When I first walked into Confab in 2012, I felt as though I had finally found home. During their workshops and talks, speakers discussed the “hows” and “whys” of writing, rather than merely the benefits of having content. They talked about writing from the perspective of thinkers – journalists, creative, researchers, and readers – instead of merely dwelling on its marketing value. It was a whole new world, connecting writing to design, turning copy into content.

It’s no wonder, then, that I’ve been looking forward to Confab 2013 since the day I left the event. And now that it’s only two weeks away, I can barely contain my excitement! In the weeks leading up to the event, I’ve begun conversations with this year’s speakers in order to learn more about areas of content strategy we don’t often hear about. Jonathan Kahn and Melanie Moran share their stories.

Digital Governance Fails Because We’re Afraid of Cultural Change

Let’s begin with Jonathan Kahn. He’s a busy man. Jonathan organizes events (Dare Conference, Confab London, London Content Strategy Meetup), presents worldwide (Webdagene Oslo, CS Forum Paris/Cape Town, IxDA Dublin), and writes extensively (A List Apart, Contents, lucid plot) about the revolutionary changes facing organizations, and why it’s so hard to overcome them.

With a background in web development, he’s also worked as an information architect, user experience consultant, and content strategy advocate. Jonathan is the Principal of Together London. He shared the story leading to his presentation, Digital Governance Fails Because We’re Afraid of Cultural Change.

For most of my career I told myself I was a firefighter, rushing in at the last minute to fix screwed up web projects. Recently, though, I discovered why I told myself that story: I was avoiding the scary part of my work, the difficult questions.

Today, things are different. My interactions with the content strategy community have helped me craft a new story, and it goes something like this:

1. The internet puts new demands on our content. Customers expect useful, usable content across channels and devices, all the time.
2. Organizations (usually) aren’t setup to deal with this reality. People avoid talking about content because it’s messy, political, and hard to do well.
3. So our content is a mess, and nobody takes responsibility for fixing it. This creates problems for both the business and the customer. It also drives us crazy.
4. Content is important, damnit! It’s a business asset. Content strategy provides a way for us to fix these problems, helping us spread the word about the value of content throughout the organization and around the world.

The content strategy story is all about asking hard questions: What content do we have? Is it any good? Why do we need it? What’s our messaging architecture, our voice, our tone? Which other departments do we need to work with? How can we create a sustainable plan for commissioning, editing, publishing, and maintaining content over time?

This story is a framework for making content strategists vulnerable. Brave. Able to put more of ourselves into our work. At the same time, there are ways in which this story can be limiting. To understand why, it’s important to discuss a challenge that almost all content strategists face: governance.

Governance

Governance includes the standards, policies, and procedures made to allow an organization to care for its digital operations over time. In theory, a governance plan ensures our content strategies stick, but it rarely works. Writers don’t follow our voice guidelines, marketers ignore our message architectures, and developers create apps without considering the complexities of content.

We’re doing good work, but it isn’t sticking, which feels like a terrible waste of time. Why won’t people follow our guidelines? Recall the first point I made in the content strategy story above: “the internet puts new demands on our content.” While that’s true, we’re scared to ask the obvious follow-on questions:

• Why does the internet put new demands on our content?
• Why is the business environment changing so quickly?
• What does that mean for our business models? our siloed organizational structures? our “waterfall” development process? the software we buy? the agencies we hire?

These questions terrify us because we’re afraid to face the truth: content strategy is just one piece of the challenge of digital transformation. Our governance attempts fail because we’re working backwards: governance can only sustain culture, it can’t create it.

So what does governance look like when backed by the notion of digital transformation? To make our organizations sustainable, we need to change culture in a way that’s broader than content strategy, incorporating practices we know little about: service design, agile development, and cross-functional teams. Once we understand this, we can start changing our organizations’ culture, today.

Readers can learn more about how to affect a cultural change within their organization by attending Jonathan’s talk. It’s happening at 2:50pm on day two of Confab Minneapolis.

Content Strategy in Higher Education: Uniting Print and Web

Next we hear from Melanie Moran. Melanie is the Director of Integrated Communications at Vanderbilt University. Her presentation this year, “Content Strategy in Higher Education: Uniting Print and Web,” highlights her team’s year-long, ongoing journey towards cohesive, cross-platform storytelling.

She’s looking forward to learning from content experts from many different sectors and bringing home a passel of great ideas. In the meantime, she shared the thought-process leading to her presentation.

I’ll always remember when the light bulb went on for me – when I learned the importance of content strategy. I was sitting in a meeting of campus communicators at Vanderbilt University. I had just returned from conducting an hour-long interview with a faculty member, a professor whose research explored neuroscience and education. I needed his thoughts to inform a story I was writing for the web.

Just then, across the room, a colleague from another office reported that she, too, was writing a profile of a faculty member – for one of our print magazines. And wouldn’t you know it, it was the same guy. She had conducted the same research and was writing the same article.

This is crazy, I thought. Why was web not involved in planning for digital content to support print stories? From that moment forward, my colleagues and I began seeking ways to shake content out of its container – be that container print, web, video or even a press release. It eventually paid off in more innovative storytelling, expanded social media impact and a more strategic use of print.

How did we do this? Here are some of the key elements that informed our content strategy:

• Story first

  Forget the deadlines; forget the Facebook and Twitter beasts that need to be fed. Forget about that for just a minute and ask, why is this a great story? You can have the most interactive website or jaw-dropping magazine around and no one will read it if the stories are lame. Story first, always.

• Exploit the platforms

  Now that you’ve got your story, think about the many ways to tell it across different platforms. What is told with a photo or graphic on Facebook can then push to a feature on your website; can be explored in detail in your print publication; can be told via a video on YouTube. You get the idea. This will likely mean writing different headlines, using different images and even showcasing different parts of the story for different media – but that’s okay. Let go of the need to show everyone everything on every platform and disaggregate the story for maximum portability.

• Strategy, not reflex

  We all know the perils of the “we’ve always done it this way” mindset. And I know it’s 2013 and many of us have already mourned and moved on from print, but for many people it remains a relevant, effective way to reach their audience.

  Vanderbilt’s alumni magazine, for example, lives in the homes and offices of alumni around the country and world. Its physical presence connects them directly with Vanderbilt through dynamic storytelling and gorgeous photography and illustrations. We support this connection heavily with digital, of course, but print remains an important and compelling component of our strategy.

• Analytics, analytics, analytics.

  It was beautiful, it was epic. You laughed, you cried. …but did anyone read it? How was the social media engagement? Did it drive traffic back to your website? Picked up by media? Put yourself on a pretty strict plan of analytics tracking and use it to refine your content strategy. Then share what you find with decision makers, as data drives most organizations. Being able to provide it in relation to communications will elevate others’ understanding your work and the impact it has on your brand’s strength and reputation.

Readers interested in learning about cross-channel storytelling should join Melanie Moran at Confab Minneapolis. Her session begins at 9:40am on day two of the event.

See you there?

So, there you have it. Confab Minneapolis begins on Monday, June 3 and – in addition to Jonathan and Melanie’s – the workshops and talks range from content measurement and modeling to creating content in a zombie apocalypse.

As always, Confab features a mix of well known and up-and-coming content strategists. I’m particularly looking forward to Catherine Toole’s “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s “Write Like a Human, Think Like a Robot.”

Who are you looking forward to seeing?

The post A Taste of Confab 2013 appeared first on UX Booth.

Design research, content strategy, gamification, oh my! Here’s the goods to make us good (err, well, better):

Design research

Design research is a necessary part of every user-centered design project, so more resources to that end never hurt:

• Patterns. Pattern recognition is something for which every systems thinker accounts. Tech writer Kai Weber’s asks how we might we more-thoroughly incorporate it into our process?
• Usability heuristic. Some, otherwise-obvious issues are difficult to see until a user points them out. But why wait? Userium’s usability checklist helps teams uncover problems before they conduct user testing. This leaves those same users free to uncover harder-to-catch issues. Oh, and if this kind of thing fits your fancy: Cameron Chapman compiled a list of 45 web-design checklists some four years ago.
• Remote research. It shouldn’t be too surprising that the state of the art of remote research has changed a great deal since Nate Bolt and and Tony Tulathimutte released their seminal book three years back. In this presentation, Nate shares the latest and greatest methods informing his work!

