Jarrett Interaction Design

I just finished a session with folks from Adaptive Path where they started a series of sessions on their design method.  This session focused on design strategy.  Specifically, a simple method for priortizing business goals, with axes of Importance and Viability.  They made the session an interactive workshop, which was nice for a change in this conference.  I’ll be attending their other sessions as well, which are brief versions of their 4-day workshops.

Dan Roam just gave a great presentation summarizing his work that is described in his new book, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures.  He did a great session, sketching on an active presentation on his tablet laptop.  He had us do some exercises as well.  His work is based on the visual and cognitive aspects that our brains are so good at and provides concrete techniques for tapping into them for analyzing and solving problems, and effectively presenting those ideas with simple sketches.  I’ll definitely be buying the book!

I just left a really disappointing session by David Armano of Logic+Emotion and Critical Mass.  I usually enjoy his blog and his visuals, but his presentation had little to offer as far as new ideas, new synthesis, or presentation charisma and excitement.  He basically promoted iterative design and deployment with cross-functional teams of blended roles.  Yup, that stuff works!  And then he showed some web applications his company has done.  Nice, but not impressive.  No “wow.”

I think he could have made some real impact if he focused on how he started and ended the presentation:  Web site design and implementation has become commoditized.  You can get a decent site put up for a few hundred dollars now, so user experience – including interaction and emotion – has to differentiate your work from the off-shore stuff.

This was a presentation from Lou Carbone of Experience Engineering.  It was an overview of why experience engineering matters.  It was a bit rushed, but his visuals and examples were great.

Ideas:

• Rather than customer centric, be “customer back”; capture their heads and hearts.
• Value creation instead of value extraction.
• The Ultimate Question: “Would you recommend us to someone else?”
• Focus on effect of the business rather than the function of the business.
• Sense and respond rather than make and sell.
• How do customers feel?  rather than How do they feel about us?

The keynote presentations were fairly interesting, particularly because they demonstrated a number of cool web apps that people have built with Silverlight.  I particularly enjoyed the Hard Rock memorabilia site and the Aston Martin.  Unfortunately, this wasn’t Oprah, so I couldn’t reach under my seat and find keys to my new car.

A few key things I learned:

• Microsoft views advertising as the key to the web ecosystem economics.  And most of their examples are traditional, print-style advertising (banner ads with video, etc.).   Much of their investment in these technologies is to drive the advertising business.  Seems diametrically opposed to the ClueTrain Manifesto and markets as conversations.  Hugh Macleod, where are you?
• Projecting (if not coining) the concept of Utility Computing.  Devices of many forms that each provide some utility into a mesh of such devices connected through the web.
• Entertainment and social network meshes are big parts of their strategy.
• IE8 fixes all the stuff that IE7 broke as far as rendering standards and performance.  It’s focus is on integrated interoperability (interop that just works without having to worry about special coding mechanisms).  It also introduces concepts of Activities (web services that are linked to snippets of content on the fly; e.g. select the text of a camera model and up pops a smart tag linking to services you’ve enabled, such as finding that model on eBay) and WebSlices (links to subsets of a web page that can pop-up enabled services and maintain a linkage over time).
• Silverlight is focused on rich media applications on the web.  Video especially.  It is now available to run on Windows Mobile 6.

I’m at Mix08 for the rest of the week.  I’ll be posting tidbits that I learn after each session, like I did with last fall’s HFES meeting in Baltimore. 

I’ll be focusing on the UX track at this Microsoft technology conference.

I am so glad that the New York Times opened up its site to non-subscribers.  I go there much more often.  They have a rockin’ interactive design team.  Their election maps and all of the interactive coverage are just gorgeous, informative, and fun.  The banner tonight covers all the primaries, and is beautifully colored as the results come in.  Enjoy!

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about Jakob Nielsen. I read his AlertBox columns whenever they come out, and early in my career, his books, panel discussions, and articles were important to me. Now, his ideas are ingrained – as are criticisms of much of his work.

His latest AlertBox, however, irritated my liberal socio-political nerves. In addressing criticisms of usability that he only tests “idiots,” and that normal, smarter people do fine with current sites, he makes a number of statements that equate income with intelligence (after stating that it’s not reasonable to use IQ tests – for criticism of that, see The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould).

… we mostly recruit people with respectable jobs — an engineering consultant, an equity trader, a lawyer, an office manager, a real estate agent, a speech therapist, and a teacher…

One way of quantifying the level of users we’re currently testing is to look at their annual income.

… studies of wealthy users because that fact helps them overcome the ‘dumb users’ objection…

We’re not neglecting poor people… But… no one could claim that the findings don’t apply to high-end users.

Wealthy = Smart = High-End

Poor = Dumb = Low-End

I’m not accusing Nielsen of attacking poor people, just using simplistic and specious arguments.  Jakob focuses on eBusiness sites in much of his work: how people make money on the web, so the profit motive is certainly a prime driver for the sites he usually tests. But using dollars to measure smartness is an incredibly narrow metric, ignoring individual circumstances, drive, opportunity, mission, and desires. I hope that all those HCI undergrads out there take a couple of economics and sociology courses in addition to reading Nielsen, or this economic class-ism is sure to be perpetuated in more and more designs, and those sites will continue to marginalize and exclude those for whom money is not the only goal.