CanUX09 Mid-way through
Half-way through the conference, and some thoughts:
General conference comments:
- Small conference with a mix of workshops and speakers. Read: close and intimate interactions, good chance of meeting a fair amount of people, conversations as opposed to broadcasts.
- Excellent way of connecting with people who share the same passion, but more importantly, the same frustrations. If not to learn how they overcame their problems, then to share our communal misery.
- Beautiful location, friendly town, great food.
- The Design Slam (people were split into different groups to solve the same problems) was a great, relevant ice breaker. Topic of the year was designing an inventory system for a fictitious food bank. All the design solutions were fairly similar, but there were a few notable presentation techniques that I’d consider using:
- While all the other groups prepared their “slides” ahead of time, there was one group who drew their visuals real-time as another group member narrated their system flow. It kept the audience engaged. And as a fun gimmick, the flow chart took the shape of a happy face which you don’t realize until it comes near the end.
- Another group performed a skit with paper props. We worked newsprint and sticky notes, and the sticky notes became the food items that were being transported in paper bags and sorted in paper shelves.
- Collette Ostler began our presentation by acknowledging the strengths of each of the previous teams.
- Jerome Ryckborst brings an interesting an empathic angle to the system by considering food bank recipients as one of the stakeholders. While they weren’t our end users, the experience of the workers and the recipients aren’t entirely distinct in that workers get an altruistic fulfillment by working in a food bank. So the distribution portion of the system is designed as a kitchen cabinet where the recipient is taken through the kitchen to select their food items. As an aside, I think rebranding the package experience as a choice between different meal choices (as opposed to item choices) would also contribute to dignity and humanity without sacrificing the efficiency of packaging.
- UX trading cards? Ingenious giveaway item that’s handy in the attendee’s day job, and as a tool to get people to start talking to another.
- Presentation from Lane Becker, the co-founder of Get Satisfaction and Adaptive Path. Solid presentation about why organizations needs to start listening to their customers (because no matter how big a company is, they aren’t bigger than the network that is Google, Twitter, Facebook-some recursive thinking there), but I think it it’s directed at the wrong audience; we aren’t the ones that need convincing.
- Modular Web Design by Nathan Curtis from Eight Shapes. Perhaps the most relevant talk so far. We all talk about modular design to our clients, but rarely do any of it come into practice. We need to start building libraries, and a common language between UX, Design and Development.
- How do we illustrate multichannel interaction? With business origami! Think paper theater puppets and pop-up books. It’s a nice low-fidelity exercise to good through with the client to identify the actors, business goals and user values. A lot more informal than UML process diagrams which communicates the same ideas, but in a language that anyone can understand. This reminds me of an article I read about using vocabulary that resonates with the goal the product is trying to accomplish.
- The show and tell was like a science fair: people who had work were stationary and people who didn’t moved around. I tried to do a bit of both. Had a fantastic conversation with Collette and Colin Bate about designing for user motivation and psychology. Did a bit of show-and-tell myself which launched a discussion with Matthew Nish-Lapidus about the tools that we use, and the advantages and disadvantages of them. I need to give Indesign and Mindjet a try. Annie Tat also had an interesting story of a info visualization project she did where she incentivized people to participant in a usability test by giving out postcards of visualizations that their activity generated. How appropriate!
And that brings the second day to a close! Thus far, I feel that the talks are a little theoretical. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to fight tooth-and-nail with management about the value of user driven design, there would be an infinite amount of resources, and no overhead between the different teams. Yet this is the reality. I hope tomorrow there would be more techniques and strategies that we could use to deal with these constraints.
Crossposting from Sensorial'Org