UXLx, day 3

Published May 19, 2012

Allright, the conference is over. It ended last night after a lineup of UX heroes, each one doing their thing on stage, keeping the big audience clinging to their seats.

All sessions were recorded and will be available online if I understood things rightly, so I’m gonna give you my top 3 recommendations on which ones to see first.

Bill Buxton – Ubiquitous Computing and the Emerging Digital Eco-system

I might be childishly fond of veterans in our field, but Bill gave us a lecture of the importance of knowing our history and a crash course in ubiquitous computing with a few sweet examples. He was passionate and open about how we work and gave us all a bit of a lesson on several topics, for example on the topic of storyboarding;

It’s all about the transitions – make them seamless and graceful (and if you need arrows, rethink your job).

An inspirational talk and I found myself sitting with my mouth wide open several times.

Now that we can make anything, whats worth making?

Gerry McGovern – The Long Neck vs The Long Tail

Gerry energized the audience with his storytelling and passionate crusade about ever-growing websites that ”eat and eat, but never poop” and that the cult of production is killing many web experiences.

Ovations for Gerry for waking up the crowd after a pretty slow session and for his presentation skills. Inspiring, even if you’ve heard about task management before.

Bonus points for telling success stories from the client I’m working with at the moment. ;)

Jesse James Garret – Design for Engagement

JJG held a less practical and more philosophical talk that made us think about our practice and what we’re actually doing and who’s really a designer (Beethoven was an experience designer through his music, he claimed).

The user experience mindset is an acquired conditions where there is no cure.

He drew a parallel to the craft known as cinematography and said it’s all about engagement, creating experiences for users regardless of the context.

A great day, and a great conference all in all. I’m happy I went, I’m sad that it’s over but I’m glad I have another couple of days to spend here in Lisbon before going home. Thanks to the organizers and all the people I met!

Follow me on Twitter if you like to stay in touch.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

UXLx, day 2

Published May 17, 2012

Another busy day here at UXLx in Lisbon is over and it’s been a good one.

I started off with a session with legendary Gerry McGovern, who I finally got to see in person as he passionately talked about the importance of identifying the top tasks of your site’s visitors. The first thing he, not very surprisingly but very convincingly, pointed out was that there’s no point in asking your users directly what they want but rather to test and observe how they behave.

He went on a crusade against poorly focused websites, lack of testing with users and highlighted that everyone on the web has a task they want to get done.

When was the last time you went to Google and didn’t know what to look for?

He also claimed that no one goes to your website just for the content or information itself. There content always supports a task.

The long tail is killing the long neck.

He spent half of the workshop explaining and demonstrating how to identify and prioritize these top tasks, a process suitable for large, complex organizations, but possibly too advanced for smaller ones.

I’d love to see an alternative for these smaller companies or organizations. They sure have the need for it as well.

Today’s shorter talks was for me a great walk through of how mapping the user experience across multiple situations and interactions could be done at Adaptive Path, a session with Jamin Hegeman. Probably the best spent 20 minutes during these days so far. Extremely effective and fascinating.

I also spent another 20 minutes on the topic of how designers and developers can work together as a close team – a timely subject for me and quite a few good tips on how to make it work (and not). I’d love to hear more about it from Samuel Mike Bowles some time.

On the last session, after endless amounts of food, wine, pastries and coffee, I squeezed myself into the very popular Mobile Prototyping workshop – a hands on 3 hours session with Rachel Hinman of Nokia Research Center. It was all good and I enjoyed the storyboarding, examples and different techniques of prototyping (Keynote rocks!), but I felt kind of sad for her cause the air kind of went out of the auditorium at the end of the day and it seems like people’s energy went out with it. Still a great workshop!

Massively tight schedule the whole day and later me and my colleagues from Bekk ended up on a local seafood joint downtown, strolling around in the city center enjoying life and a few beers.

Good times, and tomorrow there’s a rock star line up through the day and I’m really looking forward to both that as well as the closing party tomorrow night.

