Dan Saffer - Designing for (and with) New Technologies
#odannyboy Slides: -
Dan held a presentation about the progress of technology and how the need for it comes later and how the designer is being tasked with bringing meaning to the technology. He used touch screens as an example of a technology that has been around for almost 30 years but is just now seeing mainstream use. Though I agree with Dan and found his talk interesting I think that this is an oversimplification since it is not only about inventing the need but also about bringing down the cost of the technology so that consumers can afford it. I still remember going with my dad to his work to look at their company's only CD-ROM equipped PC. It was so expensive that only a trained librarian was allowed to use it.
I found it interesting that apparently Jonathan Ives started out designing kitchen appliances and that some of the design language in that field was transplanted into the computer field with his designs for the iMac. But then Jonathan Ives has been accused of copying Braun to.
Donna Spencer - Design Games
Donna's presentation was about different games (techniques) for idea generation and problem solving. The games she presented included Design the Box, a game where the team gets tasked with designing the box for the new product and Divide the dollar, an exercise in prioritizing by dividing a set amount of money to the various functionalities. She also talked about metadata games for sorting out terminology such as asking all the members of a team to name something or writing down all things they can think of in a certain category.
Luke Wroblewski - First-Person User Interfaces
Luke talked about, you guessed it: first-person user interfaces. He explained how we have gone to increasing levels of abstraction in the interfaces that we use to interact with computers, beginning with with circuit boards to punched cards to CLIs to WIMP to Natural User Interfaces finally arriving at the 1st Person UI. Luke showed some applications sporting a 1st person UI such as Layar and presented a list of features he considered signifying for the new UI paradigm:
- The possibility to navigate the space around you like with Google Maps Navigation.
- The augmentation of the immediate surroundings like with the Layar Browser.
- The interaction with nearby object like the various barcode scanner applications for mobile devices.
Steve Krug -The Lazy Person’s Guide to a Better World: Advantages of Doing The Least You Can Do™
#skrug Slides: -
Steve talked about the benefits of discount usability testing: testing frequently with few participants. He warned about the lure of fixing the low hanging fruit first because it leads to the more serious problems never being fixed. Like he pointed out in his most recent book he pointed out that you must "focus ruthlessly on the most serious problems".
Eric Reiss - Killer Content or Content that Kills?
#elreiss Slides: -
According to Eric there is only one reason to innovate: to solve a problem. Innovation simply for the sake of it or to satisfy one's ego is counter-productive. Inspired by his friend Lars von Trier he wrote the web dogma 06 which just like Triers dogma manifesto is a reaction against what he perceived as bloat (in Trier's case it was Hollywood over-the-top mega-budget products). Funilly enough one of the thinks Reiss talked about was that the "About us" section is a construct of internal politics and therefore should be removed, but I have found on one of the sites I tested that it was one of the most visited sections (but on the other hand that could have been a result of other bigger problems on the page).
Susan Weinschenk - Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click?
Susan's talked about how much of good web design speaks to the unconscious part of our mind. We humans are irrational and that is not something that we can change through training or reasoning. Examples of this are all around us such as ads suggesting the possibility to mate, how we are fooled into buying because of scarcity (the lines at the iPhone release being just one example) and the need to be part of the flock (social websites).
Understanding the irrational nature of our mind is important for good design. Susan said the brain consists of three parts (very simplified): the old brain - responsible for identifying objects that we can eat, mate with and avoid, the mid brain - stories, faces and names and the new brain - responsible for conscious processing. All parts of the brain are important when designing websites.
She gave some fun examples of people saying that cookies in the jar with fewer tasting better and how our innate fear of losing makes us spend more when we are tasked with taking away features from a car with all the extras in comparison with when adding features to the same car stripped bare.
Larry Constantine - Designing for User Performance and User Success
Slides: -
Seeing Larry Constantine talk was probably my only OMG moment at the conference due to his book Software for Use being one of the first HCI books that I ever read. The only thing cooler would have been if they had brought Jeff Raskin back to life (The Humane Interface was the first HCI book I read).
As Larry Constantine himself noted he was a bit of an outlier among the presenters since he works in the automotive industry. He talked about how UCD doesn't work in his field and how they employ activity centred design. An example he gave of this distinction was in designing navigation systems in cars where a UCD approach might endanger the user by keeping her from watching the road by introducing functionality that the user wants but is distracting. Focussing on the activities that she needs to perform instead allows Larry and his team to design solutions for users on the road without compromising safety.
Judging from the comments on twitter after the conference I there was a lot of people in the audience who didn't agree.
Jared Spool - The Dawning of the Age of Experience
Jared began his talk complaining that all the good subjects had already been taken and proceeded to dance to Beyonce's Single Ladies, generating roars of laughter.
He began his talk with how the success of Apple has put user experience on the agendas in the board rooms around the world. He talked about how Apple's iPod in many ways is an inferior product in comparison with other mp3 players but the total user experience, the combination of design and business stategy, makes up for it's shortcomings.
The increased attention to UX means that there is a greater need for skilled UX designers. He used chicken-sexing as an example of how practise makes perfect and how being a good designer is something you learn but not open to introspection (which was a fun twist: normally chicken-sexing it is used to explain implicit v.s. explicit memory). Jared talked about how the ever decreasing size of design teams requires the team members to be multi-disciplinary and that you there fore need to create teams based on skills and not on what their business cards says.
Jared listed three attributes of successful teams: vision - what will the product be five years from now, feedback - test with users regularly and culture. He talked about the need for allowing people to fail, going so far as giving examples of companies throwing parties for the people responsible for failed projects.
David Gómez-Rosado - Want magazine launch
The day ended with the launch of an online magazine about UX.
1 comment:
Hi! Thanks for the great review of the day. A minor correction, I didn't say the About Us section of a website was unimportant - on the contrary, it plays a key trustbuilding role (see B.J. Fogg's research at the Stanford Web Credibility Project). What I said, though, was that things that exist only to satisfy the internal politics of the site owner must be eliminated. In the case of F.L.Smidth (my example), much of the About Us section consisted of org charts and other stuff that had a political purpose and not a user need.
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