CanUX09 Done!
The conference wrapped up yesterday. While we had a line up a great speakers, by the last day I was a little overwhelmed. So much information to absorb, conversations to record, my brain needs a little time to digest.
Before the last day of the conference, I should note that I took one last trip to town in the morning. I’m amazed at my new-found orientation skills. Not much interesting to note except I came across ravens and magpies. Ravens? HUGE, black, scary birds.
Interesting lessons to take home:
- From Chad Fournier on Agile UX: Doing research, case studies, usability tests yields extraordinary results. Like improving call centres wait time by 17%, and saving the company $10M. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either. You can do testing with wireframes, implement small features at a time. When you’re trying to cut cost, hire more UX people! Deliver what your clients really need, not what you think they need. It’s the “measure twice, cut once” principle.
- From Alex and Matthew’s war stories on Akoha: Design isn’t a technique, or a tool, or a method. It’s a mindset, and it can be trained. Which also means it takes patience, perseverance, and practice. It’s a little like cooking. It requires a culture, trial and error, but it also allows for flexibility.
- Kristina Halvorson totally hit this out of the ballpark. This woman was enthusiastic, sassy, intelligent, funny, inspiring… Lessons learned:
- IA and content strategist are best friends! None should operate without the other. They need to determine what, why, and tonality of the content.
- If there’s one person that should be in all the discussion, it is the copywriter.
- Content is not a feature.
- Copy is hard to write.
- Death to Lorem Ipsum! Content informs the design, not the other way around. If content can’t be done first, then it should be done simultaneously with design.
- Content has a strategy: plan, create, deliver, govern.
- Allow for divergent thinking. It demonstrates trust in your team, and allows for the exploration of different ideas. (It’s imperative, really, that brainstorming is androgynous so that it can be done in parallel.) Then encourage convergent thinking. Facilitate how all those different ideas and perspectives can come together to produce something novel.
- From Rahel Bailie on Content Strategy: there’s different genres to content (persuasive, entertainment, instructive) and different delivery (formats, outputs, print, browser, utility). The content for each combination is different. You can’t expect to use the same content for the web that you would use for print.
- Peter Merholz was the perfect last speaker, summarizing all the big concepts that the conference had to offer:
- It’s time to upgrade your mandate from user experience (on the web, on the application) to customer experience (a multi-channel experience from the website to the call centre, to the storefront, everything…) throughout the entire organism that is your business. You need everyone, everyone to believe in your vision. Once you’ve truly achieved participatory design, you transform your employees to your advocates. And it resonates with your customers.
- Sometimes, it’s a CEO (say, Steve Jobs) that marshals that vision into an experience, sometimes it’s a mantra (Tivo), other times it’s a thing (like a pill bottle). It’s hard to convince an organization that it needs to change in order to make that one legendary thing. It’s more concrete to show them that thing and the things they need to do to make that happen.
- To this point, it reminds me of the story of TOM’s Shoes.
- “Communicating UX clearly to others is as important as understanding it yourself.” (- @burgertime) “Because it’s going to be a slog.” (- @peterme)
On the way home, we stopped by the city of Canmore. Same amazing, wooden architectures all around. Such grand buildings! And stars, oh my gosh, so many stars.
Met so many intelligent and amazing people: Collette, Yvonne, Matt, Kelly, Murray, Colin, Annie, Darrell, Kaylen, Karen, Rahel, Ammneh, Jess, Dennis, Samantha, Sam, Mikael, Jerome, Lawrence, Loren, Chris…
It’s my last day in Alberta. Currently in the Country Inn and Suites in Calgary. I can’t wait to get home.
Thank you nForm for hosting and flying me to beautiful Banff!
Crossposting from Sensorial'Org