If you’re curious of what I’m talking about, just check out the schedule here in Lisbon and UXLx.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

UXLx, day 1

Published May 16, 2012

It’s been a hot and sunny day here in Lisbon and I’ve had the pleasure to meet a bunch of nice people as well as participating in a couple of workshops and listening to a few short talks.

First thing this morning I went to Ginny Redish’s workshop about writing web content that works. It was a good mix of the importance of personas, content strategy, real world examples of what works and not and facts like

People don’t come to your website to read, they come to get the information they want, to complete their task.

If I could take away one thing from this session, it’s the lesson that

Every use of your website is a conversation

and content should be designed thereafter.

After a sweaty lunch I went to Dave Malouf’s short talk about designing gestures like a choreographer. An inspirational talk helping us interaction designers to understand motion as a tool in our designs. The better things feel, the more effective they are. Bring the love, fun, emotions and expressiveness!

I also listened to Yolanda Martins advice on how to integrate UX in agile environments. A hands-on talk about the challenges of Scrum and UX, with good discussions on top.

The last workshop/talk (it wasn’t much work, more listening, but today I didn’t really mind, with a talk as good as this) was Arnie Lunds about strategic UX management. A lot of practical advice on how to promote yourself and your practice and on to win the confidence of the organization you work for. For example;

  • have a point of view! Even if it’s not always correct, stand for it and make a difference. Be passionate and guide the conversation.
  • have a great elevator pitch. Tell stories, keep them real and surprising and keep them to the point.
  • identify ”champions” and help them achieve their goals with help from your expertise

This plus a lot of talk about mission, vision and strategy among 100 other things helped me straighten out quite a few thoughts I’ve been having on my mind lately.

All in all, great talks and fabulous people. On top of that, I think I’ve probably never been as full as I am right now after this evenings barbecue. :)

More good stuff to come tomorrow!

For sketch notes, summaries and presentations I highly recommend the unofficial UXLx blog at uxlx.posterous.com.

Tagged , | Leave a comment

What I’ve been reading lately (week 19)

Published May 13, 2012
  1. Interaction Design In The Cloud
    “Interaction designers create wireframes in tools such as Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle and Microsoft Visio. Originally, these wireframes were primitive shapes drawn to represent various UI elements. Many of us cannot imagine life without them.”
  2. Principles of User Interface Design
  3. A separate mobile website: no forking way
    “Karen McGrane warns about the dangers of content forking and tells us that the problem responsive design is trying to solve is really a problem with the CMS.”
  4. New Design Practices for Touch-free Interactions
    “Touch interaction has become practically ubiquitous in developed markets, and that has changed users’ expectations and the way UX practitioners think about human–computer interaction (HCI). Now, touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) are bleeding into the computing mainstream the way touch did years ago.”
  5. Computer Screens Getting Bigger (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)
    “Reasonably big monitors have finally become the most common class of desktop computer screen, dethroning the 1024×768 resolution that was long the target for web design.”
  6. The User Is Not Like Me
    “The user is not like me. August 25, 2003. It was the first day of my senior year at Carnegie Mellon University. It was the day I learned the mantra that would shape my career.”
  7. Removing Stumbling Blocks In Mobile Forms
    “There are several factors that can be considered to be stumbling blocks throughout the journey of filling out a form. Specifically on a portable device, this journey is complicated by the fact that we have to consider contextual parameters such as time, location, or limited input options, in comparison to a firm desktop experience.”
  8. You Design It, They Do It
    “What if someone came to you and said, “I’ve designed this great website, but people don’t stay on it. Why?” How would you respond? Would you ask them whether they have done extensive A/B testing? Would you recommend testing the usability of the website.”
  9. Improving UX and CX through Customer Journey Mapping
    “I need to stop taking briefs and trying to reshape them, and instead to work with companies to give them the tools to make better decisions, to give better briefs, to allow teams to work together more productively. We need to get out of the design or UX department to solve these problems.”
  10. Content as Conversation
    “Site visitors and app users come for the content. Of course, the information architecture (IA) and the site search must make that content easy to find. The design must be attractive and usable. The technology must work.”
Tagged | Leave a comment

