I didn’t want to to wait too long before I got some of my initial thoughts written down about this year’s IA Summit. I could recap all of the sessions I attended, and I still may, but there are others that will likely do it better than me. I swear that in another life, Luke Wroblewski was a court reporter for how quickly he posts his recaps of events. And then, of course, there’s the tireless Jeff Parks, who is the podcast guru and already has two of the keynotes up on Boxes and Arrows. Thank you to you both.

So instead of recapping events right away, I want to share something that I’ve been thinking about for some time. But first, a quick reflection on the 2010 IA Summit…

Why 2010 Was My Favorite IA Summit to Date

Quite simply, the 2010 IA Summit was my favorite because of the breadth of content, the variety of people attending, and the positive vibe of the conference (admittedly, I purposefully steered away from certain venues). I loved the many conversations I had and the privilege I had to meet both old and new acquaintances. There were no hangups about job titles or job roles. There was no need to “define the damn thing” (at least in the sessions I attended). The sessions were diverse and attracted professionals who possessed varying levels of expertise in all kinds of UX skills. Although she closed the Summit, Whitney Hess injected a level of positivity (as she did last year) that was infectious. I know some have offered criticism about the administration and logistics of the event, but I’m pretty easy going. Quite frankly, my focus was on content and conversations, and both were excellent.

Now’s the Time to Put the Bickering to Rest

I’ve gone to the last 4 IA Summits. In 2009 I was disappointed with the tone. It was as if 2009 was the year of bickering among UX professionals. And yes, I do proudly use the term “user experience,” because it’s not only information architects who attend this conference. Likewise, it’s not just interaction designers who attend the Interaction conferences or usability specialists who attend the UPA conferences. Why do you think different people with different job titles go to different conferences? There could be a variety of reasons. Perhaps TITLE A would like to grow his or her skills in or understanding of PRACTICE B. Maybe TITLE B likes relationships s/he has formed with the fine folks who PRACTICE A in the A CONFERENCE.

The problem I saw in 2009 was that people became so hung up on job titles and defining themselves. Why is there such a strong need to claim ownership over tools and techniques and pedigrees? If there is any fault with the conference itself, perhaps the IA Summit should be renamed using more inclusive UX terminology – perhaps the “Information Design” conference. After all, the fruits of our collective labor is to make stuff that collects, processes, and/or transmits information. That information may be 1s and 0s of a digital solution or it may be the information processing that takes place in my own head when I want to interact with a designed physical object. I liken our varied professions to the culinary arts. Here’s how I described it in response to Dave Malouf last year:

“How about this metaphor: Someone in the culinary or food services industry may refer to him/herself as a “chef” but we know this is not an accurate term. It is an easy term to use when “talking to the outside world” but it does not fully articulate his or her skills. Is this person an executive chef, a sous chef, a station chef, a pastry chef, a pantry chef? One could even argue that a pastry chef works on an entirely different “product.”

Now, do each of these roles have similar goals despite possessing different skills? Sure. Are some roles more skilled than another? Yes. Is one role more important than the other? It’s debatable. Can one person who wears one of these hats also wear another? Sure.

Now although you’ll likely pick apart my metaphor, my simple point is to say, “So what?” Yes, there are both similarities and differences. That’s why we use “UX” to describe a whole cadre of “tools” that can be used. I think it becomes confusing when we intermingle the skill (i.e., interaction design) with the identity, or how we identify ourself to others (i.e., I am an interaction designer). It’s the label we place on ourselves that is too limiting, IMHO.”

So Now What?

I think now is the time to shut up and stand up. Acknowledge that all of our skills are vital to solving problems. Instead of treating our differences like a pissing contest, let’s look at it like a wedding. I’ll make the appetizer, you make the entree, and s/he’ll make the wedding cake. It’s a party we should celebrate!

