My 2.5 days in San Francisco: MX 2010
View from top of Yerbe Buena Gardens, San Francisco, March 2010.
Saturday PM: Sunshine!
I actually began to sweat under my blazer from the warm sun shining brightly through the window.
I had arrived in San Francisco a little early on Saturday, dropped my suitcase off at the Intercontinental Hotel, and walked around the corner to a sandwich shop for a bite to eat and to get online. As I draped my coat over the back of the chair, I decided I really like San Francisco. It's the sun, I admit it. Oh, and I had already noted that the two billboards I noticed on the taxi from the airport were pure tech: one for an enterprise search system and another for PGP. Billboards talking to me? Amazing.
After settling in at the hotel, I had dinner with my old colleague Chris Burley and his girfriend at a nice Italian restaurant. Chris is awesome. I love talking with him because he has such passion for what he does, which currently is to help lead efforts like urban farming in the Bay area.
Sunday AM: 3 good things
The next morning I woke early due to the time zone difference, and I had three excellent experiences:
- In the aching fog of caffeine deprivation, had the best cup of coffee of my life, thanks to the Blue Bottle Café. (I admit, I ordered a second cup to go.)
- Paused in the Yerbe Buena Gardens where some elderly practiced tai chi and parents snapped photos as their little children hid behind a waterfall. I stood on a bridge and watched the morning sun ripple on the glass of San Francisco skyscrapers.
- Crashed a church service at a music venue called Mezzanine put on by a group that calls itself IKON. I was the oldest person there, amidst a crowd of art school students. We sang, we listened to a teaching from the Word, we had communion. It was good.
Sunday PM: MX day 1
Sunday afternoon saw the start of the 2010 MX Conference.
MX2010 is largely focused on managing user experience and less on the tactical end of UX practice, and there were some thought-provoking presentations from people who have been managing user experience for a number of years, in a number of different types of companies. Off the top of my head, presenters represented firms in financial industries (Vanguard), publishing (Harvard Business Review), retail sporting goods, and online media (Youtube).
The series of talks was fantastic, and was kicked off with a keynote by Jared Spool in which he shared insights like that Gallup's Customer Engagement (CE11) metric has high correlation to the quality of user experience. Spool's keynote actually turned out to predict some themes that carried throughout the many presentations. Among them were the importance of establishing a vision for user experience and that experience ultimately must be addressed well across multiple channels (web, mobile, physical space, etc.).
Spool talked about three core attributes necessary for great user experience: Vision, Feedback, and Culture. He posed three questions that UX managers should ask.
- VISION: Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?
- FEEDBACK: In the last six weeks have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your design or a competitor's design?
- CULTURE: In the last six weeks have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?
After the conference reception, I wound down the evening by taking a walk around a few blocks and ending at a nearby bar. I ate a burger and watched the Academy Awards for a while. Back at the hotel I watched the end of a Clint Eastwood Western flick and fell asleep.
Monday AM+PM: MX day 2
I woke at 4 in the morning. I checked analytics, email, and my usual RSS feeds. I stretched, washed, dressed, and still had time to kill. I read a few chapters in The Shack, a book Adam gave me last week.
I chatted throughout the day with Haakon, a usability specialist attending from the design company Tarantell in Norway, and as he sipped his coffee, I decided to not mention my mere three hour time difference.
The rest of the day was another series of excellent presentations. Themes: customer (more than user) experience, vision that guides the business, new models for working in the network, UX leadership stories from Youtube, customer experience in renovation of thinking at Harvard Business Review Online, understanding the holistic customer, data-driven design decisions (and when not to rely on data for design decisions), experience design as business strategy, and operating as a chief experience officer in your company.
It was great to hear first-hand the stories from these user experience leaders. Now, for what to do with it all when returning to the office.
Tomorrow and then
Tomorrow morning I fly back to Michigan, and need to get my head back into product owner and user experience work. But I also need to hold onto the ideas from this conference, and shift into actively leading user (or is that customer) experience work at Covenant Eyes.
How WordPress falters as a CMS: Multiple content fields
WordPress is amazing and keeps getting better, but I want to be clear about an inherent limitation that WordPress has as a content management system (CMS). That limitation is that WordPress doesn't handle multiple content regions on web pages.
Too strong? With WordPress, you can try to use custom fields or innovative hacks like Bill Erickson's approach to multiple content areas using H4 elements in his excellent theme "Thesis". Unfortunately, neither of those approaches really deals with the depth of the design problem that often requires multiple content areas for pages.
As an information architect/user experience designer, I've been involved in many projects that required more types of content on any single screen than WordPress is designed to handle.
Let me draw out what I'm talking about here.
Exhibit A: Page content that WordPress is designed to handle
In a standard WordPress page or post, you'll see these author-controlled pieces of content.