What I’ve been reading lately

Published April 22, 2012
  1. Usability testing – what needs fixed?
    “Usability testing is too often used innapropriately in my opinion. Compared to other research techniques, it’s fairly cheap and easy to organise. But this leads to it being used to answer research questions it often can’t answer.”
  2. Intersection of the Physical and Digital Worlds
    “It seems like every few weeks, we hear about a new field that falls under the umbrella of “design.” Though it is a great time to be a designer, we are not taking full advantage of the learning and techniques that stem from other design fields.”
  3. Creativity Is Not About Ease of Use
    “Technology is a big destroyer of emotion and truth. it doesn’t do anything for creativity. Sure it can get you home sooner but it doesn’t make you a more creative person…that’s the disease that you have to fight in any creative field…ease of use.”
  4. What Does it Mean to be Simple?
    “All designers say simplicity is important, but what does it really mean to make something simple.”
  5. Responsive web design: a project-management perspective – Dev.Opera
  6. Nielsen is wrong on mobile
    “Designer, developer and mobile maven Josh Clark tells us that rather than stripping down, we should be asking how we can do more with the mobile experience.”
  7. Designers respond to Nielsen on mobile
    “Nielsen’s recommendation that publishers build separate mobile sites has been met with astonishment from the industry.”
  8. Is UX the Key to a Long-lasting Business?
    “But what if the firm was driven, not by the goal of short-term profitability, but by the goal of continuous innovation in service of finding new ways of delighting customers? The new bottom line of this kind of organization becomes whether the customer is delighted. Conventional financial measures such as maximizing shareholder value are subordinated to the new bottom line. Profit is a result, not a goal.”
  9. The UX Community Needs to Start Paying Attention to Android
    “One thing has stood out more than anything else during this process: no one is talking about Android. Ok, “no one” is clearly an exaggeration. There are a few great resources out there that have been very helpful in the quest to learn how to best design native Android smartphone and tablet applications (posted at the bottom of this article). But compared to the huge plethora of resources about designing iOS applications, resources about Android design are extremely limited. Why is this and what should we do about it?”
  10. What We’re Looking For In Great Interaction Designs
    “When Bill Moggridge and Bill Verplank coined the term “interaction design” some 25 years ago, it was a wonky term, suited to a wonky discipline just in its infancy. In fact, the discipline was so wonky that the term itself was forgotten for 10 years, until it finally came back into use as computers started flooding the mainstream. And today? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that interaction design is the most far-reaching and dynamic of the all the design disciplines.”
Tagged | Leave a comment

4 weeks with Windows Phone 7

Published April 1, 2012

I’ve been using the new Nokia Lumia 800 for about four weeks now and I was quite enthusiastic to actually try out what Microsoft has created with their new Metro design language. Honestly, there aren’t many MS products that have impressed me over the years, but I’m delighted by the fact that they’ve really done something different and not only copied other UI’s already out there.

I’ve been using the phone for both work and pleasure and here are my key impressions so far.

THE GOOD

The Windows Phone 7 phone from Nokia - The Nokia Lumia 800

The UI is fresh and truly minimalistic. As a sucker for everything minimalistic, I think it’s a beauty.

It’s fast. There’s basically no lag at all while you navigate through the views.

It was quite easy to get all accounts linked up. I got Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Windows Live and two email accounts (Exchange for work and Google Apps for personal use) up and running pretty much instantly. I’ve heard of others having problems with this part, but for me it worked flawlessly. This is a fundamental setup to get working to be able to enjoy the People Hub for instance for easily sharing stuff and see what your friends are up to.

Another good thing is the fact that you don’t need a Windows computer to hook up to to sync or anything. You can buy apps in the web based Marketplace (which has it’s flaws…) and they get synced to the Windows Phone right away (most of the time…). There’s also a Windows Phone 7 Connector in the Mac App Store that I used primarily to get all my podcast subscriptions from iTunes onto the phone.

THE BAD

The extreme minimalistic design makes a great first impression but it gets quite annoying when so many apps look more or less the same. In far too many cases it’s basically a list of headlines and text below. The fonts are beautiful and everything but it ends up just being… boring.

