It can be an odd experience attending a conference in a recession, and my trip to the 10th Anniversary IA Summit in Memphis, TN, didn’t disappoint in that regard. The event was smaller, tinged with uncertainty, and chock full of people trying to figure out what the future holds for themselves and for their profession. I left feeling both frustrated with the angst, and brimming with new ideas and a deep desire to return next year. It took me a while longer to get all of these thoughts down than I thought it would, about a month longer in fact, but I’ve enjoyed re-visiting my favorite talks in order to share them with others.

Sketchboards & Prototypes

I spent my first day at the Summit learning about Sketchboards and Prototyping with Leah Buley from Adaptive Path and Todd Zaki Warfel from MessageFirst. Sketchboarding is an analog method for sharing design inspiration, iterating on design concepts, and mapping out user flows. My team worked on designing a document collaboration tool as part of “Facebook for the intranet”. We quickly sketched ideas, put them up on the board, identified common patterns and solutions, then began to identify parts of the flow we hadn’t adequately defined. There wasn’t nearly enough time to tackle the problem, but the exercise gave us a great introduction to the process.

Todd led the afternoon prototyping session, where we talked about principles of prototyping, and got our hands dirty creating some fairly sophisticated interactions with paper, tape, scissors, and transparencies. Our crowning achievement was a “functional” video player for the iPhone (complete with giant paper iPhone). If you’re interested in Todd’s work, you can check out this recap from a workshop he ran here in Durham last year. You can also check out his upcoming book on prototyping from Rosenfeld Media.

Michael Wesch

The first day of sessions kicked off with an amazing high speed presentation by anthropologist Michael Wesch from Kansas State. The subject of Michael’s talk wasn’t exactly new, that we’re entering into an era of participatory culture mediated by the tools we ourselves are designing, but his presentation was an amazing thing to behold. There’s a podcast online, but it’s too bad there aren’t videos available.

Podcast

Digital Space & The Context Problem

I’ve heard Andrew Hinton give various talks on the problem of context, but he never fails to help me dive deeper into the problem. Simply put, digital spaces lack physical context, and frequently do a very bad job of substituting a digital context for the physical. This problem might seem a bit abstract, until we realize just how important context is to human cognition. Andrew has a number of great examples of this, but the one that resonates with me is role of context in social cognition. We have relationships with our families, our friends, our peers, our co-workers, and more, and we modulate both how we express our selves and how we process information based on which context we’re in. Digital social spaces tend to collapse these contexts, connecting us with all of our social circles through one channel, allowing us to express ourselves in one way. This gets worse as when we introduce aggregation into the picture, because we not only collapse social context but also “object” context. In some way, we can work around the problem of context by segregating our interactions across tools. Aggregators take away even that modicum of control.

Andrew asked us how we’re going to start to understand the ramifications of this shift in context, and to start thinking about how we’re going to understand the problem. Is this a fundamental behavioral shift? Is it a problem to be solved? Or is it an opportunity to create new kinds of contexts?

Slides | Podcast

Speaking the Language of Business

After having the pleasure of meeting Eric Reiss at dinner, I was curious to hear his views on how to define the strategic and business value of IA. Eric’s core point was that we have to understand and speak the language of business, so we can sell the services we provide in terms the client (or stakeholders) will understand. Spend much time in IA circles and you’re likely to enter into a discussion on “selling IA,” and for many this has come to mean defining the ROI of our work. However, Eric contended that ROI as a measure is inherently backwards looking, and doesn’t do a good job of demonstrating the future value of IA practice. Instead, focus on actions and results, not intangible benefits.

Podcast

Designing Rules

Dan Brown’s talk focused on the idea that designing for the web is moving beyond (or, has already moved beyond) the ability to design for specific pieces of content. Instead, we need to start thinking of designing systems of rules that define how what content will appear, and how that content will behave, in a given context. It didn’t really strike me at the time, but I’ve come to realize that Dan was describing a design methodology very similar to the algorithmic game design methods of the famed Will Wright, creator of Sim City, the Sims, and, most recently, Spore.

In each case we provide the system with guiding rules, and then let go, trusting in the systems of rules we’ve created to craft the experience for the user. There are limits to the utility of this approach, but I think that as sites shift from distributing content to data, and as “content-heavy” sites become increasingly interactive, we’ll find that designing rules is far more powerful than designing content.