Content Strategy

Far too many content strategy articles focus on the outcome rather than a productive “how to” – especially when it comes to writing. The following resources focus more on how to write effectively.

• Tone of voice. Creating a solid “voice” is difficult, even for experienced content strategists. Enter Gather Content: A Guide to Tone of Voice. Created by Gather Content’s Kevan Gilbert back in November, this article provides a rough heuristic for lending personality to your website or application.
• Valuable content. Those looking for more content strategy advice should check out Ahava Leibtag, President of Aha Media. She’s been practicing content strategy since 2005 (!), and her Creating Valuable Content checklist is a gift to anyone tasked with its creation. It’s simple to use and easy to adapt.
• Using comics. Kevin Chang’s book, “See What I Mean,” was written in a show-and-tell fashion, beginning life as a presentation. The book demonstrates how comics can engage teams and facilitate understanding. Read it, and you’ll… see what I mean.
• Health literacy. Although it was published all the way back in 2010, the US Department of Health and Human Services’s Health literacy online guide is as contemporary as ever. Chock full of research, design advice and content considerations, it’s an easy recommendation.

Gamification

The gamification debate is complex. While it’s generally agreed that adding a “game layer” to an application is not a solution, there’s definitely value in incorporating engaging elements into our websites. These two resources dig a little deeper into the true aim of gamification:

• Fun and (learning) games. Keeping the Play in Learning is a video highlighting the game mechanics inherent in education, banking, eCommerce, and other daily tasks. Play is also the subject of a TED talk or two.
• Engagement via gamification. Chris McClelland’s presentation, engagement through gamification, examines the differences as well as the similarities between game mechanics – rewards, achievements, and competition – and UX best practices.

Live and learn

Ours is a rapidly evolving field, and every so often we learn another way to make the process more efficient. Leave a comment with your own favorite infographics, process-changing checklists, or a slideshare or video that speaks to the innovative designer in you.

The post April Resource Roundup: Food for Thought appeared first on UX Booth.

Consider the design of a voice-based interface. Because users can say what they mean in any number of ways, there are many situations for which designers cannot account – especially in the first iteration. Designers proactively create a set of interactions that users might accomplish, but the diversity of “common” speech patterns prevents a more prescriptive, task-oriented solution.

Clearly those designing voice-based interfaces intend for users to accomplish something. So how might designers shape their interpretation? To better answer the question, let’s examine some problems encountered defining “design” and then borrow some thinking from literary studies. Finally, we’ll explore how these considerations affect the everyday work of information architects and interaction designers.

Intention

The word “design” is problematic. Colloquially, we tend to think of design as the purposeful creation of some thing – a physical object, an experience, or even a conceptual argument – whereas etymologically, we can trace “design” back to Latin. There, it connotes purpose, choice, and designation.

If we push the etymological boundaries a little, we might think of it as the deification of an object (de-), or the association with god-like qualities. The designer is an intelligent creator that crafts things according to his/her intention. A final perspective points to the designer as someone who sets meaning elsewhere. Intention is so powerful here that the designer does not even consider variation in interpretation; the designer’s intention is the final meaning.

The problem with all four of these interpretations is that they are incongruous with the principles of user-centered design. User-centered design holds that user experience – to say nothing of designer intent – is the most important element of a design system.

Interpretation

In order to reconcile the disparity between intent and interpretation, it’s useful to borrow from literary critics, those with a long history of interpreting things (albeit from a textual perspective).

In 1946, critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a paper called The Intentional Fallacy arguing that “[the] intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art.” Instead, they believed that the only reasonable factors that could serve as the basis of critique were direct-textual material (e.g., the work itself), indirect-textual material (e.g., inferences), and contextual material (e.g., history). In other words: a literary text should be judged on its content, its merit, and history’s perception – not intent!

Contemporary HCI researcher Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza stands on the other side of the fence. Working within the realm of semiotic engineering, she sees a direct relationship between a designer and user, one facilitated by a “designer deputy.” To de Souza, a designer communicates intent through an interface. The user then interprets that interface to accomplish certain goals. It’s a one-way conversation.

Although their opinions diverge, both Wimsatt/Beardsley and de Souza’s are both “correct.” How can that be? The former – a critic’s perspective – concerns works of art, whereas the latter – a researcher’s perspective – deals with objects of utility.

Elucidation

For better or for worse, web design provides avenues for both art and utility. There are certainly elements of a bank’s website that are more artistic than utilitarian, for example. And, as such, we need to recognize that the interplay between designer intent and user interpretation is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy.

Don Ihde, a philosopher of science and technology, ruminates on this in his essay The Designer Fallacy and Technological Imagination (2008):

[T]he designer fallacy is ‘deistic’ in its 18th century sense, that the designer-god, working with plastic material, creates a machine or artifact which seems ‘intelligent’ by design – and performs in its designed way. Instead, I hold, the design process operates in very different ways, ways which imply a much more complex set of inter-relations between any designer, the materials which make the technology possible, and the uses to which technologies may be put. Ultimately I am after a deconstruction of the individualistic notion of design which permeates both the literary and technological versions of the fallacy.

Ihde goes on to suggest that the most interesting use cases are the unanticipated ones. Designing a utilitarian system demands a level of intentionality, a very narrow definition of success. Art objects, however, have a more ambiguous aim. They’re designed such that emergent properties create results, which in turn creates more emergent properties, more results, and so on.

As designers, we must accept that intention, at the very least, cannot be the central focus of a successful design output. Any object is always more than merely an object. Context gives it meaning. While our intention may affect the “in the moment” relationship to an object, later examination leaves much more room for emergent meaning creation.

Care

Because meaning created through emergent systems has the potential to regenerate itself ad infinitum, those of us designing experiences must exhibit care for how intentionality effects that meaning thusly created. I emphasize care, here, in a manner close to the way Heidegger might – as for him, concern is not the same as keeping in mind, but rather entails a specific way of being. Interface designers must concern themselves with both intention and interpretation.

Designers create systems of meaning. Artifacts are only physical manifestations of our intent. Once users put those manifestations to use, though, our original intent is no longer relevant. Associated meaning is now part of peripheral thinking about these objects.

Insofar as the designer can influence the creation of meaning after the initial interaction, we must think of the design object not as the end of our process but rather, in a strange sense, only the beginning. No interface – no object whatsoever – is valuable in-and-of itself. Value is derived from user interpretation before, during, and after the interaction.

Application

As the complexity of technological systems continues to grow, designers need to consider novel, long-form approaches to their design problems. Considering both intention and interpretation throughout the design process provides clients a more well-rounded approach, one that blends theory-based hypotheses with practical validation (or invalidation).

To that end, we might consider the following questions:

Intention

Giving more consideration to our intentions as designers puts us in a better position to create their manifestations.

1. What are we assuming?

   Intention is shaped by the assumptions we make. Being aware of these – and working to validate (or invalidate) them – helps ensure that our intentions as a designer do not conflict with those of our users.

2. What’re our design principles?

   Design principles frame a team’s approach. Enumerating goals, listing requirements, and brainstorming user stories are all statements of intent. Clarifying these helps us focus on defining aspects of the solution rather than better framing the problem.

3. What does our work affect?

   Even when creating something relatively simple, like a landing page or the information architecture for a small website, the things we design have an impacts far beyond their initial experience. Think in terms of systems. How is the element we’re designing affecting all the other elements in the system?

4. What else effects our user’s perceptions?

   No design solution is an island. As user-centered design (and the emergence of an experience-driven economy) has successfully proven, solutions conceived without consideration of context rarely succeed. Context, especially the boundaries between them, heavily influences interpretation. Knowledge of context helps mediate the ambiguity that different environments create.

Interpretation

The next step – often overlooked – is to examine how users interpret those manifestations; to consider the direct, indirect, and contextual interpretations of our work.

1. What is the direct textual material we’re designing?

   These are the “content” comprising our interfaces: physical objects, screens, images, buttons, text, audio clues, etc. Look at the actions they afford. Do they match our design intentions?