The Metro design puts information architecture heavily in the centre and it’s not always obvious where things are. Whereas in iOS I often find myself thinking “I could probably find item X in view Y” and be correct, on this phone I need to look all over the place to find the right menu and the right list to find it. Maybe it’s a learning thing, but even the basic things feel hard when I need to guess where stuff are.

I don’t know how many times I accidentally launched an app instead of scrolling in a list. It’s like I need to touch the screen and hold the finger on the same pixel for just a nanosecond and the phone interprets it as a tap. It drives me mad when all I want do do is scroll (and you need to scroll A LOT).

All the little details that make absolutely no sense: I upload a picture via Twitter and the image gets hidden behind Windows Live with a link three miles long, Spotify offline playlists that suddenly aren’t available offline, apps that are downloaded and installed but can’t be found anywhere, the fact that my Windows Live account is Swedish but everything about the phone is Norwegian messes things up in the Marketplace, the phone is by default looking for wrong iTunes library, there’s no way to take screenshots… The list goes on.

The web based Marketplace. Besides looking like it’s being designed in Frontpage by a enthusiastic teenager in 1998, it’s full of broken links, mobile hostile pages and is generally a pain to use unless you get a direct link to the app you want.

Marketplace on the phone. Maybe it’s due to the fact that it’s full of incredibly crappy apps (as the app store was for iOS in it’s young days), it’s hard to find the good apps and to see the really great stuff. If there is any. Even the list of recommended apps and top lists are full of shit, to be honest.

App quality. As I said, there are so much crap out there, it’s hard to not get lost. Many of the good iOS apps (e.g. GetGlue) are websites wrapped in the Windows Phone app format and it’s obvious how young the Windows Phone world is.

Battery life is a joke. Most days I run out of it before the workday is over, and I barely use the phone for talking.

ALL IN ALL

Competition is great and I love seeing Microsoft trying out new solutions and UI’s but, perhaps I had too big expectations because after these 4 weeks I mostly feel disappointed.

I like the look of Metro, but it’s not enough. It’s a decent phone, with a decent UI and I’ve heard that the Windows Phone tools are convenient for .NET developers who wants to create mobile apps, but unless you’re a huge Microsoft or Nokia fan, I suggest you get an iPhone instead.

Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

What I’ve been reading lately (week 8-10)

Published March 13, 2012
  1. Why User Experience Is Different From Consumer Experience
    “How many UXers can hold their own in a board room, or in front of the CEO alone making the (expensive) case for revamping the CX? Read The Customer Experience Fiasco and honestly ask yourself if you can imagine the typical UX designer in the role of the fictional Dana Chase. Her job is to find all the organizational problems that are leading her company to create a bad CX.”
  2. Designing for Android 3.2 & 4.0
    “Here are some excellent resources if you are designing an Android smartphone application for Gingerbread or Ice Cream Sandwich.”
  3. What the iPad 3 Display Means for Designers
    “As March 7 draws closer, it seems certain that Apple’s next iPad will have a Retina-style display. While the hardware specs are unknown, the 9.7″ display will be doing a lot of work to push almost as many pixels as Apple’s 27″ iMac.”
  4. All of Microsoft’s Best Design Work Isn’t Happening at Microsoft
    “Microsoft is trying. They are trying to improve upon all of their design work and in some places they are succeeding (like Windows Phone 7.5) and in others they are constantly 10 steps back (any version of Office).”
  5. Experiences vs. Possessions: You Are What You’ve Done, Not What You Own
    “The user experience of a product is more important than we think. It’s not just the idea that the product should be easy to use/ interesting. The EXPERIENCE part of user experience is not just a fancy word to use.”
  6. Low-budget responsive design
    “If you have a client that won’t pay for responsive design, get a client that will.”
  7. The Language of Design
    “We all know that Apple’s design language is very calculated. So, the obvious problem with trying to follow someone else’s design language is that you don’t know exactly why you are saying it. And when they change it, the products that follow it lose what little meaning they have.”
  8. Designing Perceptual Persuasion
    “Persuasive design is hot. Especially on the web as designers found out that the internet perfectly lends itself for persuasion. The combination of both interpersonal and mass communication as well as its interactivity creates a perfect environment to apply persuasive techniques like the ones described by Maurits Kaptijn in his article on Persuasion Profiling.”
  9. Defining Great User Experiences
    “Helen Waters was one of the jurors for the Interaction Design Awards 2012. During the reviewing process she discovered what actually defines a great user experience. It’s something that leaves tech behind and address larger systems of interaction. In an article for Co.Design she defines four elements: building platforms, moving beyond the screen, seamlessly integrating data and empowering the user.”
  10. The Psychologist’s View of UX Design
    “The article on UX Magazine is from 2010 and was related to Weinschenk‘s book Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click. She shares several insights.”
Tagged | Leave a comment

