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2010-04-21T03:01:00.001-04:00

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Taking Design to Small Donors

2008-11-05T22:42:00.001-05:00

I'm starting to move the Small Donors Foundation into the public.

Petrol Station

2007-08-24T08:20:00.001-04:00

Jan Chipchase's presentation at UXWeek 2007 still has me thinking. So I wrote this comment on his blog about one of the images he discussed.

Your image of a petrol bottle atop a brick in Vietnam and your comments have stuck with me. You asked the audience about what it was and you stated a gasoline station. You pondered if the brick could have been removed.

My perspective is that the brick was essential to making it commerce. The brick removed it from just being someone's jar on the street to a purposeful display of petrol for sale.

And the more I thought about this image, the larger the metaphor grew for me. The brick is marketing stripped to its simplest form. The user experiences the marketing and the product as one.

UXWeek2007: One Laptop Per Child

2007-08-14T16:10:00.000-04:00

Upon reflection and conversation, two concerns about One Laptop Per Child. First, Sugar - the operating/network system - is an interface. I believe that "interface is content" and therefore it requires critical review. Sugar will "teach" as much as the content. And because the MIT Media Lab, home of One Laptop Per Child, has a dogmatic approach to teaching, I'm concerned about the flexibility of teaching styles that Sugar offers.

Second, the product is aimed at the poor in developing countries. What about the poor in this country? The primary group that does not graduate from high school. Sure the product is new, the design is new, the concept is new. More work needs to be done.

Charmr

2007-08-14T14:03:00.000-04:00

An Adaptive Path team just showed their research and design for a Diabetic Management device called Charmr. Their research was good and there may be more problems that it could solve. For example, the problem of getting people onto the pump. Not a gripe, but an unintended consequence.

UXWeek2007: More at

2007-08-14T09:58:00.000-04:00

Twitter
and
Technorati

UXWeek2007: One Laptop Per Child

2007-08-14T09:51:00.000-04:00

Saw first UI demo of one laptop per child which introduces a different OS/network to developing world which produces new way of learning. More...

50 Ways to Become a Better Designer

2006-08-24T02:37:00.000-04:00

I don’t take this list as a set of rules but rather as a checklist to see “have I thought of that yet.” Sorta like solo brainstorming. So enjoy 50 Ways to Become a Better Designer, best advice from 17 print, video and web designers published by computerarts.co.uk

Presentation Handouts

2006-08-21T06:58:00.000-04:00

At UX Week every printed handout with one exception was a copy of the slides. So I now have this folder of 8 1/2 x 11 papers with two pictures or maybe some words on each page. Is this really helpful to me when I go back to the office? Maybe when I listen to the blogcast. Or maybe when I review my blog entries from the week.

Next year I hope the designers take on the challenge to design handouts. I’ll take on that challenge for the upcoming year.

Data Viz: Why Now?

2006-08-17T11:56:00.001-04:00

Michal Migurski.

Reason #1 — Data Got Cheaper
Map of the Market (1998) - treemap view of stock market.
Newmap – Markos Weskamp – also treemap
FundRace – Michael Frumin, Eyebeam
Red or Blue by Gravity Monkey – Phone App to see red or green of GSP from phone
Historyflow Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viegas– looking at WikiPedia changes
Phyllotaxy by Jim Bumbgardner aka KrazyDad (Flickr)
Related Tab Browser (Flickr)
Reason #2 – Flash Got Better
Gapminder – Visualizing World Development
Digg Labs – for Digg.com called Swarm – get people to look at hidden stories -> API coming for digg.com
Etsy — Jared Tarbell – shop by color
Flash Wins — 2004 Presidental Election graphic maps
One Use – Geography – lots of public info in US
Election Maps – U. Michigan – did the Purple America Map
Mappr — Stamen Design – looking at Route 66 and geotags
OpenStreetMap – Tom Carden in UK
OpenData – free software is useless without data
Another Use: sousvallence (??)
Sparklines in very dense way. See product: StressEraswer
Attention – Stamen
Trixie Tracker – MacNeill and Egan – information about your infant
Week in Review – bunch of people in LA get together over beers and put it on paper
Resources
Tableau Software. Show you the best type of display
http://uxweek06.stamen.com – deck for presentation

UX: National Air and Space Museum talk

2006-08-17T10:10:00.000-04:00

Tour later today is at Suitland, Maryland, site. This is where there are no longer public tours of this facility.

Same principles apply that were talked about earlier this week: know your audience (may not know English very well), know your assets (we have the real planes), “focus on the user experience and the brand will take care of itself” (what is our brand worth?).