2. What is the indirect textual material?

   How do users interpret our objects? What inferences are they making? Are they interpreting the artifacts in the same way as we are? Alternate, unintended interpretations are not necessarily a bad thing; they can often lead to new opportunities and angles.

3. What are the contexts in which this product is used?

   How are contexts different? What are the effects of these differences? Think about your design object not as a static thing but rather a piece of a larger system of meaning, one that is constantly in flux. Objects are interpreted in vastly different ways according to the contextual spaces in which they exist. Contextually-aware design works to understand the differences between situations—cognitive, geographical, emotional, informational, etc.—and create products that fit within these differences. A thorough understanding of intention and interpretation is necessary to achieve this end.

But what does it all mean?

The systems we design are becoming increasingly complex. As technology continues to afford new behaviors and incorporate new sets of data, designers have a multitude of potential solutions at hand. Advances – such as context-aware systems, natural user interfaces, and pervasive computing – will change user- as well as designer-behavior. With new intentions and many-more interpretations to consider, designers have a responsibility to re-examine this critical divide.

The post Intention vs. Interpretation: What Matters? appeared first on UX Booth.

It’s no secret that responsive design helps us develop a single site to serve smartphones, tablets, and desktop displays equally well. But the thinking that goes into a good responsive design? That takes time. How might designers go about making a site tablet-friendly right away?

This is exactly the problem we currently face at Cars.com. While my team is busy considering all of the elements that make up our site (content first, kids!) and how they might be handled in a responsive manner, we’ve wanted to make some quick changes that might immediately impact visitors.

People visit Cars.com to find vehicles for sale, read editorial content, and browse consumer reviews. With these things in mind, we’ve prioritized our short-term changes by focusing on three, key areas: content, layout, and forms.

Content

As Elaine McVicar recently reminded us: when it comes to touchscreen interfaces, content is navigation. This has serious implications for Cars.com – specifically, our photo galleries and content-promoting carousels. Fortunately, mobile luminary Brad Frost has a fantastic article weighing in on this particular element.

Our takeaways? We need to make sure our carousels are swipeable, as swipe gestures allow touch-based users to more-intuitively move through the panels. Next, when it comes to galleries with thumbnail strips, we need to ensure people can swipe through thumbnails. We can’t – or, rather, shouldn’t – exclusively rely on previous and next arrows.

The examples below show what a difference these considerations can make:

The main content carousel on the BBC homepage does not recognize swipe gestures. You have to tap the right or left arrows to navigate through the content or let it play like a slideshow.

The carousel on the Cars.com homepage has a much larger area for tablet users to interact with than the one on the BBC homepage.

While accounting for large swaths of our content (and navigation), we found that we also needed to pay attention to the way in which that content presents itself. This meant considering layout.

Layout

Fingers are horribly inaccurate as pointing devices. As a consequence, Apple, Google, and Microsoft all provide guidelines for the proper sizing of tap targets. But because pixel and point sizes are variable (a topic beyond the scope of this article), Steven Hoober suggests that physical sizes be used when thinking about mobile layout.

The team at Cars.com has taken this to heart – I personally decided to keep a ruler at my desk. This allows me to measure distances right on the glass and, aside from testing with real people, provides a great way to get a feel for whether tap targets are too small or too close to one another.

Compare the left-hand navigation in the examples below from Macy’s and smart. Which would you rather use?

Macy’s faceted browsing has tap targets that are too small and too close together for tablet users to navigate easily without first zooming in. This is common in eCommerce websites in which the design predates the proliferation of tablets.

smart’s navigation design includes larger tap targets and better spacing between the targets.

Having considered both content and layout, in general, we figured: what’s next?

Forms. That’s what.

Forms

Forms do the “heavy lifting” on Cars.com. They’re one of the main ways users tell us what they want. And let’s face it: while forms can be difficult to use on desktop computers, they pose an even bigger problem on mobile devices with their small, virtual keyboards.

When it comes to forms on mobile, otherwise simple changes can go a long way towards improving usability. Luke Wroblewski’s best practices ring true:

• Use the fewest number of form fields necessary to achieve your business goal.
• Reduce the number of fields that require typing. If there is another way to get the information other than the keyboard, use it. I call this mindset “more tap, less type”.
• Use native device capabilities. The GPS, compass, accelerometer, camera, address book, and native social networking apps can all provide data so people don’t have to enter it manually.
• Let people type whatever they want. Allow people to enter values like phone numbers with various special characters even if you’re just going strip them out afterward.
• Whenever possible, retain form contents in error states. Don’t make people retype their whole email address on a virtual keyboard because they forgot the period.

Simply by redesigning our forms against these guidelines, we increased their overall utility. What’s more, redesigning our forms also gave us a chance to reconsider our form aesthetics.

Layout

As with our content, the larger our forms’ inputs, the easier they are to navigate. Increasing the padding around form elements as well as making some of them taller and wider makes them more navigable.

Compare the previous version:

Form elements are too close for comfort on an older version of the Cars.com dealer locator form.

To the new version:

The redesigned form increases the size of the form fields and adds more spacing between elements. This reduces people’s likelihood of tapping the wrong element.

Notice the difference? Next, we use a different background or border color to indicate focus. This isn’t groundbreaking, of course, but it does provides a visual confirmation that the characters a person types will appear in the correct place – and differences like this add up.

What’s more, the CSS required to do this is super simple:

input:focus {
  background-color: #ffffe0;
  border: 1px solid #f00;
}

Finally, we looked at context-specific keyboards.

Get specific

Context-specific keyboards offer users a subset of the traditional keyboard layout to encourage completion of a specific task. For example, a “number” keyboard provides number keys (as well as commas, periods, and dollar signs) to users rather than the traditional QWERTY keyboard.

HTML5 provides an easy way to trigger the display of context-specific keyboards using the “type” attribute. Specifically:

• <input type=”email” /> triggers a keyboard with the @ symbol and a period.
• <input type=”number” /> triggers the keyboard with numeric digits plus characters like the dollar sign, comma, and period.
• <input type=”url” /> triggers the keyboard with characters needed to type a URL, including a “.com” button on iOS and some Android devices.

Notice how Crate and Barrel utilizes <input type=”email” /> on their sign-in screen. When entering an email address, people are presented with an “@” key and a period key:

Crate and Barrel’s create an account screen gives people all the characters they need to type an email address on one keyboard.

We decided to make heavy use of <input type=”number” /> on Cars.com since many of our tools use ZIP code to determine the person’s general geographic location. Without utilizing this input type, people would be forced to manually switch back and forth between different keyboard layouts – alphabetical and numeric. That’s a lot of unnecessary interaction.

Oh, and one more thing: there is no negative impact to using these input types. Because older desktop browsers that don’t understand them, they default to “type=text”. Newer mobile browsers will display a more user-friendly keyboard and older desktop browsers will be unaffected.

Getting started

Improving the three, key areas of Cars.com highlighted in this article has provided our mobile-based users with a dramatically better user experience, all while affording our design and development teams more time to think through our responsive redesign.

The team at Cars.com now thinks about tablet users for every design change we make on the “traditional” site, helping to achieve a vision that’s more usable across devices. Hopefully, following a similar approach increases your team’s sensitivity to (and awareness of) the design considerations specific to touch and gesture-based interactions.

Additional resources

• HTML5 Forms – Dive Into HTML5
• Touch Gesture Reference Guide – Luke Wroblewski

The post Finger Tips: 3 Quick Ways to Retrofit a Site for Touchscreen Use appeared first on UX Booth.

I explored the 10 best UX books of 2010 and, three years later, the time has come to follow up. There are a bunch of great books due out this year, covering myriad topics from the psychology of persuasion, to experience strategy, to lean UX, to microinteractions. Although we may not all get around to reading all of them, perusing the top 10 at least gives provides perspective. Without further adieu, here’s the list!

Designing the Search Experience: The Information Architecture of Discovery

Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate kicked off the year with this impressive guide to information architecture as it pertains to the ever-present search bar. No doubt this will be added to many an a library sometime soon. Covering both the art and design of search, “Designing the Search Experience”, weaves together the behavior of information seeking with the practice of user interface design.

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; Available now!

