learn and except a medium or device. From the radio 40 years to Youtube, just 6 months.

What we need to do when designing is remember that sometimes things are complex for a reason.

It’s not about what you know, but what you don’t know; we have to see the world as it really is not as we have learn and expect.

We are transforming design, in small prototyped live steps, shifting the enviroment from a world of paper to that of screens, always on.

Rob Malda – Slashdot — the Rise and Fall

Rob had an interesting journey, telling the tale of the Rise and Fall of SlashDot.

I had no idea on SlashDot’s humble beginnings and the way it was basically held together by tape and chewing gum (well almost) in the early years.

This really appealed to me.  Especially as I remember the industry very well back then.  Before we become professional.  It really was just seat of your pants stuff, with servers under desks and the like.

Was amazing to watch the unfolding of SlashDot’s slide into stagnation and the rise of the social networks around SlashDot.

Does just go to prove you can survive the fire hose.  Oh and Cache is your friend.

Adam Lisagor – Clients make the world go Round

I had a long chat with Adam at the after party.  A really humble and nice guy.  Almost everything Adam talked about I have done, and learnt these lessons the hard way over the last 17 years in this industry.

The number of times I have taken that project on just for the money, with no love or motivation than the payday at the end is just countless.   He is just right you have to “eat the dog food” or not bother.

The more we liaise and collaborate with the client, the better the overall outcome.  You should expect things to fail, as we all do, but when you have a good liaison with the client, that is being in constant communication, any failure just becomes a problem for both of you to solve.

Alex recommends when researching and talking to clients, trust answers, but question when it’s an opinion, knowing the difference is the skill.

The big one was – Don’t Lie.

Make it personal, business is personal, it’s about people, it’s abbot emotions, feelings, no matter how cold people try and be in the board room.

Just know when you have to stop, and walk away.

Adam also suggested – it’s just about telling the story.

Michael B Johnson – Making Movies is Harder than it Looks: Building Tools for Telling Stories

Okay Mike’s talk is not videoed, I don’t think it even has an audio recording for various copyright reasons.  But you know I’m okay with that.   It was a really good talk from a genuinely nice guy.

Mike walked us through the 3 ways to make a movie and how we could tell a compelling story.  Reminding us it’s in the attention to the detail, and the design pain is just temporary compared to the “suck that is forever” from a badly released product, that you rushed.

The way to make a project work is to have a plan A, and a plan B. You always need a backup plan.

He suggested the best teams are the ones where you have fun, and surround yourself with heroes, as then other teams will  then defend and support your team.

Jenn Lim and Tony Hsieh – Delivering Happiness

Before this talk I had no idea of the book – Delivering Happiness and the company Zappo.   It was particularly telling when both speakers ask who had read the book, a few hands went up, or when asked who had used Zappos, even less hands.

Still the talks were  entertaining.

Jenn talked around the experience of the book and it’s promotional vehicle.  This was was a little flat, as I had NO idea what the book was.

She assumed (again) I would know all about it.   It was interesting, but I still to this day have no idea what they did or what it was about, and really I’m just chalking this one up as, Huh!?  I’m not about to waste my time on this book, if the author can’t even tell me about it.

Now Tony’s talk was very direct he just explained Zappo’s service and culture ethos as a company, this was very enlightening.

Showing a company that is committed to its core ethical values of delivering a WOW service.

They haven’t chased the cash dream, but instead ensure their customers had the best service ever.  Very simple.

Derek Handley – Doing Good and Well

Derek’s talk was the closing keynote, not that Webstock really has keynotes.

He made us question if we had the scale of our issues in the right order.

When we are on our death bed, it’s not that money, but a meaningful life with purpose that we crave.  That level of personal success.

Yet we have our ecomonics measuring finances and resources, we have fallen into the trap that business is a shareholder profit only.  The aspect of service just seems to be gone, lost for shareholder profits.

We have forgotten that service and communities are all interlinked.  The sad thing is that we have also forgotten that history we judge this generation as we are the most documented generation in history. They will know all we do wrong and right, as we have been telling them all about it.

It’s simple according to Derek just live life for a real self satisfying purpose. Something to think about.

Webstock 2013

Will I be back for Webstock in 2013? Finances and project schedules permitting I should be back, might even do a little touring around.

If you haven’t put Webstock in the your calendar for 2013, I suggest you do so.

I have been interested in Lean for a while, if nothing else than to explore if any of the techniques could be stolen for use with UX and service design.   I’m only starting out on this journey about Lean, learning mainly from the local Perth Lean Meetup group.

This is the first, of hopefully a series, of short articles on what I learn from the Lean meetup.

So I expect that I’m bound to get some aspects of Lean wrong.  That’s okay I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m too far off track.

Lean and UX

It’s quite amazing that when people talk about lean you suddenly realise that a lot of the techniques are in fact unnamed technoques within UX that you just do because they make good design sense.

I guess this comes down to the way in design you are always dealing with the “thorny” issues or problems, and just except it as the norm.   Where as in business these issues are often pushed aside as to hard.

The core of Lean is stated in terms of continuous improvement as:

 Produce Quickly,  Test Quickly,  Fail Quickly
-  Repeat.

Now that’s a little too close to the UX design principles of “design, test and fail quickly”.   But this is not surprising as Lean like UX has grown by stealing what was good from its environments.

Background of Lean

Lean comes from the Toyota Production System which rolled into Lean in the 1990′s.  It’s focused on waste management with an overall goal to improve customer value.

This is achieved by using empirical (evidence based) methods to adopt various new or hypothetical ideas.   Older pre-existing ideas are not automatically considered due to pre-existing merit, but must reprove themselves.

Sound familiar? – Oh look scientific method, my old friend.