American By Air Exhibit at Smithsonian

50 to 100 people will have worked on the project – opens in Fall 2007 into 1500 sq. ft. We have no sequence – people can wonder where they want. [Note: asset of web is that designer controls links though not address or back button.] Will have AirBus and Boeing 747.

Who are the stakeholders of the exhibit? Visitors, Congressmen, Donors, peers of curator, museum director and others. Been fundraising for 10 years, usually three years. Curator did a book on the involvement of government to establish air transportation. Computer interactive in the exhibit. Break it down into eras (eg 1927–1941). Took series of headshots of pioneers and moved them into a kiosk – computer display.

Design Process

Creation: Script writing (curator, educators, editor), review (by entire team - establish standards), graphic panel layout (graphic designer), panel review (by entire team). We have to take every word and put it someplace. Need to find graphics when we have too many words. We make every effort to allow wheelchair but not all air

Testing and prototype: We test all exhibits, even very rough. Would bring in about 20 visitors and let them try it. Also larger crowds in the Museum. How do you measure success? We got half the people to read the labels! Failure: we expected people to learn three things before trying – so we broke it out into three steps.

Computer Interactive. Our interface is touchscreen because most others break easily. Other option is Mechanical Interactive. MI offers direct, immersive experience but they must be simple. You have to be willing to kill something.”Keep your focus on the big idea.”

In-house or by Contact. Must be content driven. Pro-bono has not always worked.

Questions

How do you research what audience wants? And age ranges? Lots of surveys: every 5th both coming and going to get demographic. Did surveys during project and ask about engines. But people don’t always know what they want to know. Monterey Bay Aquarium jellyfish exhibit – in the surveys no one wanted it until it was actually done. Need to explain

Favorite exhibits? Vicious Fishes – carpet with sting ray patterns. Aquarium where you can get underneath it. Totally immersive.

Do you have a business strategy? What is your target market? This is a big issue for the web site where we’ve just finished a survey. Most of current are WWII generation. How do we engage new generation? They are using the internet.

UX: Introduction: Total Experience Design

2006-08-17T09:37:00.000-04:00

Jesse James Garrett introduced the day saying how presenters have talked about Total User Experience. Today’s first talk is about designing an exhibit for a museum. This is what museum designers have been grappling with for some time.

Designing the Next Generation of Web Apps

2006-08-16T22:00:00.000-04:00

Description – Notes:

Web 2.0 – How many are comfortable with this phrase? How many are tired? Look at this term in design. And see how boom and bust works.

Nervous: When it makes magazine covers. (shows Biz Week cover of blogs). And looked at venture capital explanation of web 2.0 which was then picked apart.

Booms and Busts:

Tulips market in Netherlands.
Railroads – changed where goods had to be produced
Model T – revolution was how it was produced (getting faster and faster)
Great depression was trading information
Tokyo real estate boom and bust could not be sustained
Net bubble – lasting change underneath

Today we have a real boom with angles investors. Lots of start ups and innovation. (Start a company at the worse possible time.) Seeing first signs of bust with some startups folding (see TechCrunch deadpool).

What can we pull out? How can we do good work?

Web 2.0 Meme Map from O’Reilly. Acknowledgment of lots of things that we’ve been doing.

Elements => Surface – Skeleton – Structure – Scope – Strategy.

Surface - of Blogger.com tried to make it very friendly. Skeleton – show how interaction works. Structure – Info Arch side. Scope – what do we do on the web and what don’t we do. (fits in nice with service design). Strategy – What does our company do?

Apply to Web 2.0

Surface: Everyone has an opinion of the visual (“That is really blue!”). So let’s take a set of numerical data. At least expose some metadata – rainfall in five cities. It is now information with metadata. Next, add color and use background color to push back the metadata. Try changing the numbers to size of raindrops, but this can be dangerous (see USA Today and The Onion).

What can I do with this by letting go of design control? Shows map where users click on city to show the data from the city. Dr. Gitte Lindgaard – trust a web site by first impression at it and only showed 1/20th of second. trust on the surface: visual appeal is initial emotional response. Then cognition and if you do it right you have Halo Effect. Two books: Don Norm in Emotional Design. and B.J. Fogg Persuasive Technology. Think of your users as collaborators. Users Controlling Their Data.

Skeleton: I was comfortable towards interaction design as simple. Really simple to do wireframes. Then AJAX – innovation of perception. Promoted by Google. Then Jesse coined the term. We have wide enough use of modern browsers.

Shows kayak.com so I can plan with the results. Easy to correct from mistakes.