A Practical Guide to Strategic User Experience

In “A Practical Guide to Strategic User Experience,” Leisa Reichelt covers the foundations of both user-centered design and business strategy. She explores methodology, documentation and tracking metrics, helping designers make a more seamless transition into a strategic role.

Publisher: Five Simple Steps; available: Summer 2013

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Understanding users is an absolutely essential part of what we do and the skills required to do it should never be taken for granted. Although Steve Portigal’s webinars have provided suggestions for embracing our user’s perspectives in the past, his book will likely provide a more comprehensive approach.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: May 2013

UX Team of One

Similar in scope to “Undercover UX” – Cennydd Bowles and James Box’s eye-opening book from 2010 – Leah Buley’s UX Team of One is specifically written for people working without the support of a team. It aims to highlight the real-life challenges faced by designers who need to produce deliverables with low effort and high impact.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: June 2013

Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience

Continuing along the Lean UX theme, this “hands-on” book aims to cover the principles of Lean UX – how this collaborative process enables you to forgo excessive deliverables in favour of building a shared understanding within a product team. Jeff has been working in lean UX and agile development for years now; he’s certain to provide valuable tactics and inspiring techniques!

Publisher: O’Reilly; available now!

Designing with Agile: Lean User Experience for Successful Products

While agile may function well for other teams, I’ve personally struggled trying to reconcile it with my own approach it. In this book Anders Ramsay aims to “provide a path” for design teams, and User Experience practitioners in particular, to help them transform their practices by applying Agile methods and thinking.

Publisher: Rosenfeld Media; available: late 2013

Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation

An increasing number of books address specific areas within the context of user-centered design and I for one am glad for it. Designing the Conversation is aimed at practitioners who are looking to take their facilitation skills to the next level. Written by three UX professionals, this book helps designers facilitate stakeholder interviews, peer brainstorms, and client interactions.

Publisher: New Riders; Available now!

How to Get People to Do Stuff: Master the art and science of persuasion and motivation

Susan Weinschenk – otherwise known as “The Brain Lady,” – has spent the past 30 years applying psychology to the design of technology. With several publications to her name, including “100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People” and “Neuro Web Design (What Makes Them Click?),” Susan’s next book is all about how we “get people to do stuff;” how to use insights from recent research in psychology to be more effective in motivating people and to get them to do the stuff we want them to do.

Publisher: New Riders; Available now!

Microinteractions

In “Microinteractions’, Dan Saffer provides a new way of thinking about designing digital products. He proposes that every feature, large or small, is nothing more than a series of interactions that are essential to creating a compelling personality.

How do you turn mute on? How do you know you have a new email message? How can you change a setting? All these little moments are opportunities to engage the user. These are the moments that change a product from one that is tolerated to one that’s beloved.

Publisher: O’Reilly; available: May 2013

Human Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective

“Human-Computer Interaction: An Empirical Research Perspective” covers foundational topics, including: historical context, the human factor, interaction elements, and the fundamentals of science and research. Throughout the book, Scott provides hands-on exercises, checklists, and real-world examples. Given Scott’s background of more than 30 years in interaction design, this book is likely to be a very comprehensive guide to research in HCI – a hefty addition to any bookshelf.

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; Available now!

Collect them all!

It’s impossible to read everything that’s coming available this year, but the books above are the ones that I’m most looking forward to. And at this early stage of the year I have the best intentions to read as many of them as I can!

So, what’s on your 2013 reading list? Have you read any from this list yet? Join the conversation in the comments below – I look forward to hearing more suggestions.

The post 10 UX Books Due out in 2013 appeared first on UX Booth.

For context’s sake, here are the sessions I attended that informed my reading list:

• “The World Is The Screen: Elements of Information Environments” by Andrew Hinton
• “Sitting in the Director’s Chair: How the Role We Play Drives the Vision of the User Experience.” by Traci Lepore
• “Links, Nodes, and Order: A Unified Theory of IA” by Jorge Arango
• “Taxonomy for App Makers” by Andy Fitzgerald
• “Web Governance: Where Strategy Meets Structure’ by Peter Morville and Lisa Welchman
• “Closing Plenary” by Karen McGrane

These are just a subset of the total sessions comprising the conference, of course. For a full list, check the schedule page for the conference.

Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension

The Embodied Cognition theory suggests that sensemaking is as much an external process as it is an internal one. In other words, technologies with which we interact change how we think about the world. Andrew Hinton suggests that this has significant implications on the work we do as information architects.

Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins

As a compliment to Supersizing the Mind, Edwin Hutchins’s Cognition in the Wild reminds us that our understanding of the world is also cultural. This idea touches on some of the educational concepts that Bill Gribbons mentioned to me last month, so it was a natural addition to the list.

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate by Peter Brook

Traci Lepore’s presentation explained how perspectives that function in the world of theatre can also lend themselves to the management of user-centered design projects. Although this book framed the majority of her talk, Tracy also mentioned method acting, which has me thinking about its applications to our practice, as well.

The Connected Company by Dave Gray and Thomas Vander Wal

Ah, governance. It’s a topic that’s as puzzling to me as it is important to the continued success of any design endeavor. Peter Morville and Lisa Welchman referenced this book as they explained how “loosely connected pods” are the key to a good governance plan. From what I understand, this approach informs Amazon’s corporate structure.

Content Strategy For Mobile by Karen Mcgrane

This one’s high on my list. In her closing plenary, Karen McGrane explained how radically different tomorrow’s content problems will be. When working with The New York Times, Karen recounted how digital publishing used to be relegated to a separate office. Today, it’s given equal footing with the print side of things. And tomorrow? Let’s just say we’ve got our work cut out for us.

Yours?

I find it quite likely that some of you who read UX Booth attended the Summit. What books caught your eye? Are you currently reading anything that informed your understanding of this year’s talks?

Share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post A Reading List Courtesy of This Year’s IA Summit appeared first on UX Booth.

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences explains how a classroom of students (or an office filled with users) may learn and process information in multiple different ways. Although he penned his theory with an eye towards school reform, he unwittingly provided UX designers with a valuable tool – one that’s especially useful as we struggle to present information “intuitively.”

A matter of (several) perspective(s)

Whether they’re building eLearning courses or focusing on onboarding, user experience designers need to act as teachers in order to create experiences that subtly explain to users how to employ a website or application. Through user research, designers might learn what users do or don’t expect; but to better understand how users process information we need to reconsider how people learn.

Gardner published his multiple intelligences theory in 1983, stating that “students possess different kinds of minds and therefore learn, remember, perform, and understand in different ways.” The intelligences he identified were: visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, and logical-mathematical. Everyone has the ability to acquire information in each of these seven ways, he posited, though we all have different strengths.

Visual-spatial learners process best what they see on paper or in space around them. Sometimes this can come out artistically (many artists and architects are visual-spatial learners), and sometimes it may come out through an interest in charts and graphs, puzzles, or reading and watching television.

The traditional classroom setup favors visual-spatial learners.

Bodily-kinesthetic learners take in information best when they’re moving, whether by role-playing, building things (or taking them apart), or using gestures and sign-language. Perhaps the most famous teacher using bodily-kinesthetic learning is Louisa May Alcott’s character, the fictional Mr. March of Little Women, who “invented a new mode of teaching the alphabet by forming letters with his arms and legs, thus uniting gymnastics for head and heels.”

Musical learners take in information more readily when it is tied to music, but this isn’t restricted to musicians. A completely tone-deaf person can be a musical learner because, for example, he finds he studies better with music in the background, or memorizes facts more easily when they are put to a rhythm.

Interpersonal learners are at their best when in a crowd. Their strengths include empathy, street smarts, and “reading people.” They can then use these strengths to learn less inherently interpersonal skills – such as reading – by reading aloud to a friend, or math by finding a study group.

Intrapersonal learners are in tune with themselves: aware of their own needs, thoughts, and feelings. As a result, their strengths lie in the ability to self-teach. Any learning system that is too-structured will only serve to distract or confuse intrapersonal learners; these are people destined to self-motivated careers such as scholarship, computer development, or freelance work.