Lean is also about improving the “flow” of work or communications.  This is achieved by a Pull based processing, where waste reduction (low quality)  is looked at as a system wise consequence not focusing on the point of failure.

It’s about getting the right things in the right place at the right time, in the right quality.  This should result in the perfect “flow” for the system.

Now isn’t a lot of UX about delivery in the journey for the user.

Application of Lean

Lean is not about cutting process or documentation.   It’s not about trimming the fat.

It’s about moving the decision making process from management to the people that are informed.  Such that the decision can be made at a level which the person can control the outcome with all the respective relevant research or facts.

This can be from a design decision to the layout of your own workstation so you have logical place for everything.

Lean is used for continuous product or service improvement.  Any new services or features must be ones that a customer is willing to pay for.  If it’s not then it’s waste, then is will be simplified, integrated or eliminated.

Again note customer centric.

One interesting application of Lean is in the creative environment.   If Lean is implement correctly it will allow for an action based management approach where the only directions forward is via consideration of the Customer view with a focus on that outcome.

Focusing on the tools and not the communication, collaboration of the design will fail to produce the best design outcome.  After all good design comes from conflict and collaboration to pull the design forward.   But we already knew this, right?

Concerns

I do have one concern with Lean, it seems at this point to be a little too methodology based.  Now we know that overall methodologies don’t work in the long term, hence  we need to move to more informed design approach.

I guess it’s really about not following the process by rote, but applying the techniques to assist in the decision making process which considering the final Customer outcome.

I suppose Lean does have it’s place, at least we can steal some great ideas and reuse them, if nothing else.

Times have just got to change. I’m a little sick of living in a world that is regionalise into sales and licencing zones for no real reason besides to restrict sales due to some arcane money grubbing corporate policy.

What makes matters worse is people building experiences that highlight this and rub our face in it time and time again!

I regularly buy music online from various places, I tend to favour non DRM music, or if I can buy directly from the artist which is even better – I don’t like iTunes much at all.

Now eMusic, which I use, have recently redesigned and tweaked their user interface  towards a very strongly  recommendation engine based sales model.  Now I have no issue with this at all, in fact I applaud it as a welcome change, as it’s always good to discover new music.

It’s Very Simple

After you have signed in, eMusic knows your country of residency as it’s in your billing profile, they also know your likes, dislikes and  previous purchases.  Which is good as all this leads to a better browsing and recommendation experience.

Or so you would think.

Below is the home page of the eMusic site after I signed in.   It shows you a selection of “New and Noteworthy” albums.

Now seeing as eMusic knows so much about me, I would expect the selection to be tailored towards my tastes; and yes it is, at least a few of the albums on the home page are of interest.

However despite knowing so much about me, eMusic goes and destroys the entire experience by not allowing me to purchase ANY of the albums recommended.   Due to licensing restrictions in Australia.

Here I am, wanting to purchase an album, but I can’t.   To make matters worse eMusic decides to wave a large flag in my face, screaming, “HA HA you can’t buy this”…

Changing the Approach

Now what would it have taken to exclude the albums from being recommended.  Emusic you already know they are “Not Available” due to my being in Australia, as we can clearly see this on the screen (above).

So just exclude the items “Not Available” from the query, really it’s not that hard.  Just show me the “Available” high rated or new albums.

A recommendation is a waste of time if I can’t purchase it.

Maybe eMusic just wants me to move a few clicks away and download the music for free.

You know I try and support and do the right thing by the musicians, but sometimes the paper pushers just get in the way and destroy the experience.

The model and experience is broken, they need to change.

I have been interested in agile process for a while, especial it’s use with UX techniques.

The other day I ran into a myth that there aren’t many User Experience Design people with skills that can work on agile teams.

It seems UX people aren’t very flexible.

This I find almost laughable, in fact most UX professionals I have found are extremely flexible, often changing tack or techniques as required, at a moments notice.  Maybe we are too flexible.

The core of any agile process really is to have a role less team that can specialists with generalised skills.

Having the traditional defined roles of a Architect, Business Analysis, Project Manager and Developer is really against the principles of working as a collaborative team to achieve days tasks.

In fact what you want to have is the entire team being “T” shaped in a way.    With just deep specialisation in key areas, but still able to operate on other duties as required to get the team over the line.  Hence like the rise of the UX Developer.

Looking at this mix, maybe a User Experience Design “T” shaped person is also required.

Well it seems that “user experience” or even “design” is still a dirty word in the agile sphere.

Sadly I see this time and time again.  The UX specialist is brought in on a agile project at the end or just to correct some issues.   The consistency of maintaining the user experience is often lost as they leave.

The reason given is often that they can’t find UX people to met the team requirements when they are building the team.  Or that the user experience or requirements aren’t on the clients mind.

There is also a false belief that there aren’t any designers that can code (at least on the front end) and understand User Experience and maybe get Usability too.

Looking in the Wrong Place.

I’m calling people out on this one!  I know a lot of my freelance contacts (including me) who are UX or design based could fill any of these “missing skills” for an agile team.

The people exist, we the “T” shaped UX people are sitting around waiting.

It’s just your recruiters or  team builders that aren’t looking in the right places or asking the right questions.

Mainly this comes from the way people are recruited – along old school waterfall process – go get a BA, a Project Manager, a few Developers and maybe a tester or two.   Unless the BA and Testers are closet UX people, and it does happen, the project is going to face issues.

Which is a pity as these project could escape the usual last few sprints with the UX polishing consultant, and do it all properly from the start and save resources.

I guess that solution is for all UX people to just say they are a BA instead.

Will be very interesting to see the audience attending the upcoming Agile UX  Conference in Sydney.