While I was at the IA Summit I sent out ALOT of tweets. The final tally was somewhere around 360, and I only lost ~10 followers with all that activity. The challenge when I returned home was getting all my tweets organized and in a digestible format. Luckily, Yoni (twitter) has built an amazing tool that helps for people that take their tweets and turn them into blog posts.
His tool takes just two inputs, a username and a hashtag(s). Using these inputs, it pulls out any tweets that user has made that contain the hashtag(s) and cuts the hashtag(s) out of the results. Some additional features include reversing the order, exporting as an excel spreadsheet, or exporting as html. The excel format wasn’t very helpful for me, but I image others find it very useful. I prefer the html export, this allows me to just copy and paste between two windows.
Bottom line anyone that uses twitter to keep notes or provide live coverage of an event for people should us this tool. Here is the link to the Tweet to Blog tool, and several twitter based tools: http://twitter.infinityplusone.com/
The final track that I attended was given by Whitney Hess (twitter), and was by far one of the most inspiring and influtential tracks of the IA Summit. Her message was simple, to be a success and be part of a community you have to get involved. The following are my tweets from her session:
‘I think a lot of people want to be modest” - @whitneyhess
“You can put better stuff out there on your blog than my mom.” - Whitney Hess
Following the advise that Whitney puts forth, anyone should be able to become a vocal advocate in their field. She shows how tools like blogging, Twitter, and LinkedIn can be used to get yourself out there and how best to use them. If Whitney wasn’t able to get someone to go out and starting blogging, twittering, and connecting with like minded folks I don’t know what would.
It is standard for a User Experience Designer to have a passion for the people, but occasionally they forget about the business that serves them. Christina Wodtke (twitter) gave the attendees of the IA Summit a reminder of why keeping the business in mind is important for any design project. The following are my tweets from her session:
Money is oxygen for a company, if you don’t have money you WILL die.
ROI is simply a return on investment. Whatever you put out creates some kind of value.
WIkipedia is a non-profit, but the still need money to operate.
Designers would profit from thinking about not just about helping the user but also helping the users.
Designers need to know what the key metrics are for a business and how that can effect their design.
If you are a book reseller how are you different from amazon? What do you have to offer that is better?
“A guy selling beans in a fish market is crazy, crazy like a fox!”@cwodtke
Behavior is just a function of a person and his environment. If you design the environment, you can change a persons behavior.
What is the one activity for my user to accomplish for the business to be successful?
Engineers see users as a set of problems that need to be solved equally.
Only 1% of your users are actually doing the work on Wikipedia. They are doing the heavy lifting for your business.
Group managers only make up a small % of a user group, but they monitor the site, kick people out, and do all the real work.
Deriving marketplace dynamics from ‘Hello Dolly’ - pure genius.
Advertising starts to become contextual based on what you are doing, which also reinforces the brand.
We need to ask ourselves about the rules that make sense to put into place as designers
Once you notice that demographics can make you money, you start looking at things differently.
“Your boss comes up to you and tells you that they want user generated content because it is free” @cwodtke
You need to think about how your users are connecting with each other, determine who are the word spreaders.
Money will come if you create a service that encourages users to care and become active, even if you don’t have a business model.
Free trails make it easier for users to evaluate the offering and commit to paying a fee to continue the service.
If people don’t eventually understand the value that you offer, then the card credit access will be turned off.
Having a combo business model, when the market shirts you still make money just from different offerings.
Over the users value, the user will come back for more, and eventually give something back. Content, Money, Sponsorship, etc.
You can prove through metrics that what you created actually does provide value, really hard to do without the metrics.
Customers centers are a good place to get an idea what the key metrics are.
It is easy to get caught up in user research and being an advocate for users that you loss sight of the big picture. At the end of the day, a product or service needs to give back to the business as much as it provides the users with a good experience. I think the most important aspect of Christina’s track is how a business can be structured to support multiple models. Having several models to support a business, users have more options on how they can interact with the business.
IA Summit 2009: Integrating Effective Prototyping Into Your Design Process
If there was a best of show award given at the IA Summit, Fred Beecher’s (twitter) track on prototyping would be one of the nominees. Jonathan Knoll (twitter) summed it up best by stating ‘@fred_beecher’s prototyping session is turning into the most directly educational & practical I’ve seen in a long time.’ Below are my tweets from the presentation:
Prototyping is just a tool to communicate ideas and explore ideas.
The level of prototyping depends on the level of fidelity you need.
Fidelity has two types of dimensions: Visual Fidelity, lowest form is sketches. A sketch prototype is more than one page.
Highest Visual Prototype is colored JPG pages.
The second dimension of fidelity is functionality, how interactive the prototype needs to be.
Proof of concept allows you to test an idea in an interactive way to see if you are on the right path or not.