Linguistic learners learn through speaking, reading, or writing. Their ability to communicate well via words is rewarded in traditional schools as well as on the web. Sadly, many strong Spatial-visual, Interpersonal, or Logical-Mathematical learners fail – even in traditional math and science classes – because their linguistic intelligence is not high enough to communicate what they are taking in.

Logical-mathematical intelligence lends itself to conceptual thinking. Logical-mathematical people are often scientists or, more recently, programmers. They learn by identifying patterns and logic games. They are more likely to find information interesting when it is presented as a puzzle with which they can experiment.

Lastly, naturalistic intelligence refers to the ability to identify and classify the components that make up our environment. This intelligence would have been especially apt during the evolution of the human race in individuals who served as hunters, gatherers, and farmers. These days, these include botanists and farmers – and even Charles Darwin!

Given the array of learning types, how can anyone expect a design incorporating only one type of learning to work for everyone?

Facilitate understanding

It has been 30 years since Gardener first presented the theory of multiple intelligences and, sadly, most classrooms are still set up as lectures or slideshows. Worse still, most web sites mirror this approach. While a traditional approach makes things easier for linguistic and visual-spatial learners it unfortunately disenfranchises those who rely on audio, interpersonal, or other forms of information. No wonder such a large percentage of the population finds long-copy (geared only toward linguistic learners) boring, but Facebook (intrapersonal, linguistic, visual-spatial, and sometimes audio or musical) fascinating!

When it comes to onboarding, designers are teachers; responsible for presenting content in a way that engages the most studen – err, users. This is where Gardner’s theory comes into play: designing interactions with multiple intelligences in mind can help us reach a broader audience.

The following two examples serve to illustrate this approach:

John works for an engineering company. His goal is to convert all of their eLearning courses into online courses. He initially plans to post the lectures online as audio files, providing logged-in students with an online “notebook” to record their notes as they listen.

After reading about the multiple intelligences, however, John begins to believe that most of the engineering students are either visual-spatial or logical-mathematical learners. His eLearning courses are only appealing to linguistic (and some musical) learners. He decides to record videos of the teachers to attract the visual-spatial learners, and include diagrams from the textbook and real-world problem sets (appealing to the logical-mathematical learners) as supplemental material.

Windchill, a real-life eLearning tool for engineers offers video and audio tutorials, as well as interactive tours, appealing to kinesthetic learners.

Jane is a UX designer creating the on-boarding process for some event-planning software. Because she learns best when moving around – she’s a kinesthetic learner – she writes most of the tutorials to include drag-and-drop activities and suggests that people stand and walk while making decisions with regards to venue size.

Jane receives feedback that her boss doesn’t understand the tutorial she’s written. When reading about the multiple intelligences, it becomes clear to Jane that she and her boss just learn differently. Moreover, neither Jane nor her boss have any idea how their users learn!

After conducting some usability tests, Jane finds that many of her users are actually intrapersonal learners. As a result, Jane decides to include forums and message boards as key areas in the on-boarding process. Her intrapersonal-learning users will likely appreciate the opportunity to interact with others and learn as a community.

For all intelligences

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

Albert Einstein

Although accounting for multiple intelligences isn’t the job of any one heuristic or other type of design pattern – it’s simply part of a more considered approach – try and keep the following points in mind as you (re)evaluate your product’s experience:

1. Isolate user intelligence types

   Incorporate the multiple intelligences theory into the design process from the start by capturing details related to learning during user research. While conducting user interviews, for example, ask what types of books (if any) the user enjoys reading, what hobbies he has, and what he excelled at in school.

   If a user reads frequently, he might be a linguistic learner. If he prefers to spend his time playing board games or online collaborative games, he may be an intrapersonal learner. If he spends his money on concerts, speakers, and new mp3s, you may have a musical learner.

2. Connect the easy and the enjoyable

   A common saying about great chess players: they are good at chess so they enjoy it; they enjoy playing, so they play more; and the more they play, the better they get. This cycle is true of not just chess. Anything that comes easily to us is something we are much more likely to enjoy, thus kicking off the enjoy-grow-improve-enjoy cycle.

   Sometimes the only way to present material is in a less-than ideal format, such as a video for learners who have a low visual-spatial intelligence. Present these users with a survey, audio, text, or other content geared towards their intelligence, and they’ll gain confidence from the ease with which they succeed. Once they have that confidence, challenges such as the video will feel more manageable as they continue through the onboarding process.

3. Incorporate prior knowledge

   When educators talk about prior knowledge, they mean reviewing addition before beginning multiplication. By reviewing 2 + 2 + 2 = 6, it provides students with a basis for understanding how 2 × 3 = 6.

   Experience designers rely on prior knowledge as well: The New York Times relies on their readers’ prior knowledge of reading newspapers to understand their online formating; Gmail’s mobile app relies on users’ prior knowledge of word processing to understand their “compose mail” icon; etc. When designing for those who learn a specific way, remember where their comfort zone is. Interpersonal learners are most comfortable in a crowd, for example, so providing them with social-centered content and functionality is a good way to facilitate their growth.

   

   Netflix reminds intrapersonal learners – those who learn by self-reflection – that all choices are based on their personal preferences. It speaks to their interest in always seeking out a better understanding of how they themselves think and act.

4. Don’t stop just because you’ve got it right

   “It’s always in the last place you look” does not apply to UX designers. Often, even if the first or second idea seems like “the one,” it’s only the beginning. Since designing for multiple intelligences is a relatively new idea, it is even more important to explore four or more variations, in order to delve deeper into the realm of possibilities. It may be easy to design multiple variations for linguistic learners, for example, but that’s no excuse for shirking on variations for interpersonal learners!

   To really explore new ideas, target several variations to different types of intelligence. Then conduct A/B testing to determine which type of intelligence best guides your users through the task at hand.

5. Value the differentiators.

   In an attempt to save time or design costs while designing for more than one type of learner, the focus is often on how two templates can be created to be as similar as possible. Instead, focus on the differentiators during the brainstorming period. Not only will this result in better personalization for different learning styles, it may turn out the differences complement one another well – you’ll never know until you sketch it!

Just as teachers constantly seek out new ways to engage their students, UX designers constantly concern themselves with what best suits their users. It’s no surprise, then, that an educational theory such as Gardner’s is so valuable to our practice. It’s the next logical step to personalizing every application and website for its ideal user. Let’s go forth and educate.

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My first mobile phone, a Nokia 5110 (purchased in 1998!), offered very few features: I could call, text or play Snake. What’s more, these interactions were completely controlled by the manufacturer. With the advent of smartphones, touch screens, and “app stores,” however, the opportunities for designers are now innumerable. It’s incumbent upon us to familiarize ourselves with the conventions of this still-relatively-new medium.

Welcome to Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design. Here’s some background in case you’re just joining us mid-series: Designing for Mobile, Part 1: Information Architecture demonstrated the key challenges designers face when designing for mobile, primarily the mobile context: from viewing conditions, to behavior and emotion. Because these differences impact the user, I explained that it’s important for us to consider them throughout our design process – from research and strategy to creating the final product.

Part 1 concluded with an exploration of information architecture in the mobile context. This provides a good foundation for the rest of the design process. Before jumping into aesthetics, though, it’s important to understand how mobile and tablet interactions differ when compared to their desktop counterparts.

The design of interactions

Most modern, mobile devices employ touch screens; which provide their own set of opportunities and constraints. We use them not only to view content, but also to interact with that content. This forces designers to consider ergonomics, gestures, transitions, and finally, mobile-specific interaction patterns.

Ergonomics

Designing for mobile ergonomics requires that we pay attention to device dimensions as well as the pragmatic concerns of touch screens. The way a user holds a device and touches the screen, for example, influences how easy it is for that user to reach parts of the screen.

Hit areas, or “areas of the screen the user touches to activate something” require adequate space for the user to accurately (and confidently) press. The average fingertip is between one to two centimeters wide, which roughly correlates to somewhere between 44px and 57px on a standard screen and 88px to 114px on a high-density (“retina”) screen. Nokia, Apple and Microsoft each recommend slightly different sizes to account for the nature of touchscreens.

Yet there are no hard and fast rules with regards to hit areas. Instead of looking to the various standards for an answer, simply consider what the user needs to achieve on the screen, how important that task is, and how quickly they need to complete it – then design accordingly.