Slides | Podcast

Experience Themes

I’ve long distinguished “User Experience Design” from “User Interface Design” by saying that UxD aims to build holistic experiences, not just usability interfaces. The problem with that statement is that it’s hard to define a holistic “experience.” It’s one of those “I know it when I see it” kinds of things. Thankfully, this problem is getting some attention, and Cindy Chastain gave a great talk on using experience themes as a tool to conceptually tie together a design. I appreciated that the presentation included a very specific example of a project where these ideas have been into practice.

Slides | Podcast

Is Interaction Necessary?

If there was a talk that blew my mind, this was it. Karl Fast summarized a rather critical shift that’s been happening in terms of cognitive research, away from the classical idea of humans as rational actors to an understanding that context and physicality are critical to cognition. This has some pretty heady implications, particularly as we make steps into more tangible interfaces. He also introduced me to the idea of epistemic action, which recognizes that “errors” can in fact be critical to the way we think. These actions allow us to explore the problem by changing the environment quicker than we can attempt to model these changes mentally.

Podcast

Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role

Richard Anderson & Craig Peters walked through a number of different strategies for making UX efforts take on a more strategic importance within your organization. In an interesting twist, they gave over most of the session to let us discuss the pros and cons of these strategies in small groups. This gave us a chance to hear different viewpoints, and to share our own thoughts about how effective these techniques might be in our own organizations.

Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

I’ve yet to attend a Jared Spool talk that wasn’t highly entertaining. Here he covered much of the same ground as his recent articles:

• The $300 Million Button
• The Magic Behind Amazon’s 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

Leading With Insight

“A lot of times, people don’t now what they want until you show it to them…” Steve Jobs

“Recognizing the need is the primary condition of design” Charles Eames

I tend to avoid the “What Designers Can Learn From Oddball Thing X!” presentations the IA Summit seems prone to, but Matthew Milan managed to trick me into learning about insight from Columbo, and it wasn’t so bad. Matthew’s basic premise was that as designers, we’re in the business of finding insights into our customer’s behavior that will lead to better products. At least, that’s what we should be doing. This is why we do research, not to validate our assumptions, but to challenge them and look for that moment of clarity where we see how we can make a real improvement in an experience.

Designing Social Interfaces

Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish gave a short but informative introduction to many of the social design patterns that they are covering in their new O’Reilly book of the same name. You can see much of the work they’ve produced on the wiki they setup as a companion to their book:

Designing Social Interfaces

Links

• IA Summit Slides on Slideshare
• IA Summit Podcast at Boxes & Arrows
• Recommended Articles & Books

Faber-Castell Pitt Artists Pens (8pc Manga Set)

I’ve been using Pitt artist pens for sketching for the last few years, but I only recently discovered the 8pc Manga Set. It includes three different black markers (brush, medium, and superfine), and a 5 shades of gray (brush tips). The black pens are great for sketching, and the grays let you add shading and highlights.

Buy the Pitt 8pc Manga Set at Dick Blick or Amazon

Adaptive Path Sketch Templates

AP’s sketch templates are great both for generating ideas (use the multi-page layout) or for generating detailed sketches (use the single-page layout). I keep stacks of these on my desk.

• Multi-Page Layout
• Single-Page Layout

Misc Pens

I like to have a yellow highlighter to add just a bit of color in my sketches, usually to indicate a highlight or active element. The fine point red pen gets used for highlights on occasion, but mostly I use it to markup my sketches when I’m reviewing them with the team. The fine point black pen is used for annotations, notes, and the very occasional fine detail.

• Yellow Highlighter
• Fine Red Pen (like the red Uni-Ball Signo UM-138)
• Fine Black Gel Pen (like the black Uni-Ball Signo UM-138)

Recruiting Boxee research participants on Twitter

I’ve noticed several of the UX practitioners I follow on Twitter have started recruiting research participants from their followers. Makes sense, it’s fast and easy to send out a note, and given that your followers have some personal connection to you (in theory at least) they may be more willing to volunteer, or help recruit volunteers from their own social networks. I’ve given it a try once or twice, though I’ve only had a couple of responses each time. Of course, recruiting Twitter users, or even trying to recruit from their social networks outside of Twitter, is going to net you a pretty specific crowd. Just something to keep in mind before sending out that tweet.

I’m curious who has tried recruting from your networks in Twitter, Facebook, etc., and what kind of success you’ve seen.

Since I don’t want to turn my personal Twitter stream into a constant stream of research requests, I thought about setting up a VigetUX Twitter account and inviting people to follow if they’re interested in participating in future research projects. I might have to give it a try and see what happens.

