Tag Archives: conference

IUE2009: Thursday’s tracks

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Okay, that was a great conference.

The last day was built on parallel tracks of presentations, most were about an hour-long. I’m only going to write about 3 of the ones I attended.

  1. Now That I See It, Dan Klyn, Flannel
  2. In-House Recruiting, Cora Bledsoe, Quicken Loans
  3. Grown-Ups Guide to the Social World of Web 2.0, Jan Welborn-Nichols, Market Arts Creative

Now That I See It

Dan Klyn’s talk was enthusiastic and thoughtful. He asked the question about information architecture, is there more we can learn from “regular old” architects? Of course, the answer is yes.

One idea he garnered from architecture is the spectrum of architecture work. Which level should it meet?

  1. Shelter
  2. Comfort
  3. Convenience
  4. Prestige

Ask that about any Web project. What an excellent model for thinking about the aims of a project! Associated with each is the level of customization, the speed of delivery, and the reliance on established patterns of use. E.g., for many sites that need comfort or convenience, building a site using WordPress (or another blog CMS) would be fine. However, if you need certain convenience or prestige, more custom approaches/implementation of information architecture may be needed. An out-of-the-box CMS may not be able to reach that level of work.

I suspect most of us make these strategic calls at the early stages of projects, but I found this spectrum of shelter to prestige to provide a nice frame.

Dan also talked about some discussions he’s had with Richard Saul Wurman, who wrote a book a published in 1997 with “Information Architects” as the title. I’ve not read the book, but been aware of Wurman by references from a number of authors in the IA field. My general take is that he pushed thoughts on the topic forward, but that the book was focused more on what today we call information design. Funny, I’ve watched a number of TED presentations, but had no idea that Wurman was behind that project.

It’s been so long since I’ve been in a room with other information architects. I love IAs.

Dan is working on a book called “Now That I See It.” I’m looking forward to seeing it!

In-House Recruiting

Cora presented one of the most immediately applicable ideas of the conference. In short, it is the idea to create a place for people interested in participating in user research to gather, so that when Quicken Loans needs to recruit participants, they have an existing pool of possible participants to pull from. See a core part of the answer at feedbackcentral.quickenloans.com.

Awesome idea. Perhaps we’ll do this at work.

Grown-Ups Guide to the Social World of Web 2.0

Jan presented a fast-paced survey of many Web 2.0 sites out there, and gave her review of many of them. She shared many recommendations on making the most of each one. Her talk was great and entertaining…and I need to get to work. Read LOTS more about her talk at Zach’s blog, and visit her company’s site at market-arts.com.

IUE2009: Keynote track, part 2

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The 3 afternoon presentations were top-notch.

  1. Feeling: What makes an engaging product experience? (Kumi Akiyoshi, Adaptive Path)
  2. How to do social media right in 2009 (Marta Strickland, Organic Detroit)
  3. Lessons learned from the world of game design (Lisa Mullinaux, pogo.com and Rich Briggs, Electronic Arts)

The game design (3) presentation was the most stimulating. That one of the experience goals had to do with strategic dismemberment may have contributed. Seriously, it was excellent to hear stories of intense usability work involved in design, production, and strategic product decisions for the game Dead Space by EA. Rich Briggs shared an interesting term “Kleenex Test” which he described as throw-away tests. The point being to do quick tests on identified tasks, make changes, and keep testing till design improvements are successful. That sounds to me like rapid iterative design.

Another great detail from the presentation was that one of their goals for the game was that it meet an 85 Metacritic score. I’m not a gamer, and had never heard of metacritic, so for those with me on this one, it sounds like a way that the gaming community can rate the overall quality of a game based on a series of attributes. An 85 was a lofty goal, but they had committed to meeting it. After 70+ reviews, they had average above 85. What a great use of a purely 3rd party metric as a goal!

And a final point on the game design presentation was that when the usability research irrefutably identfied experience issues that were hard to fix, the team and leadership committed to fixing them. The example given was that the hero of the game was too slow for the users’ liking. Speeding up the hero’s movements and reactions meant changing a lot of other elements in the game that were important to the overal user experience. This was deemed an important part, and the game development team buckled down and made the improvements.

The social media presentation seemed the most coherent and well-thought-out. Marta covered a lot of ground, including this idea of what comes afer Web 2.0—that being the Relevant Web, which seems based on what can be possible through the semantic web.

Overall, the moral of her story: to represent yourself well on the social web, be real.

Kumi’s presentation on what makes an engaging product experience was the most beautiful. Is it belitling to say that? I don’t think so. Her presentation slides were really nice to see. She moved fast through them, which I heard some people comment on (not sure if it was good or bad), but I really liked the quick pace.

She also shared some good stories and advice in championing good design in siloed organizations (everyone who had worked in large universities, raise your hands).

In the questions/answers at the end, I was entertained that she was tossed questions about the future and commercializtion of new, engaging experiences. She answered them very well, which is to say she completely avoided fortune-telling, and returned to her message, which was that we are coming into new ways to interact with our devices in more “human” ways. Direct manipulation, gesture, etc. and feedback that engages all senses.

Photos: Also, I see photos are starting to show up on the internet user experience flickr group.

IUE2009: Keynote track

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Presentations this morning

  1. Threshold of Acceptable Usability
  2. Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?
  3. Bringing left-brain and right-brain together (or, the happy spot)
  4. Anatomy of a bus map

There was an interesting hodge-podge of presentations at the Internet User Experience conference this morning. I suppose, relatively speaking, I’m an old-timer in this field…which is to say I found 1 and 3 sort of boring. I like to think and learn new things. 2 was good, except that I had already studied the book, so it wasn’t new to me. Strangely, the most chaotic and incoherent of the morning sessions, #4, I found the most interesting.

Ed Vielmetti presenting "Anatomy of a Bus Schedule" at IUE2009

Ed Vielmetti presenting "Anatomy of a Bus Map" at IUE2009

This Vielmetti guy (I have no idea who he is) walked in and so ensued the chaos. He started by asking a room of 150 UXers to fold a prototype of an 8-panel bus schedule. It involved folding and tearing of paper. It was a fun usability exercise (though it wasn’t intended as one). I think I ended up folding it correctly, but didn’t end up needing to tear it? Eh.

8 panel prototype of bus schedule, cite: Vielmetti

8 panel prototype of bus schedule, cite: Vielmetti

His talk rambled fairly well, and included some brief glances at interfaces. Primarily, though, he riffed on stories of people needing to find a way to get on a bus to some other place. For a number of years not long ago, I was a daily user of CATA, the bus system in Lansing, MI, so I appreciated his stories.

One concept that came through his lecture is how the motivations of public organizations (like a public transit authority) have strange—and sometimes missing—intersections with motivation and information expressions of other agencies, such as an apartment management company or customers of the transit system. User motivations, of course, will differ from out-of-town conference attendees versus commuters. Knowledgeable users of a bus system will ultimately know valuable information, or stories, that employees of the bus systems will simply not know. He gave an example of a pedestrian path that services as a shortcut to another bus stop that has buses every 15 minutes, instead of the one that is physically closer but has buses every 30 minutes. Certain expert users know this, but others and the public agency just won’t, and sure won’t capitalize on it.

Small contextualized apps are built often by individuals scratching specific itches, when given the time and free information to manipulate.

I fear this blog post is perhaps as chaotic as the talk. I know I should edit before posting, but…this is, after all, just my personal blog. ;-)

By the way, Zach Spencer is also posting lots of notes about the conference on his blog “Life of a Web Programmer.” Here are Zach’s posts tagged with IUE09.