Gestures

Each part of a touchscreen dedicated to functionality precludes the display of content in that area, making gestures a crucial component of mobile interaction design. All of the major touch operating systems employ them, including: Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, and Microsoft’s Windows 8.

The table below provides a brief summary:

Action	iOS	Android	Windows 8
Press	Selects primary action	Selects primary action	Selects primary action
Long press	In editable text display magnified view for cursor positioning	Enter data selection mode	Show tooltip without selecting the item
Double press	Zoom in or zoom out	Zoom in or zoom out. Also used for text selection	No standard
Small swipe	Reveal a delete button by sliding horizontally on a table view	No standard	Select objects in a list or grid by sliding perpendicular to panning direction
Large swipe	Scroll across content	Scroll across content or navigate between views within the same hierarchy	Scroll across content Also used for moving, drawing or writing
Pinch / spread	Zoom in or zoom out	Zoom in or zoom out	Zoom in or zoom out

Additionally, standards and patterns have emerged for developing gestures on touch-based devices. Designers can – and often should – push the boundaries of gestures to suit their application.

Transitions

Transitions are interactions that smooth the boundaries between application states, helping to tell a story or (re)establish a gestural metaphor. More generally, transitions help facilitate recall and prevent users from getting lost.

Basic transitions include:

Gesture	Transition	Description	General usage
Press	Quick change	The view changes without any animation.	When changing between two different types of tool or content.
	Expand	An item on the screen expands pushing content along or down	When expanding a list of content within a screen.
	Flip	The view flips over as if turning around from back to forwards	When viewing a screen specifically related to the previous screen, e.g. additional settings or information.
	Open to full screen	An item on the screen opens/expands to fill the full screen.	When opening or viewing an item. This transition can also be inverted to close an item.
Swipe	Horizontal slide along	The view slides left or right, pushing the previous view out of the screen.	When moving forward to view new and related content, or back to a previous screen.
	Horizontal slide over	The view slides left or right, over the previous view	When viewing supporting or additional content.

These are just a few; there are a whole host of transitions from which we might choose. The best choice is one that adds coherence to the interaction we’re facilitating.

Common patterns

As alluded to in part 1, mobile devices give designers less space to add menus and navigational cues than they might be used to on a desktop computer. Combined with environmental factors – such as poor viewing conditions and/or distractions – it’s often difficult for us to provide users with a good grasp of our content’s structure.

There are, however, a few common interaction patterns up to the challenge. Some of the most valuable include those used to improve navigation, select content, sign in/out, and negotiate forms.

Main navigation

Main (or “primary”) navigation is a visual manifestation of our website (or application)’s information architecture. Here are a few options to consider:

Starbucks responsive site with expanding menu	Expanding Menu Many mobile and responsive sites use an expanding menu to access the main navigation. A menu icon (generally a series of lines) is contained in the header. Tapping the icon shows a list of main menu items. Good for: Responsive websites Watch out for: Too many menu options and sub menu options could push the content further down the screen making it frustrating and awkward to use.
Facebook app with side menu	Side menu Some apps and also sites use a sliding side menu. As seen in the Facebook app. As with the expanding menu you will often press an icon with a series of lines or slide the screen over, this then expands or slides open the menu, showing a list of menu options vertically down the side of the screen. This can have categories as well as being scrollable. Good for: Apps with a high number of menu options. This creates a separate area for the navigation instead of taking up a large amount of space where the user would interact with content or features. Watch out for: Ensure it doesn’t clash with any other navigation or interaction patterns, as the user may be easily lost. For example using an expanding or tabbed menu along with this pattern may cause the user confusion when trying to find a specific item or feature.
Amazon app with tabbed menu	Tabbed menu This pattern corresponds with the previous article in this series. A persistent toolbar, displayed in either the header or footer of an app, allows user to quickly switch between sections. Good for: Apps with fewer menu options. This is due to the amount of horizontal space available on mobile screen. This is generally used as app navigation for iOS, where 5 menu options are recommended. Watch out for: Bottom tabs may clash with Android and Windows 8 standard interactions.
LinkedIn app with dashboard menu	Hub and spoke menu This pattern corresponds with the previous article in this series. A centralized home screen allows the user to select a menu option. This will navigate the user to this section, which can have it’s own internal navigational pattern. The user may return to the home screen by activating a back link. Good for: Quickly exposing an app’s features. Watch out for: Silo-ing functionality. If a user wants to navigate between functionalities, returning to the home screen could be frustrating.

Selecting content

Pressing links to activate content facilitates flow, making it easy for the user to quickly select content with one hand. If done well, this transition also increases user engagement.

BBC news app with forward navigation	Press to move forward The user will flow forward through content, generally by selecting categories, sub categories then into content, and often moving forward to new related content. Good for: Keeping a user engaged in article driven content. Watch out for: The user may feel lost if they aren’t sure where they are within a navigational structure.
App store with coverflow carousel	Coverflow The user can scroll across previews of content then select an item to navigate into it. This horizontal scrolling pattern is inherent to the Windows 8 ‘metro’ style apps. Good for: More visual content that you want the user to explore and preview before selecting. Watch out for: Making the user do lengthy scrolling to access the content they want to access frequently.
iOS maps peel back for further options	Flip over / Peel back To make it clear that you are exploring content or settings relating to the item you are already viewing, often a peel pack or flip over interaction will allow you to nicely access further details. Good for: Relating two types of content, e.g. settings or further information. Watch out for: Over complicating your interactions and confusing the user as to where they are within the navigational structure.

Signing in

Entering a username, email and password is an essential process for some applications. As designers, we can ensure it’s as painless as possible.

	Auto sign in The user’s sign in details are stored within an app, and on initialization the user is logged in, and their data is shown. This is how many social network apps work, e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter Good for: Apps that require log in to access personal information but don’t require a high level of security. Watch out for: Ensure that the correct level of security is being applied.
	Remembering details As with desktop sites retaining user details, such as the email or username within a form can help speed up the sign in process. Good for: Mobile and tablet sites that require sign in. Watch out for: Requiring sign in where it isn’t necessary.
	Pin codes Creating a quick way of logging in without requiring the user to enter the standard log in details can be really powerful. PayPal allows you to create a simple pin number, making signing in very quick and easy. Good for: Apps that have a requirement for security, but can associate with your specific device. Watch out for: Ensure that the correct level of security is being applied.

Using forms

Filling out forms can be frustrating on a mobile device, especially if that form appears on a website designed for a desktop, yet lacking a mobile version. Facilitate the process by attending to the usual mobile design considerations, and consider these solutions to make using forms on a mobile even easier.

Amazon app allows you to access personal details and order history	Save user details Using a login to save/recall user information saves time, reducing overhead and making using your website or application that much easier. Good for: Sites or apps where a user may have to add personal details, such as within a shopping process. Watch out for: Ensure an appropriate level of security is applied.
Just Eat app provides an email focused keyboard	Providing the right keyboard One way to smooth out the form filling process is to ensure that the relevant keyboard is displayed when a user activates a form field. For example, if the user must enter a phone number, display the numerical keyboard. This can be achieved through the code. Good for: All forms Watch out for: Nothing!
Topshop app purchase process	Progress bars Progress bars are a really excellent way of informing the user the length of a multi-step process on a desktop, but device dimensions make this a bit of a challenge on mobile and tablet devices. They can still be used however, but clever use of the available area will be required. Good for: Shopping process or long forms Watch out for: Don’t take up too much space, as this could be a barrier to quick content access.

Next steps

Standards and guidelines provide a place from which to innovate. When I played Snake on my Nokia 5110 I never imagined that I would someday have the opportunity to design and shape tools for mobile. Today’s solutions become tomorrow’s standards and guidelines.

Getting the interactions right on a mobile device is essential. But to create a truly wonderful experience the actual appearance of the website or application needs to inspires, charms and engages. In part 3, I’ll explore how the layout and visual design can support the information architecture and interactions to create a thoroughly engaging experience.

The post Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design appeared first on UX Booth.