To get a good idea of if some of the design ideas work, it is important to test them in an interactive method.
“Slap & Map” image mapped jpgs offer a great middle ground between high visual fidelity and mid-level functionality.
Problems with production level prototyping is that it can constrain the design. As a designer we need to be free to explore.
People in development are creative, and they can offer insights into many design issues.
Content is another dimension of the fidelity of a prototype. Your prototype isn’t just about interaction, but also the content.
The screen just randomly rolled up into the ceiling for @fred_beecher, doing a great job just rolling with it though.
Content doesn’t need to be perfect, you just need plausible content the makes sense to the user when testing it.
“There is no such thing as high or low fidelity, only appropriate fidelity.” Bill Buxton
You can also test out the various concepts to see which work and which don’t.
Prototyping also allows you to have the conversation about ‘Is this what you meant?’
LVF/HFF prototypes are good for using testing as a design tools. It tells the designer if their ideas work or suck.
Proof of concept testing of isolated interactions, the design may work but it tests if the necessary interactions work as well.
Interactive prototypes supplement documentation for the development teams. Visually express the desired interactions.
HVR/LFF prototypes are good for discovering usability problems introduced by visual design.
You are able to find problems with the workflow when testing with non-savvy user groups.
HVF/HFF enable user testing as a design tool when testing new functionality into an established system.
This type of prototype gives you supplemental documentation for OFFSHORE dev teams.
“People are dumb and we like shiny and movable things” @fred_beecher
Know what questions you want your prototypes to answer, early in design the questions are structural, later questions about usability
In corporate agile mature ux organization use prototypes to show small complex proof of concepts.
Corporate-Waterfall-new to UX start off by developing detailed scenarios you want to test.
Walk through the interactive prototype using the printed documentation with developers and stakeholders.
Consulting/Agency Develop the detailed scenarios you want to test, sketch 2 oe 3 of your UX design concepts into small prototypes.
It is important to keep clients involved in the process, walk them through each prototype and gather their feedback.
Last context is when doing Hardware Devices. First step, once again, develop detailed scenarios you want to test.
Do as many iterations of a low functional fidelity prototype as you can.
Creating wireframes and prototypes are an important aspect of what an interaction designer does, and one of my personal passions. The key takeaway from this track was the methodology for the various forms of fidelity a prototype can have and the situations they are best utilized in. It is a fine line between having a detailed design and a conceptual design. Using Fred’s process for developing prototypes, a designer can better gauge when they need to do something more conceptual, or get down and dirty with the details.
Personas are one of my favorite tools in the user experience tackle box. They can be used to drive the design of a project from start to finish, and also answer many pesky design problems. Adrienne Massanari (blog) pointed out another use for them at this years IA Summit in Memphis, political leverage. The following are my tweets from the session:
As she was working on a work flow diagram it occurred to her that she didn’t have a clue who the users were.
We are going to look at using Personas to tackle political issues inside an organization.
Discourse is the space in which carious objects emerge and are continuously transformed.
Discourse is powerful stuff, just as powerful as a language.
“Users are not monolithic or straight forward, but are complex and fragmented in nature..”
Theme 1: the ‘stupid user’ is a concept that is going away. Anyone who has done a usability test has felt this way though.
Not everyone wants to be a power user, and it makes sense to hide some advanced features to support the common user.
Theme 2: Users as victims of bad design. Nelson is seen as encouraging the view that users are simply victims.
If the user is a victim, then the designers can be viewed as teh heroes that swoop in to safe them.
Theme 3: Users as the co-designers. This is seen a lot in participatory design and users are seen as part of the overall system.
Personas and politics: Users are not good partners for coming up with design, better to have pretend users and design for them.
Good ole Eagle-Eye Edward from Cisco. He was a good desk topper for over a year at my old company.
Dan Saffer (@odannyboy) states that half of the personas that are out there are made up, and mostly just imaginary friends.
Personas are boundary objects, they encompass complex IA concept into a story.
PM’s and analysts can use personas as political leverage inside of their own organization.
IA/UCD uses users are resources to be mined, we flatten the difference between different people.
IA/UCD can also undervalue the users hands on knowledge and considers themselves the expert rather than the user.
IA/UCD already use users in the form of personas as political tools in their organization.
With personas we need to make sure we don’t mistake the map for the territory.
It is difficult for designers to be heroes because there is no tyrant to overthrow, no dragon to slay…
We can’t simply “understand users and then ignore them” — Robert Hoekman
The information Adrienne gave us did an excellent job of pointing out something that has always been there, but no one ever noticed. By showing us the variety of ways an organization can use a persona, it gives more strength to the agrument on why projects should take them time to develop them. It also adds another line of seperation between personas and market segments, though some can argue that market segments are used in the same manner.