AJAX: “Roller skates for the web!” – Bruce Sterling.

Discoverability. Shows AJAX interaction to find stuff with kayak.com. Google Maps – “you can drag it around”. More like how you use a map. Fundamental change. Panic Goods – would you have discovered how to drag into shopping cart?

Recoverability. ifile.com looking to see if username is already taken. Interesting that they took this down because of engineering changes on the back web. This new tech challenges our tech team.

Context. Simple act of uploading a file and provide feedback on time to upload from Ruby on Rails.

Feedback. How does the system respond? We got lazy with this because the browser would respond to hitting a button. Shows yellow fade effect to show change was done that 37 signals put into Rails.

Structure: How we organize the data. Shows documents folder on his Mac. Search on the desktop has changed this – important shift. Filing metaphor broke down and search took over. And I do the same thing at del.icio.us. Drills into the blog tag. I find most interesting is “show me keyword from all users” and very interesting way.

Tagging experience as architecture. I think the big innovation was how easy it was. Shows flickr and you can add metadata to the pictures. And I can go to the lizard page from my photo – all other data is by users. Their data is the architectures of the site. You can almost use algorithms to provide experience e.g. popularity of tags, last 24 hours. And flickr has no control of what data shows up.

Scope: Increasingly interesting because of commodization. In 1996 you needed $10 million and category leader idea because of cost of building the server farm etc. In the startup world now it is nearly free. And we only pay for the people we get with Pay Per Click. Try out any idea for nearly anything. This has changed the scope of what is viable.

Old Problems. New Platform. Participation. Example is content management systems. So many fail because the solution is so complicated. Shows TypePad. Were not problems about control but about access. Blogging has created a flood of participation because everyone publishes RSS. Hows The Hype Machine. The other example is Google Maps and open the API to show ChicagoCrime.Org mashup. And this was an evening project by one guy.

Old problems: Analytics. MeasureMap. Your site is only one part of the experience. You need to play well with others.

Strategy: No one used a travel agency to book their travel. This is changing across the board.

Amateurization: An Architecture of Participation. Push out the expertise to our audience. Blogosphere and Rathergate and false document. One blogger of typewriters said it could not do the document. And four people from CBS resigned. Clay Shirky weblogs fix the inefficeincits that traditional publishers are paid to overcome.

Look at craigslist takes the bottom out of the newspaper market because of classified ads. And wikipedia.

Back to travel. There is a next step. Show them how to be an expert. flyspy.com to see when you. Or farecast.com to decided when to buy – looking at trends that a travel agent use to do. Triphub allows people to organize a trip which travel agent use to do.

Next generation of blogging tools, vox, help you know what you want to write about. Shows lots of startups logos that we don’t have time to do.

We are definitely in a boom and we can learn from it.

Slide deck is a pdf.

Brave New World: Usability Challenges of Web 2.0

2006-08-16T17:17:00.000-04:00

UIE.com: We’re a think-tank more than consulting firm. We also take a very long view and so we are at the beginning of the research.

What is Web 2.0? Lots of different ideas.

How Design Mutates through three phases: Technology Design focuses on getting the technology to work. then, Feature Design where you add features. Then Experience Design. Commodization.

Features: Wang WP. Boo.com Microsoft Word got into the feature trap. Amazon has added blogging. Why?

Experience design is not graphic design. See craignslist. MySpace is even worse for visual design.

Web 2.0: Designed around user experiences. “Small pieces, loosely joined.” Share common design attributes: APIs (mashup), RSS, Folksonomies, Social Network (“Wisdom of Crowds”). Poster child is flickr.com.

APIs – RSS is a huge component

Challenges: APIs: chicagocrime.org. But how do we build good design into an API? Look a date dropdown in chicagocrime.

How do we create seamless experiences when multiple sources for the code?

RSS: What happens when everyone is designing interfaces? CNN RSS feeds.Not something your grandmother is going to use. Just explaining how it works is tough.

Can we come up with a way to explain how RSS works? Subscribing is complex. Interactions are unpredictable.

Tagging: consumating.com Dating site that uses tagging. Kitchen cabinet problem: try finding a glass with the lights off in someone else's house. So tags may not mean the same to others.

Social Networking: Netflix has it built into it. Wisdom of crowds. Reviews only for your friends.

Long Tail: Power curve noticed with usage of English words. Chris looked at revenue the long tail that bricks and mortar can not stock. 800,000 pages at Microsoft have never been retrieved. 98% of users at Microsoft come from only 2% of the content. What do you do for the interface to the test of the content? Worse with user generated content. How do we handle the longtail issues?