Information Architecture plays a vital role in uniting our individual passions and, every year, the IA Summit brings together speakers from all aspects of user-centered design to discuss it. This particular year, we had the opportunity to digitally “sit down” with a few presenters before the event to get their thoughts on information architecture, best practices, and the future of our continued collaboration. Regardless of whether or not you’re able to attend, the ensuing discussion can help all of us think more critically about our craft.

We’re also in the position to give away a ticket to the IA Summit to one lucky reader. Read below for details as to how you might win!

Experience design seems to be increasingly focused on smaller things: micro-interactions, ubiquitous technologies, mobile, etc. Do you think this reduces or increases the scope of our work?

David Farkas: It enlarges the scope by leaps and bounds, falling under the old adage of “constraints foster innovation.” The more things we focus on, the more constraints we have to lend shape to our solutions.

It also provides more opportunities to fail. Where the web started as static pages with an information-centric purpose, it was easy to understand the risks of a seemingly finite space. As interactivity and technology have progressed, the opportunity to design good (and bad) solutions increases. The same opportunities exist across new technologies, environments and verticals. While we understand the limitations of one area of experience design, the opportunity to discover, explore and fail in others is ever growing.

Andrew Hinton: I don’t think mobile and ubiquitous computing (or micro-interactions, for that matter) are “smaller things” so much as they are specific aspects of a whole experience.
I do think that, in the broader conversation, there’s a tendency to focus on parts at the expense of the whole. But that’s just a human quirk. People tend to grab hold of specific memes more readily than higher-level, system-wide stuff (which is complex and requires more abstraction). Information architecture concerns itself with that wider point of view: how contexts connect.

Brad Nunnally: It reduces the scope of our work. Many teams now focus on micro aspects of an overall user experience rather than the bigger picture. We need to start asking “Why does X need to happen and how do people want to accomplish it?” We have to rise above micro solutions and start designing the overall experience.

What led you to present on your topic of choice? Is your presentation more of a summation of your current thinking or is it a sort of rallying cry for where we should head as a profession?

Lauren Colton: I first heard about Plain Language in law school and fell in love with the idea of streamlining communication for a stronger message. Although clients and I sometimes have to consider the usability and accessibility aspects of language. I’m ultimately trying to convince people to not be afraid of their words. Language is how we make friends, run governments, and build the technology that improves lives.

Nir Eyal: I spent several years at my last company working in, and studying, advertising and video gaming. These two industries depend upon what I unapologetically call “mind control.” My talk will be a call-to-action for interaction designers to understand and apply what those who create habit-forming products have known for years.

David Farkas: My presentation – “The F Word… Fail” – is a rallying cry for our profession to be more comfortable with admitting, discussing, and sharing failed projects, code, discoveries and experiences with each other and our clients.

The idea came out of my MidwestUX talk on “Interaction Design through Mixology.” Much of the post-presentation conversation centered around how I document my failed experimentations. It was a crystallizing moment for me: Where have I kept them? Why aren’t they available? Over the following months I researched my own and others work identifying the gap in knowledge in our field isn’t solely in academic or mentorship programs but exists in our fear of failure, or more importantly our resistance to openly discuss it.

Karl Fast: I’m speaking about the big challenge of small data. This is a reaction to the assumption that big data is inherently more complex, more interesting, and more important than smaller data. Big data is complex, interesting, and important, of course, but that doesn’t mean small data problems are simple, boring, and unimportant.

Look at the information in your life: the paper piled on your desk, the photos on your computer, all the stuff in your Evernote account. These are small data problems. They are messy and pervasive; something everybody has to deal with. The conversation around big data implies that we’ve solved small data problems. We haven’t.

Kel Smith: Both, really. The experience of designing for the digital outcast is something I’ve been exploring for the past several years (soon to be released as a book by Morgan Kaufmann). I’ve been inspired by how people with disabilities are increasingly relying on “grass roots” self-sufficiency as a way to successfully navigate their lives, and I believe there are lessons that we can all take from their efforts.

Designers seem to simultaneously ask “why?” and “why not?” of their clients. How does motive and/or intention factor into our work? And at what point might our work with government, healthcare, and other institutions become unethical?

Nir Eyal: At some level, design is about manipulation. I’ve written on this topic before: how a designer can better decide what is worth working on from a moral perspective. I ask them to consider two things: First, “Would I use the product myself?” and second, “Will the product help users materially improve their lives?”

Karl Fast: Like any profession, UX designers believe our work has value; that we create positive change in the world. We have good motives and positive intent. Therefore, we naively assume our work must be ethical. Yet UX work is always coercive at some level. We deliberately design things that make people buy more, that persuade people to click ads, and so on. These are not inherently bad things, but they’re not inherently good either. Our work is not neutral. It has an ethical dimension, even if it’s not something we talk much about.

Kel Smith: I’ll speak from the point of view of healthcare. No authentic examples of unethical design practices come immediately to mind, likely because the industry is so tightly regulated that very few renegades are able to slip through the cracks.

The only case where I could consider a health design practice unethical is, obviously, when patient’s wellness is at risk. As we approach a new phase of healthcare that supports greater interoperability and an emphasis on quality of care, I think we’ll see new practices emerge that force us to reconsider how the patient experience is manifested through systemic or experiential constraints.

What are the biggest obstacles we’ve overcome as a profession? Along the same lines, what are challenges you foresee for our profession in the coming years?

Karl Fast: When Marissa Meyer was hired as the CEO at Yahoo, the headline in the New York Times was “Mayer Hopes to Brighten User Experience at Yahoo.” This headline was unthinkable ten years ago. Today it doesn’t seem unusual. So the biggest obstacle we’ve overcome is fragmentation. We have loosely assembled these pieces under the UX banner and, on the whole, it’s been a good thing for the field.

Looking ahead, a big challenge is the deep contextualization of UX practice. Take healthcare, for example: A typical UX role is improving the hospital website. Compare that to the much broader notion of patient experience design. Some people are moving in this direction, and I think it’s a positive trend. If this continues, maybe we’ll start hearing less about information architecture or interaction design, for example, and more about patient experience design (for healthcare), student experience design (for education), and citizen experience design (for government).

Andrew Hinton: Generally, I still get a sense that practitioners are impatient with complexity, and want to make everything too simple and concrete, too quickly. The zeitgeist right now is all about “making stuff” without much thinking, analysis or modeling. The assumption seems to be that if you’re working through a problem with any level of abstraction – analyzing, modeling – then you’re not making anything yet. This is horribly wrong-headed, and leads to a sort of blindness to big, complex, systemic challenges, and an over-focus on problems that can be tackled with a quick prototype. Meanwhile, the world is getting even more systemically complicated. We need to embrace complexity, then tame it.

Brad Nunnally: I’d say the fact that business executives and directors are including designers more and more during the initial conversations of a project is a big win. The results of this shift can be seen in the number of new products being released with a high level of design quality.

This new respect and desire for our skills also presents us with new challenges. Business leaders now see the value of design, but they need us to communicate that value back to them in terms they understand. If we don’t step up, then the success we are seeing will be short lived.

What book(s) are you presently reading? How else do you keep up with the accelerating change in our industry?

Lynn Boyden: I’m rereading Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting; of all the books on my shelf of professional literature, this is the one that not only bristles with post-its, but that I have returned to the most frequently during my 13 years of professional practice. It offers not only techniques for problem solving, but also for managing clients’ expectations, dealing with resistance, and other ways to get your expertise used. On my desk for the next read is Mike Montiero’s Design is a Job; everyone I respect who has read it insists it’s the best book about practicing IA that they’ve ever read.

Lauren Colton: To keep up in the industry, blogs are a great way to stay informed. Smashing Magazine, UIE BrainSparks, and ZURBlog are some of my favorites. But as quickly as technology moves, the shape of a great sentence and the strategy behind an engaging message both come down to people. Copyblogger and Grammar Girl have great nonfiction blogs, but since what you read shapes what you write, I’m always reading novels too. (Recent favorite fiction includes the Dud Avocado, Snowdrops, and Reamde.)

Nir Eyal: The last great book I read was Addiction by Design by Natash Dow Schull. I try and keep up with change in our industry by specializing in my area of focus, behavior and habit design.

Brad Nunnally: I’ve recently taken a deep dive into collaborative facilitation and workshops. The skills addressed in books like Gamestorming, Visual Teams, and Rapid Problem Solving with Post-It Notes allow me to work with business stakeholders in ways they may not be used to and help to drive future direction and strategy.