How real people might react to Windows 8

Published March 12, 2012

It’s interesting and fascinating that Microsoft actually tries new stuff, but with entirely new interfaces like Metro, most people has to  learn to replace stuff like the Start button. Look at this video and see how people actually might react when facing the upcoming Windows 8 for the first time.

By Geek, found via @kottkrig on Twitter

Tagged , | Leave a comment

What I’ve been reading lately (week 6 and 7)

Published February 19, 2012
  1. Why Personas are Critical for Content Strategy
    “Personas help to bring richness to otherwise statistical data. Unlike traditional target audience segmentation, they provide greater depth and context to generic target audience groups by focusing on one character who embodies the predominant qualities of the larger group.”
  2. Designing Experiences for Young Kids:Child Proofing your Application
    “Kids are curious and eager to explore. They tend to touch everything they see on the screen and notice things adults sometimes miss. For example, they don’t experience banner blindness; for them, a banner is an exciting opportunity to learn what will happen if they touch the screen.”
  3. The Dark Side of Creativity
    “Creative individuals are more likely to be arrogant, good liars, distrustful, dishonest and maybe just a little crazy—OK, let’s say eccentric.”
  4. The State of HTML5 Video
    “HTML5 has entered the online video market, which is both exciting and challenging for developers in the industry. With the HTML5 specification and the various browser implementations in constant flux, we at LongTail Video spend a signficant amount of time understanding the limitations of the technology and optimizing our own products for HTML5.”
  5. Progressive And Responsive Navigation
    “Developing for the Web can be a difficult yet rewarding job. Given the number of browsers across the number of platforms, it can sometimes be a bit overwhelming. But if we start coding with a little forethought and apply the principles of progressive enhancement from the beginning and apply some responsive practices at the end, we can easily accommodate for less-capable browsers and reward those with modern browsers in both desktop and mobile environments.”
  6. Mobile Sites vs. Apps: The Coming Strategy Shift
    “Mobile apps currently have better usability than mobile sites, but forthcoming changes will eventually make a mobile site the superior strategy.”
  7. Rapid prototyping for mobile products
  8. A Craft Of Consequences: Reader, Writer And Emotional Design
    “Instead of us asking the question, “How do these things look?” perhaps we should rather be asking, “How do these things feel?””
  9. Our Economy Is Mostly Services. But How Do You Design Great Service Experiences?
    “Service design–choreographing the dynamic interactions between companies and people–cannot only transform a company’s image; it can improve people’s lives. But successful service design is complex and complicated, and many companies get it wrong.”
  10. Structure First. Content Always.
    “We have to start somewhere. Something has to come first.”
Tagged | Leave a comment

Moving to Oslo, joining BEKK

Published February 14, 2012

After almost 10 months of travelling the world, recharging my batteries, finding inspiration, generating ideas and lately a bit of freelancing I have gotten the opportunity to join a group of designers and developers at BEKK Consulting in Oslo, Norway.

Beginning March 1st I will be working as an interaction designer and functional advisor, doing what I do best – creating interactive web and app based solutions for some of Norway’s most exciting companies.

I’m really stoked to get my hands dirty again. See you in Oslo!

Tagged | Leave a comment