Let’s not get too caught up in basing our own self identity and our own self importance by what we do for a living. I have strengths and weaknesses as a professional in this “UX” landscape. If I don’t have one tool, I either get it or ask someone who has that skill for help. Perhaps the real discussion should focus on needed skills for the profession and knowing when it’s worthwhile to acquire them vs. asking someone for help. So, I think now is the time to lay our weapons down, stand up, and celebrate. Celebrate our differences. Celebrate how we complement one another. After all, if we can acknowledge that we cannot do it all or always get it right, then it becomes easier to ask for help and easier to offer help. Then let’s consider attending “UX” conferences such as the IA Summit, the UPA Conference, the Interaction Conference, et al. Then consider attending conferences that are outside of the UX world. Conferences that complement. Maybe even conferences that do not appear to have relevance to the practice of IA. Think about why you attend conferences and then choose wisely. Go to make or grow friendships. Go to learn new things. Go to expand your horizons. Go and present. Present using your own life knowledge. Teach the rest of us concepts that are outside of the traditional UX makeup but can add to our learning. Just go, but go with civility and humility.

I’ll leave you with a song of inspiration, a song I was listening to on the way home from work…yes, the day after I returned from the Summit, all tired and thrown off by the time zone change…it’s a song that inspired me to dust off my blog and say something to you today.

[Jars of Clay | "Weapons" | Lyrics]

Source of Ideas

Hinton, A. (Feb 11, 2009). The UX Tribe.
Hinton, A. (Mar 26, 2010). What am I?
Klyn, D. (Mar 19, 2010). There is no such thing as Jesse James Garrett.
Malouf, D. (Feb 11, 2009). Enough UX chumbaya!!!
Morville, P. (Apr 13, 2010). 5 Minute Madness.
Resmini, A. (Mar 27, 2009). Big rock, small rock, and chorizo sausage.
Saffer, D. (Mar 29, 2009). A Fool and a liar.

Nice use of Twitter – @shorterjakob:

New Alertbox: IxDA mailing list people are f%&$ idiots: http://tr.im/nOtp

So I saw some retweets of this synopsis of Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox. What made me laugh is that it’s so true. Folks in the UX industry should know that the best designs are those accompanied by user observation and other types of user feedback, but some design teams feel that such UX methods slow the process down and are unnecessary. In addition, the reality is that for some teams, not every design can be tested or observed, so designers are often left with providing “expert review.” Unfortunately, expert review is not necessarily a stopgap measure when it’s success as a tool is not as proven as other methods. I think we as designers and UX professionals need to be reminded that although we may be very talented, if we are not the target user, we cannot assume we have the right design unless there is validation by observing our users. Nielsen brings all folks in the UX industry back to earth by reminding us that the user is always right.

In addition, what Nielsen and Jared Spool emphasize is that there’s nothing more important than observing users. Nielsen argues that even observing 2 users with the design can dramatically influence your success (compared to expert review) at deploying the best design. Nielsen’s point is not to denigrate interaction designers. Instead, his point is OBSERVE, OBSERVE, OBSERVE. Design without observation is merely art. Design w/ observation is a good product.

Tags: [Jakob Nielsen, usability, expert review, Partial Recall, user observation, interaction design, IxD]

I was fortunate to be able to participate in the first show. Here was the question I posed,

“I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?”

Basically, I wanted to figure out how the team could explore a lot of ideas before widdling down these ideas to a select few. Listen to what Jared and Robert have to say: Userability Podcast #1: Exploring More Design Alternatives.

Tags: [userability, Robert Hoekman, Jared Spool, UIE, usability, user experience, web design, design, podcast, Partial Recall]

Every millisecond counts.

Nothing is more valuable than people’s time. Google pages load quickly, thanks to slim code and carefully selected image files. The most essential features and text are placed in the easiest-to-find locations. Unnecessary clicks, typing, steps, and other actions are eliminated. Google products ask for information only once and include smart defaults. Tasks are streamlined.

Speed is a boon to users. It is also a competitive advantage that Google doesn’t sacrifice without good reason.