Data entry causes experience problems – example flying to which Seattle with online travel site.

Brave New World

We’re designing for Experience;

E-zine: UIEtips.

Panel: Designing Web Apps

2006-08-16T17:15:00.000-04:00

Below are rarely quotes, but more notes.

Moderator: Jeffery Veen.

Steve : Been working on a book – the User is Always Right

Rashmi: Doing research.

Jared Spool: Focusing more lately on experience design.

Mike: Showing Mappr – flickr api application with Route 66. Exploratorium/cabspotting.org. digg labs – showed swarp. Work without constraints: client relationship. Looking for loose relationship. Projects progress from on to another.

Rusmi: Duct tape research. MindCanvas. Deliverable is variety of terms.

Jared: We don’t use much automated because we have not found a project that it would dovetail with.

Rusmi: We ran into limitation with some browsers with Ajax so went with Flash because of cross browser compatibility. Some reports are Ajax.

Mike: We primarily use Flash. You can zoom down. Problems for Linux users with Flash. Three or four people working on applications – can be as few as one.

Rusmi: Work remotely with India team. Formality is basecamp or email. We use PowerPoint as a collaboration tool

Steve: Something stupid? Did wireframe in PowerPoint.

Jared: Back button is a problem with Ajax, but you can show people where to go next.

Rusmi: Going full screen has not been a problem.

Steve: Will do usability testing with photoshop with HTML

Veen: Our guys are okay with throwing away 90% of the code.

Jared: Still fan of paper prototypes. Someone makes clickable pdfs.

Lower Barriers of Participation

2006-08-16T14:51:00.000-04:00

by Bradley Horwitz – VP Product Strategy

Yahoo Developer Network, Methods & Practices, Research Berkeley, Advanced Products Group, Technology Development. But we need to get everyone, all 12,000 involved.

Hack Yahoo! Invites all sorts of people. Inspired by JotSpot. Everyone gets involved. Credo is mashup or shutup.

Observation: Three classes of participants. 1% creators, 10% synthesizers and 100 consumers. Results from Google Groups. Same with del.icio.us. Helps pick up what is hot.

Goal is to get everyone involved.

Anyone with a ___ is now a ___: keyboard, author; camera, photographer; ipod, dj; browser, publisher. Problem is that a lot of these people are not artists.

Tim O’Reiley did post on interestingness with Flickr.

(1) User Generated Content
(Computer vision is very, very hard – digression)
(Bumped into ESP Game – rouse public blind tagging game. Remarkable thing.)
(2) User Organized Content -breakthrough is lower threshold
(tag space grew organically)
(takes picture of hotel room and tags it – culture of generosity)
(3) User Distributed Content (see third party blogs)
(4) User Developed Functionality (APIs)

LinkFlex – like Google Page Rank. So Flickr uses interestingness. Eg. views, lots of comments, recency, favorites, etc.

Distinguish between tags like jaguar car from animal. They look at secondary tags to cluster.

“Better search through people”

What Gradulate Schools Are Teaching

2006-08-15T17:09:00.000-04:00

This is a panel discussion with profs from the above Grad Programs.

IIT has about 100 students. Have a 9 month intensive program and Phd program.

UofB. Two graduate programs and two certificate (IA and New Media Publishing). Designed for working professionals. All are weekend and evenings. Most are part time and it takes about two and three years.

Remarkable facilities across the university. Undergraduate has industrial design program. Two masters degrees and a PhD program.: communication planning design and interaction design Program is two years long. Second year is thesis paper.

Why Graduate Schools or an Academic Arm for the Profession?

The credentialing system enhances the professor. Also universities can take the long view because they are not project driven. Also do research that is readily available.

How are you schools ahead of the curve?

CMC: Service design is probably ahead of industry but maybe not Europe. Robotics and elder care. Integrating students from HCI, design and business the first year.

UB: Practice of participatory design is ahead because of the time requirements that a University can do that most business can not. Also, specialized audiences – we are doing young adults.

ITT: Always searching for new methods and processes. Students are now working on incentive designs. Also risk mitigation within an organization.

Design has become so broad what do you teach in two years?

CMU: Give the students the framing for how to work in the future. Try to include the range of methods. “Like eating your vegetables.”

UB: “Like an exercise machine.” It is fundamentally different than training. These fields did not exist in the 70s. They still have a lot of training to do when they get their first job, but they have learned how to frame the problem and find tools to use.

ITT: Critical thinking is what any program provides.