Books only help me keep up with the the design industry so much, though. The other side of the equation for me is attending conferences. Events like the IA Summit, Interaction, WebVisions, and SxSW are key to my own professional development. The first IA Summit I attended back in 2009 taught me more than two years of being a practitioner.

Many thanks to our friends at the IA Summit for helping us put this interview together as well as the speakers for their time in answering the responses. High fives all around!

See you in Baltimore?

Oh, one more thing. If you’re itching to join these (and a bunch of other) speakers at the IA Summit and haven’t yet bought your ticket, you’re in luck. We’ve got one to give away.

To win, simply let us know who you’re most looking forward to seeing/meeting and why in the comments below. Be sure to follow @uxbooth on twitter and leave your twitter handle in your comment so that we can contact you to claim your freebie.

Finally, entries must be made by midnight, tonight. We know that’s short notice, but we’d like to give the winner some time to arrange for their own hotel and travel accommodations. Please be aware that we can’t provide those!

Good luck, everyone. We can’t wait to meet you in person (@andrewmaier will be there) in two weeks.

The post A Q&A with the Speakers of This Year’s IASummit appeared first on UX Booth.

Students say you’re a professor with “list of people” to whom you want them to attend. Is that true? Who comprises that list?

More or less! I’ve always admired Don Norman. I knew Don before he became a very successful consultant, and he’s one of the greatest cognitive scientists of the 20th Century. He’s a brilliant man who started in the academic world as a researcher.

Dan Arielly also makes my list. Are you familiar with his book, Predictably Irrational? He’s down at Duke, and he’s lectured at MIT as a visiting professor.

And Malcolm Gladwell, of course.

Another guy, Nicholas A. Christakis wrote a book called Connected. In it, Christakis gives a full history of not just why social networks exist, but how we create communities, societies, and cultures on top of them. It’s all centered around meaning and our desire to belong.

Gladwell’s critics say he offers “pre-packaged common sense.” But isn’t that just good information design? He makes things more accessible, which –

– that’s exactly what I was going to say. And there is a brilliance in that. Anybody who criticizes him is just jealous they didn’t think of it before.

It also gets back to a kind of “universal design thinking:” What he says may be commonsensical, but nobody has articulated it as well. It’s as if, once an author tells a story the “right” way, it enables a broader, shared understanding?

I think that’s the brilliance of Arielly, too. He takes something like behavioral economics – something that’s about as dry as it could possibly be – and makes it accessible. He even made it fun! And I don’t think he cheapened it, either. He didn’t compromise the integrity of it; he just made it accessible.

And is it Stephen Johnson who wrote Where Good Ideas Come From? That’s a big one as well. He looks at design and innovation historically.

Online learning sites such as Code Academy and Udemy threaten the business model of universities and graduate programs everywhere. What do you make of those?

I believe that about 90% of higher education will eventually migrate online. The asynchronous nature of it is a big win.

Unfortunately what students lose when they study online is that “connection,” that sense of community. Students learn as much – or more – from each other than they do from books. The modern university’s job is to facilitate connection. You can have your blogs and such, but the sense of community around them is simply not the same.

That’s ultimately why we have two campuses, one here and one in San Francisco: We want students to feel included and involved regardless of where they study. Next year we’re bringing thought leaders such as Nancy Dickenson (former head of UX design at eBay) to the West Coast. That way it doesn’t matter where students decide to study; they’ll join a community with a shared purpose.

Many graduate programs partner with various corporations in order to expose students to real-world problems. How do you determine (1) which problems to share with students, (2) which problems to send to Bentley’s Design and Usability Center, and (3) which problems to tackle yourself?

So, we’ve actually had clients on the West Coast for years who have been partnering virtually with our students here. Our job when engaging potential clients is to triage, to figure out the nature of their problem. If their problem represents a design exercise then we partner them with a design class. If it’s research, we dig deeper: Is it a problem that’s out there that’s failed and needs forensics or is it something more basic?

Nancy teaches a leadership class, so there we partner with companies in the valley who are looking at organizational issues. She and her students work within companies who are struggling with integrating user-centered design into their company culture.

But at what point does the line dissolve? Every interesting, exciting project I hear about has an element of the unknown. I recently found myself offering “business consulting” even though I myself identify as an interaction designer, for example. At what point do students work for pay and at what point should students pay to work (or “learn”)?

I think there are times when you can work from home I think there’re times when you need to be out there observing and learning. It’s got to be a mixture.

Of course you’re going to have educational institutions that will dig their heels in and “be brick and mortar” – that’s all they know. I also think they’re going to be other places that will go completely online. Students will have to find the work on their own time. Ultimately, though, the goal – the value – is in community: learning from and contributing to it.

Universities have to preserve community. And Bentley’s been pretty successful in this regard: even our students who have graduated from the program come back to participate. So we’re constantly creating workshops outside of the classroom, and graduates of the program frequently return to give back.

Then how do you price the program? Do you price it based on what it takes to run the program – the bare minimum – or do you consider the value you add by teaching a philosophy or maintaining the community?

Our tuition and fees are pretty much based on the institution’s price.

When alumni come back to the program, it’s free for them to participate in the workshops. But nothing in this world is “free;” alumni pay for it with their time. They often hire other students or offer internships. They’re inevitably building reputations. So while it’s not free, it works for everybody. So long as everybody stays together.

I sort of asked you “Why San Francisco” once before, but my guess now is that you’ll say “the more locations we have to facilitate community, the better.” Is that correct?

Yeah. What I’d like to do if we’re around long enough would be to create a hub in Europe somewhere. There’s a lot of interesting, different kind of thinking going on in Europe around this.

I’m interested in the difference between, say, what you guys and what a company such as IDEO offers a client who is looking to build a product. Is a consultancy’s model that different from a school’s?

IDEO is sitting at the top. It’s hard to suggest anyone would compete with them, really, because of this. They really nailed it. They go into Proctor and Gamble and work with the whole organization, you know?

So I think you carve out wherever there’s a market opportunity. We’re not working at that high of a level. Most of Bentley’s work is product related. Sometimes, if we’re contacted early on we might build out the research that will fuel many products, so sometimes the research spreads across many products. On the whole, though, our work tends to be smaller in scale than someone like IDEO.

Final question, then. This one is a bit more broad. User experience fits into an interesting niche between qualitative and quantitative data. Your team is known to be data-driven; how do you measure customer experience?

I think that’s a big shift in the field. We’ve historically been very qualitative, and we’re becoming increasingly quantitative.

Qualitative data is always going to be there. And, particularly on the innovation front, field research and interviews give us the raw materials to gain the insights that fuel innovation. You can analyze analytics all day long and it’s never going to tell you where people are coming from. You’ll never innovate out of that.

Remote methods of data gathering – what we’re doing today looking at very large data sets versus what we could do in the usability lab ten years ago – provide a different kind of insight. Bill Albert (who runs the Design and Usability center) and Tom Tullis (the VP of user experience at Fidelity) have a book called Measuring the User Experience. They teach in the program as well.

We’re seeing more and more of our students taking statistics, too. This is a cultural shift. Many students have traditionally come into the program more qualitatively oriented. So this is changing the profile and the makeup of the profession. I love students that come along saying “I love math” because I think there’s a place for both.

So do you, personally, lean more qualitative or quantitative?

I’m more qualitative. That’s the part I love. And that’s what I tell my students: at the end of the day, do what you love. If you love getting insights from data, go quantitative. Myself, I like the connecting to people. It makes me happy.

That’s why I love teaching, and you shouldn’t do something that’s not natural for you. You won’t be happy, and you won’t be good at it. The good thing about this field is it gives you the opportunity to do both.

Around here the clock struck 1pm, marking the end of our time together. Although I thanked him profusely for his time and attention then, I can’t help but reiterate the sentiment: Thanks so much, Bill, for sharing your wisdom with us.

Readers, what do you make of the future of design education? Do you get everything you need from books, blogs, eLearning sites, universities, and/or conferences? How do you stay current? And what advice do you offer those looking to learn? Sound off in the comments, below.

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