User experiences are now often defined, not only by ease-of-use and fun-to-use measures, but by speed. As a user experience designer, it’s not my job to make the system perform faster, but I can include designs that take speed into consideration. Consider Jakob Nielsen’s advice regarding response time:

1. 0.1 second is about the limit for having the user feel that the system is reacting instantaneously, meaning that no special feedback is necessary except to display the result.
2. 1.0 second is about the limit for the user’s flow of thought to stay uninterrupted, even though the user will notice the delay. Normally, no special feedback is necessary during delays of more than 0.1 but less than 1.0 second, but the user does lose the feeling of operating directly on the data.
3. 10 seconds is about the limit for keeping the user’s attention focused on the dialogue. For longer delays, users will want to perform other tasks while waiting for the computer to finish, so they should be given feedback indicating when the computer expects to be done. Feedback during the delay is especially important if the response time is likely to be highly variable, since users will then not know what to expect.

I’ve had a few conversations with my company’s Performance Engineering team to discuss the overlap between performance and user experience. The work the User Experience team focuses on is how to create designs and interactions that are intuitive, consistent and desirable. We can work to limit the number of clicks and page loads, but we do not have control over how fast the system should respond to user interactions with the product. Enter our Performance Engineering team. They are responsible for making sure that our products are fine tuned so that human-computer interactions are as efficient as possible. But what happens when lag time is unavoidable? We use the progress indicator to provide visual feedback to the user that they must wait.

Obviously, the goal is to keep response times short so that a progress indicator is not needed. However, there are times when it is necessary to use them. Consider the 4 progress indicator types as explained by Steven C. Seow, Ph.D., in his book entitled, Designing and Engineering Time.

Dr. Seow provides the following rule of thumb:

Beyond 2 seconds, some form of progress indication is necessary. Between two and five seconds, a simple indication to the user that the system is working is typically sufficient (Class B). The indication can be a typical “busy” animation or a simple line of text that indicates that work is underway, such as “Saving document.” Beyond five seconds, it is critical to provide some form of active progress indication to the user (Class A or C). This doesn’t mean that the indication cannot take momentary pauses, but it does mean that it must communicate and assure the user that progress is being made. Another class of responsiveness (captive) comes into the picture beyond ten seconds. When a process takes more than ten seconds, you must include an “escape hatch” (typically a Cancel button) to enable users to abort or ignore the process. For durations reliably beyond five minutes or so, consider providing notification of completion (Class D).

After speaking with our Performance Engineering team, we wondered how to engage users when they may be forced to wait. Since we are not in an eCommerce product space, we do not need to fill the space with advertizing. We have the opportunity to display information that is useful, and potentially actionable, to the user.

In your designs have you had to account for wait times? Have you worked with engineers to come up with solutions that focus on alleviating wait times and design appropriate user wait feedback?

Tags: [user experience, ux, ucd, performance, progress indicator, Partial Recall]

This was the second IA Summit that I’ve attended. Last year I took my wife. It was great because, as parents of twin toddlers, it was a welcome vacation and respite from the responsibilities that parenting entails. Although I willingly chose to spend free time with my wife, I wasn’t able to connect with people in my professional network as much as I would have hoped. This year I attended on my own, and I found the “conference” part of weekend much richer as I was able to participate in extended conversations with colleagues. I also found that Twitter became an easy substitute to the obligatory business card for creating connections. “Hello” to all of my new friends.

Resources

There are already a number of photos, slides, and podcasts available from the event. Podcasts are supposed to be uploaded to Boxes and Arrows, but I haven’t seen anything yet (I will update this post once I see them available).

Program: Main Conference Presentations
Social Network: Crowdvine
Photos: [Flickr Group: IA Summit 2008 | By Flickr Tag: IASummit2008, IASummit08, IASummit]
Slides: [SlideShare Event: IA Summit 2008 | By SlideShare Tag: IASummit2008, IASummit08, IASummit]

Quick Takeaways

There are already a number of recaps popping up everywhere, so I will try to post a little bit about what I learned at the sessions I attended. I’ll try to provide as many links as I can. Note that the sessions below are not the complete list – only those sessions I was able to attend. Please refer to the resources above to view the entire listing of sessions.

Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design (Jared Spool, Bio) [Slides] – Replace user-centered design with informed design that leverages refined tricks and techniques.

The Three Questions:

1. Vision – “Can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?”
2. Feedback – “In the last 6 weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use yours or a competitor’s design?”
3. Culture – “In the last 6 weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?”