A little poking around revealed that the disk had been setup (by the Fedora installer I assume) as an LVM volume. This meant that I couldn’t browse or mount the volume without LVM2 installed, and thus began my quest to learn how to read the stupid thing and recover whatever I could from the disk.

First I tried to recover the partition from an Ubuntu LiveCD, but in the end grabbed a spare drive, installed Ubuntu, then stuck the busted drive in as a secondary. Then I had to figure out the magic words to make the Ubuntu box mount the LVM partition.

1. Install LVM2

   # sudo aptitude install lvm2

2. Reboot, and then double check that the necessary kernel module is loaded

   # sudo modprobe dm-mod

3. Find all of the volumes available, you’re looking for the name of the volume

   # sudo pvs
   PV         VG         Fmt  Attr PSize  PFree
   /dev/hdb2  VolGroup00 lvm2 a-   74.41G 32.00M

4. Get the details on the volume, using the volume group name pvs spit out. We’re looking for the biggest logical volume (LV) in the volume group.

   # sudo lvdisplay /dev/VolGroup00
   --- Logical volume ---
   LV Name                /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
   VG Name                VolGroup00
   LV UUID                mD1CI2-X3yf-2ORa-d0mY-i70k-Q1BW-gw8hSH
   LV Write Access        read/write
   LV Status              available
   # open                 0
   LV Size                73.38 GB
   Current LE             2348
   Segments               1
   Allocation             inherit
   Read ahead sectors     0
   Block device           254:0
   
   --- Logical volume ---
   LV Name                /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01
   VG Name                VolGroup00
   LV UUID                vy2MW1-NlTl-IXne-T96V-zcmo-ezV2-0KMQsW
   LV Write Access        read/write
   LV Status              available
   # open                 0
   LV Size                1.00 GB
   Current LE             32
   Segments               1
   Allocation             inherit
   Read ahead sectors     0
   Block device           254:1

5. Mount the offending volume, referencing it as VolumeGroup-LogicalVolume

   # sudo mount /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00

Hopefully this info will help some other poor sap like myself avoid the hours and hours of experimenting I had to go through to get access to my data.

Social Design Patterns for Extroverts

One of the critical problems of modern social software is the inability to separate out the different social contexts in which we live. This presentation will review some of the design patterns being used to overcome this problem, and identify areas for future work.

As a designer who never went to a design school, I’m pretty excited to have helped come up with this panel:

Design School for Dummies:

The oddity of web professionals is that we come from every possible discipline and background. This panel will show those of us who got here without a design school degree what we missed. Get the some of the benefits of D-school training without the price tag.

Check out all the SXSW panel ideas from the cool people at Viget Labs!

• Initial Impressions of Silverback

In July, I’ll be joining Viget Labs as a User Experience Designer at “Viget South” in downtown Durham. But before that happens, I’ll be taking two weeks off to recharge my brain, including a trip out to California to see my brother before he moves to Australia.

Download High-Resolution PDF (612KB)

This is the poster Alla Zollers and I presented at the 2008 IA Summit.

Abstract

Tag clouds are becoming increasingly popular with websites that utilize social tagging to categorize ever expanding collections of digital information. Tagging has been found to be more adaptable than traditional classification, as well as more prone to serendipitous information discovery. The flexibility of tagging systems allows users to rapidly adopt new terms and engage in extremely dynamic tagging practices, yet tag clouds are not able to represent agile shifts in tagging patterns. Over time, semantic and linguistic changes can modify the meaning and form of tags, and changes in tagging behavior can create disconnects between related tags. By conceiving tagging as a triad: object, user, tag, we completely miss the critical notion of time. Time leads to changes in semantics, vocabulary, behavior, and syntax. In order to address the problem of aging tags and aging folksonomies, we really need to include time as a critical facet of tagging: object, user, tag, time. The adaptive behavior of tags requires that there is a constant influx of new descriptive data about an object, but time-related changes have to overcome the weight of the pre-existing tags. In this poster we propose a new tag-cloud visualization technique that attempts to address these issues by including a dynamic factor: the changing weight of tags over time.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, but I finally got around to making a stencil of little people to use at work.

Download OmniGraffle People Stencil

To Install: Copy the stencil file into /Users/username/Library/Application Support/OmniGraffle/Stencils/

| View | Upload your own

Slides from my presentation on Research Driven Design at the DC Design Talks at the Viget Labs HQ in Falls Church, VA.