- Post/page Title
- Body
- Excerpt (often not-used)
Standard WordPress content fields include the title, excerpt, and body.
There are other sets of data for a page or post that an author can control, too, but these are meta-data such as tags, categories, slug (shows up in the URL), and possibly search engine optimization information like title, description, and keywords.
For a normal blog, many online trade journals, and a lot of basic websites, this really covers the bases. The body contains the bulk of the content including images, video, and audio that can be intermingled with the text itself. This model is very flexible, and it has definitely proven itself.
Exhibit B: Page content that pushes WordPress too far
In 2009, there was a small project at work to develop the website Covenant Musicians, and because the person who would keep the site updated was already using WordPress, we made the decision to build this site with WordPress too.
Well, if you look at one of the destination pages for this site, the musician profile page (here's one for example), you'll notice some different pieces of content which may or may not be present on any particular musician profile page. When they are present, they need to be in certain places and sometimes with certain content.
This custom WordPress page uses fields in addition to the standard options: Musician Image, URL, and Video.
The problem is, to control those extra pieces of content: the video, the band image, the link to the band's website, the site owner needs to use WordPress's custom fields in very precise ways, without the benefit of WordPress's content editing tools. What a drag!
To make life easier for the site owner, we ended up recording screencast instructions on how to use these fields and delivered those help files with the site itself. (We used Jing by Techsmith, by the way.)
It would've been better had the interface been clear enough so that we didn't feel the need to document the process of updating these destination pages, but that's the trouble with stretching WordPress beyond its default content fields.
Ask too much of WordPress and ease-of-use is the casualty
Do you see the difference? When an effective design solution requires multiple types of content per page, using WordPress will actually make your website difficult to manage. WordPress is usually so easy to use that when you hit this wall, it is very apparent.
When you're at that point, WordPress is probably not the right CMS to choose.
Should WordPress improve in this area?
Whether through the core application or through an excellent plug-in (is there one already that I missed?), if WordPress is going to grow in the content management systems field, this shortfall will need to be addressed.
However, WordPress is really excellent at what it does already, and the better course might be to decide to keep the features in check and let other systems compete in the mid-to-enterprise scale CMS arena. Scope creep never stops, and a good application strategy knows when to say "no."
Am I wrong?
Am I off-base here? This is just one aspect of WordPress that should limit its use. Another that should cause designers to think twice is when dealing with faceted-navigation which requires more than one dimension (tags can probably handle one dimension). But, again, those are more complex design requirements.
I'm not a WordPress consultant, and I'll bet some of you would like to point to the errors in my thinking. Let's hear it.
Experience theme for Covenant Eyes
Cindy Chastain's article, "Experience Themes," at Boxes and Arrows outlines a neat way to package the concepts that help user experience designers put creative work into context.
When I was leading many design/development projects at a time, I'd write a creative brief for each—it helped me and the team stay clearheaded about each project. An experience theme seems like an alternative to a creative brief.
The following thoughts apply Chastain's article to my work at Covenant Eyes.
Covenant Eyes is rich with stories
At Covenant Eyes, Inc., we have a full-time blogger, Luke. As I see it, Luke's job is to draw out the stories surrounding Covenant Eyes and to share them using the Internet. He's our storyteller.
What are the roles? There are so many stories, from people in so many places in life.
- husbands, fathers
- wives, mothers
- children
- pastors, rabbis
- counselors
- porn addicts, recovering porn addicts, people who have beaten the addiction
- and the list continues
What are some theme concepts?
- For people fighting a problem with pornography: Learn to be honest again (These words come from Michael Leahy's mouth while he was visiting our offices.)
- For mothers with children who use the Internet: Protect my family
- For fathers with a teenage son: Teach him to be responsible for his actions
Experience transcends our services
What work do we do at our company? Although others I work with may claim we deliver software, I think we deliver information. Our software allows us to provide information-rich reports on Internet usage that can be used within relationships. I think of these as "accountability relationships."
The theme concepts listed above have little to do with software or even our service. The real value we provide is that we can provide the sense for people that what could be their little secret is not actually hidden. That little bit of knowledge has proven its ability to change lives, and relationships, for the better.
The hard part is carrying the experience theme across our touch points with users
I recently helped put together a spreadsheet to inventory the automated emails we send to users at various points. There were over 60 emails, and they fulfill needs ranging from billing concerns to helpful reminders after a few weeks of being a customer. Many of these messages should be revised, and keeping the theme in mind will help create a coherent experience for our users.
Covenant Eyes has multiple touch points with its users.
Beyond these emails is a myriad of other touch points:
- sign up form
- help documents
- filter settings controls
- accountability reports
- tech support phone calls
- blog posts
- and so on
Taken all together, these communications can benefit from an experience theme.