Exploratory search and folksonomy: Exploration paths in social tagging systems (Tingting Jiang, bio) [Slides] – Information seeking in social tagging systems is largely exploratory.

Integrating web analytics into information architecture and user-centered design (Hallie Wilfert, bio) [Slides] – You don’t need to be a statistician, but you need to effectively communicate the “what” people do by successfully predicting “why” people exhibit certain behavior patterns on your site.

Inspiration from the edge: New patterns for interface design (Stephen Anderson, bio) [Slides] – Just say NO to default thinking – look beyond immediate industry rivals for innovative design ideas.

Blind ambition: How the accessibility movement overlooks sensory experience (Claude Steinberg, bio) – Creating accessible sites becomes about making the thing work rather than how the site makes the user feel. Ask users what they get out of the site – you can create an auditory equivalent to describe the experience. Referenced sites from Claude’s presentation include: Hyundai, JK Rowling.

How to be a user experience team of one (Leah Buley, bio) [Slides] – Generate a lot of ideas, assemble an ad hoc multi-disciplinary team, pick the best ideas. Mix and match word associations. Keep an inspiration library. Business needs + user needs = design principles.

Designing your reputation system in 15 10 easy steps (Bryce Glass, bio) [Slides] – Bryce answers the following 10 questions: 1. What are your business goals? 2. What community spirit do you want to encourage? 3. What motivates your community members? 4. Which entities will accrue reputation? Rate the thing, not the person. 5. Which inputs should you pay attention to? Action > Affects What? > Indicates What? 6. How transparent should the rules be? 7. Should reputations decay from non-use? Yes! 8. Are there cultural aspects you should consider? 9. For what contexts will users accrue reputation? 10. What presentation pattern is appropriate?

Search Patterns (Peter Morville, bio) [Slides (with audio) ] – Behavior Patterns: narrow, search & browse & ask, pearl grow | Design Patterns: faceted navigation, federated search, best bets, category match, auto-suggest, contextual search | Well executed search patterns can: increase conversion rates, increase site traffic, decrease customer service needs.

Content page design best practices (Luke Wroblewski, bio) [Slides (4 MB PDF)] – We optimize for static structures but need to consider dynamic movement within a site. How much traffic comes from within the site and how much from the web ecosystem: communication, display surfaces, content creators, content aggregators, search. Takeaways: 1. Content – A page should be about the content, not site overhead. Keep page links and titles in sync. Use visual hierarchy principles. Engage people in related content. Be brief – show content highlights (i.e., CNN includes “story highlights” for those with short attention spans). 2. Related – Access to what matters now vs. access to everything. 3. Context – well-executed visual design adds credibility and elicits trust.

Extending the gaming experience to conventional UIs (John Ferrara, bio) [Slides (6 MB PDF)] – Game characteristics include: static objectives, environmental constraints, formal constraints, interface-based arbitration. Games are compelling because: operant conditioning (rewards and punishments), currencies, joy of interactivity, audio/visual sophistication. Games can solve real problems (e.g., Google Image Labeler, Yahoo! Answers). Game patterns: 1. Physical presence of the user. 2. Temporal motion. 3. Adaptive experiences. 4. Uncertainty. 5. Micro/macro readings (show details and context). 6. Health bars. 7. Tutorial levels. 8. Collaboration.

Panel: Practical prototyping (Todd Zaki Warfel, bio; Chris Conley, bio; Anders Ramsay, bio; Jed Wood, bio) – Less important the specific tool and more important to get something out quickly for the conversation. Start with paper prototyping. Then you might want something higher fidelity to show behavior, interactions. Use prototypes to explore alternatives, not to get it right. Build 3-5 things that are as different as you can. You make decisions based on how you feel or experience it, which is what you are trying to design. Prototype to brainstorm vs. prototype for final. Requirements writing is broken. corrupt and fundamentally flawed. Have prototypes delivered with requirements hand-in-hand.

Web site maturity cycles (Vera Rhoads, bio) [Slides] – Web sites can be evaluated using a defined measurable life cycle (similar to capability maturity methodology): Level 1: web presence and established information delivery, Level 2: information processing, Level 3: knowledge creation, Level 4: business value clearly identified and derived, Level 5: true excellence through an integrated, personalized, and collaborative environment. Company Categorizations: size, business model, web property existence, precedence, strategic prioritization, sufficient funding.