Designers are graduating without hard skills, it appears to me (audience member) like a site map, wire frames and other documentation.

UB: We teach them deliverables.

Traincheck is not my day job and we do mobile interface. How is mobile space changing thing?

CMU: Do what is needed in the world – two or three focus projects were mobile. Everything is going to be connected so mobile is part.

UB: Students must consider beyond the beige box. Actually technologies to play with is a budget problem. We also have a program focusing on inner city Baltimore.

ITT: Mobile has shifted student projects beyond the magic

Accessible HTML?

UB: How else would you teach it?

Design to save lives, democracy and poverty. Do Universities try to tackle these since industry is working on different programs? Will stay with it after school?

ITT: Bottom of the pyramid is a project in rural India and China. This is also a future business opportunity.

UB: We can not tell students to work for nothing. I think the answer is the open course community. We have course to examine the cultural implications.

CMU: Hard for them to have potential employers see the non-profit work as useful to their career.

How did you get into the academic environment as a career?

ITT: I came through consulting. Director asked me to teach a few classes and took opportunity for full time position.

UB: I’ve been an prof my whole life. We do hire people. Read the catalog and contact the department chair.

CMU: I was consultant for a long time. I had opportunity to take a year long stint as a chair. Lucky enough when the position opened up.

How did these programs start? Who championed it?

CMU: Recognized that there was a need internally. Two rounds of gathering input from the field.

UB: Ours was born out of Comm. Design program frustration that was very print oriented. So we were hired to do electronic. Difficulty getting them part of core, so we moved into it and got a new school.

ITT: Have always been in the shadow of architecture. Always need to distinguish itself and worked with faculty and board when moved out of the architecture building.

Panel Description

Future of Design?

2006-08-15T16:09:00.000-04:00

A design language is an interesting concept to push. Is it too big of a hurdle to cross? I think there is success to have as we define common concepts, elements, laws, etc. I’ve got to let this flow over me for a while.

UX Week Book Signing

2006-08-15T13:58:00.000-04:00

The authors were sitting with the book buyers signing and talking. Forgot to bring my copies today. Just as well – did not need the extra weight in my backback. Can they sign the pdf version?

Microsoft Atlas Breakfast

2006-08-15T08:56:00.000-04:00

I took a week long course in Microsoft ASP earlier this year. It really is broken in my view because of all of the round-trips to the sever that it requires. It certainly helps sell severs and server licenses. ASP.NET Atlas – in other words ASP does Atlas – seems to solve some of those issues. It is hard to tell in 30 minutes .“Update panel” does not solve this problem according to G. Andrew Duthie. So I’ll stay tuned as it moves into beta.

Jake Zukowski doing UX Week

2006-08-15T08:47:00.000-04:00

Jake Zukowski is blogging UX Week better than I am. I’m sure there a more bloggers doing this given the number of laptops turn on during talks.

Heavy Load at UX Week

2006-08-15T08:29:00.000-04:00

For those of us not staying at the hotel we carry a heavy load. Most people have laptops. Then there are the breaks that work well if you have a room. Glad to be in AC now given the humidity this morning.

UX Monday Morning

2006-08-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

Jesse James Garrett did the opening relating design work back to the sacred. He then introduced Steven Johnson who covered his earlier book Interface Culture. So the internet and the interfaces are between the medium and the message. After the talk I suggested that McLuhan’s saying that the content of any new medium is old medium also applied.

Chris Conley from Gravity Tank gave a nice three part talk including playing part of the second disc from the Incredibles DVD. Didn’t know they were useful until now. Then he talked about the principles, which could be seen in the DVD and they rang true.

Charles Warren from IDEO suffered from being right after … and not being prepared? Or was that the style? Talk was like Chris’ talk.

UX Week Bloggers

2006-08-14T11:50:00.000-04:00

Bryan Busch, John Crean and Alok Jain. I’m sure there are more given the number of laptops in the upstairs room. But it looks like most of the notes will be on the wiki. Off to another presentation.

UX Week: Sunday Event One

2006-08-14T00:55:00.000-04:00

Awesome beer dude! What a way to start the week with the best beer bar in the US.

Got my diary and collected some autographs. Even a beer label to start things off. Steve Johnson is in the diary and we had a nice chat about McLuhan and the book business. Also told him about my belief that every industry is in the publishing business now.

Made some sketches of graphics on various T-shirts. Less T-shirts and goatees than expected. I was the old guy in the room at one point.

Took some pictures but will have to upload them later. Exhausted right now. Had some trouble getting Zlides.com update running on the server tonight. This is a Zlides presentation.