I suspect the key to pulling this off is to have all those involved with crafting these touch points understand the experience theme and leave it to them to carry it through. As the company's user experience lead, my job may be to facilitate the definition and adoption of an experience theme, and motivate and lead by example so others will carry the vision.
Seams between systems and the Vignelli NYC subway map
I just read "Mr. Vignelli's Map" by Michael Bierut over at Design Observer. In the post, Bierut remembers and analyzes why the public rejected Vignelli's map of the New York City subway system. (Here's the Vignelli subway map.)
The Vignelli map smartly acknowledged that for passengers of the subway focused on navigating the subway system itself, above ground geography was nothing but a factor of added complexity. So the map instead was oriented around the subway lines and stops themselves, abstracting actual geography. This was a keen simplification from an information design perspective.
But consider this observation from Bierut's article.
To make the map work graphically meant that a few geographic liberties had to be taken. What about, for instance, the fact that the Vignelli map represented Central Park as a square, when in fact it is three times as long as it is wide? If you're underground, of course, it doesn't matter: there simply aren't as many stops along Central Park as there are in midtown, so it requires less map space. But what if, for whatever reason, you wanted to get out at 59th Street and take a walk on a crisp fall evening? Imagine your surprise when you found yourself hiking for hours on a route that looked like it would take minutes on Vignelli's map.
The concept of designing the seams between systems has become apparent within the user experience design community over the last couple years. This is an example of that problem of seams.
Passengers of the subway system are also navigators of the city itself, so their context of use spans beyond the subway and the end of their decisions are not merely which stop to get on and off of, but where they are going once they get out of the subway.
Bierut makes the point:
The problem, of course, was that Vignelli's logical system came into conflict with another, equally logical system: the 1811 Commissioners' Plan for Manhattan.
How can designers consider the seams between the subway system and the city plan to result in a better-designed subway map?
NYC, of course, has a functioning subway map. Is functionality the only litmus test?
(I've taken the subway in New York City only once, and managed to get from Point A to Point B successfully, although with some anxiety.)
WUD 2009 at MSU recap
Yesterday's World Usability Day event at Michigan State University was good—but a little odd.
The morning sessions were spot-on, and some of the afternoon talks were good as well. However, it was clear that some panelists didn't understand their audience of usability and accessibility practitioners. Their talks were still interesting, but they didn't understand the user experience industry's take on words like "accessibility" and "sustainability," which was this year's theme.
So, here's a quick recap.
Assistive Technology Expo
I attended the Assistive Technology Expo in the morning. I posted yesterday about comments regarding CAPTCHAs gleaned from that talk.
The two presenters work in the technology field providing technology support for people with various disabilities and are themselves blind. They demonstrated how they use screen readers to accomplish various tasks online, like checking the weather, tuning into a football game streamed online, checking stocks, buying groceries, and buying a computer.
I appreciate observing and listening to people with disabilities who use the Internet, because it helps counter what I know about the technology with what is clear about people. That is, people adapt and make things work to the best of their ability. These two presenters were gracious about technology-related problems that I know many sighted people would be upset with. They also pointed out that most websites are at some level usable by them, but of course they prefer ones that are more accessible. We did see a number of examples where they simply wouldn't have been able to overcome some technical roadblocks without significant additional effort.
One part of the presentation included them showcasing how they use an iPhone. An accessibility feature on the iPhone causes a single tap on the touch screen to say the name of the application (or letter if it is the keypad), while the double-tap will activate it. So, they have audible feedback to find the function they need, plus the capability to then activate it. This seemed to work very well for them.
Another point made during the session is that these assistive technologies like screen readers and electronic braille devices are quite expensive. Some screen reader programs are more expensive than the cost of the computer itself. However, the presenters voiced hope because the prices are coming down. They cited Apple shipping Macs that have built-in accessibility features at zero additional cost. Also, for Windows, there are some screen reader programs that are only a few hundred dollars.
Special Session: Contemporary Issues of IT in the Sustainable Global Knowledge Economy
This panel session had presenters on the topics of:
- delivering broadband across the state of Michigan even to rural areas (George Boersma)
- ITEC, a center in Lansing that provides after-school programs to help youth learn about technology, science and math (Kirk Riley)
- IT accessibility (Sharron Rush)
- global knowledge economy (Mark Wilson)
All the presenters were well-spoken and interesting. Sharron Rush seemed to be the one presenter that is part of the usability and accessibility profession, though the others shared important information and perspectives.
Unfortunately, I don't have the time to provide more details on these presentations.
Hybrid Technology for a Sustainable Future
Shane Shulze of Ford Motor Company presented information on what Ford has been working on in regard to battery powered cars. His talk was focused on battery technology, and it was interesting to see the audience's response.
One participant spoke up and asked about how these new cars will address the safety issues with quiet-running cars. Shane's answer was that Ford is aware of the issue. I suppose we can look to future prototypes to see how what they do with this issue. (From a UX perspective, I think that is a really interesting question: what are the design concerns in regards to the volume and appropriateness of the audio.)
e-Government Services for a Sustainable County
Salina Washington of Oakland County and Constantinos Coursaris of Michigan State University presented on how Oakland County has transformed their delivery of services to citizens of Oakland County with the eGov department of the county government.
This presentation was inspiring. We know that good, usable technology can improve service delivery and decrease costs, but this was an actual example of that happening.
The take-away from this was that when faced with a challenge, like a massive cut in budget, instead of going the traditional route of laying people off, think creatively and as a group come up with ideas on decreasing costs and making the most of the resources that each part of the government agency uses.
Sustainability and Agility: UX Designs for Eforms
John Rivard spoke about integrating UX and Agile development at a bank. He shared examples of their workflow, like work-ahead, follow-behind. This was also an excellent presentation and it seems that the way John is working is similar to how we operate at Covenant Eyes.
That's all folks
All-in-all, it was a good day with some unexpected, but enjoyable talks. Good job to the organizers from the MSU Usability & Accessibility Center! Also, check out Tom Schult'z posts on his blog.
WUD: captcha problems discussed in assistive tech expo
Tom Schultz and I are at the World Usability Day event hosted by Michigan State University today. We sat in a session this morning that focused on a demonstration and discussion of assistive technologies.
An interesting point in the discussion was that problems with CAPTCHAs for people with visual impairments. One of the presenters went through a process at the DELL website, selected a computer and went to purchase it, but on the way to checking out, he had to pass a CAPTCHA that asked him to enter the characters he sees in the image into a text box.
Of course the problem was that he could not see the image and there was no alternative available. No sale.
Someone else brought up Google's use of audio as an alternative to the visual CAPTCHA, but the presenters pointed out that for someone who has both visual and hearing impairments, this is still insufficient.
(You can try the audio CAPTCHA on the first page of the sign up page for Blogger. Try it out!)
They pointed out that a CAPTCHA that used reasoning could be a more accessible approach, and another idea was to send an email to verify that the agent is, in fact, a human (that's the point of a CAPTCHA).
I'll probably post another update from this conference later.
Paper: crucial to Web design
At first thought, Web design is a digital job. But as long as I have done this work, I've had paper on hand.
In the 90s I'd quickly sketch different ideas for overall design, narrow it in, and then sketch out the plan to create the layout with tables, complete with pixel dimensions for each cell and notations on margins, borders, and padding. I'd annotate the sketch with hexidecimal codes for colors to use. The process placed ink before pixels.
As CSS gained ground and the industry left table-based layouts behind, I sketched fewer details, but usually still rapidly drew thumbnails of page layouts on paper before settling in.
For a time, I thought I could do most of this work with computer programs as my primary tools: Word, Excel, Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, and straight textual coding tools like BBEdit. Later, OmniGraffle joined the toolbox, and I did first-round design digitally.
Ink before pixels again
Over the last six years paper and ink has again become my first tool. Hand-drawn sketches and notes are fast and fluid—far moreso than code or Photoshop.
With a quick sketch in hand, the coding can leapfrog some easy-to-make first mistakes. For instance, last week I needed to create some screens for a 3 page sign up process. I spent about 30 seconds drafting two quick page layouts on paper before I jumped into Photoshop and Dreamweaver to create the graphics and code it up.
By doing the second sketch, I was able to make better use of a design grid and utilize white space more effectively. That's 30 seconds well-spent, and it means I didn't have to waste time in Photoshop or with code on a design that had whitespace problems.
Good paper is worth it
When I started my latest job, I asked for some paper to sketch with. I was provided with some cheap cardboard-backed white notepads. Each pad fell apart within a week or two of use, and was better suited to ripping sheets off then holding together. Irritating!
I started to use my own notebooks for work, and just a couple weeks ago purchased a set of Moleskine Volant notebooks. They are softcover notebooks about 5 by 8 1/4 inches, and are well-bound with excellent ruled paper. I think they're the best notebooks I've ever had.
Recent Posts
- My 2.5 days in San Francisco: MX 2010
- How to write release notes
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- Nephtali web framework creator talks FP
- How WordPress falters as a CMS: Multiple content fields
- Experience theme for Covenant Eyes
- Seams between systems and the Vignelli NYC subway map
- The Thanksgiving Duck
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- WUD 2009 at MSU recap
- WUD: captcha problems discussed in assistive tech expo
- Paper: crucial to Web design
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Links: Friends, Co-workers
- JAWS: Jared Wein
- Life of a Web Programmer
- Nephtali: A PHP web framework that functions beautifully
- Paolo Tiseo @ MySpace
- Pointless Rants
- Seeking Jesus blog
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