Audiences & artifacts (Nathan Curtis, bio) [Slides] – Our documentation needs to be design and user-centered just like the resulting products that we help create. We need to map the right artifact to the right audience. Deliverable life cycle: 1. preparation, 2. concepts, 3. variations, 4. details. Try to be more structured, focused, predictable, prepared, investigative, mechanized. Collaborate on deliverables, Formalize deliverables, automate deliverables.

Designing with patterns in the real world: Lessons from Yahoo! And Comcast (Christian Crumlish, bio; Austin Govella, bio) [Slides] – Do design patterns stifle innovation? No. 1. Avoid reinventing the wheel. 2. Promote a familiar user experience for customers. 3. Free up designers to do innovative leading-edge work. The Essence of the Pattern – 1. Problem (what does the user want?). 2. Solution (How to meet the user’s needs). 3. Context (When to use it). 4. Examples (pictures, links). Link to related specs and documentation. How to contribute: 1. Check the library, 2. Give feedback, 3. Suggest a pattern, 4. Help write or review a pattern. Rating the Patterns – levels of 1. working solution, 2. best practice, 3. The Yahoo! way. Keep patterns fresh.

Data driven design research personas (Todd Zaki Warfel, bio) [Slides] – Personas make sure that design matches user and business goals. Personas communicate: knowledge, activities, interests, influencers, (what would influence you to use the system or prevent you from using it) goals, and pain points. Todd feels that the “Persona DNA” is the most important aspect of the persona (see slide 27).

Checking the feel of your UI with an interaction audit (Peter Stahl, bio; Josh Damon Williams, bio) [Slides] – Recommendations: 1. Affordances – consistent visual cues that an interaction is being offered (e.g., click link inconsistencies). 2. Tasks – consistent path to accomplish an immediate goal (e.g., filter inconsistencies). 3. Data object – representation of a data record or other piece of data (e.g., inconsistencies in representing eBay members). Interaction Goals – 1. low learning curve 2. consistent cues for actions 3. predictable behavior of affordances 4. instant recognition of interface elements 5. allow (eBay) member content to shine. Create interaction audit teams to check for consistent interactions (e.g., Clickers, Submitters).

Tags: [IA Summit, Partial Recall, information architecture]

Tags: [Blackboard, Partial Recall, usability, interaction design, information architecture, ui, ux, ixd, user experience]

This morning I went to the Apple home page to find one of their commercials. I went to search and noticed that the behavior mimicked Apple’s own operating system and the “suggest” features available in browser search boxes. What I liked is that it not only offered suggested terms but displayed media previews along with the term. I realize this isn’t especially groundbreaking, given the amount of AJAX development in recent years. However, it reminded me that as Peter Morville analyzes search patterns, another to add to the list is the behavior of providing suggestions before a user has even executed a search. This might remedy the need to distinguish between a basic and advanced search, or the need to revise a search after seeing results. Notice the screen capture image (click image to see original) where I entered “ads” as my search term.

Tags: [Apple, search patterns, search, Peter Morville, Partial Recall]

Although I am a firm believer in the power of nonverbal communication, I would have liked the authors to include more indicators of positive responses. This attempt, however, has inspired me to come up with my own heuristic for “desirability.” Right now I’m also beginning to look at the article referenced recently by Victor Lombardi. More to come…

Tags: [heuristic, emotion, desirability, user experience, usability, Victor Lombardi, Partial Recall]

The other day someone invited me to connect (no, not my wife, like the picture depicts), and I was impressed with both the use of dynamic button names and the behavior of providing help text when I hover over one of the buttons. Notice that the button dynamically includes my wife’s name (click picture to view larger image). Also, note the hover text.

I like this method of providing contextual help, particularly because it explains what the resulting action will be when the user clicks the button.

Tags: [LinkedIn, web design, ui, information architecture, usability, user experience, Partial Recall]

This year your peers and industry experts will speak about how topics such as social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies, and a wide range of IA tools and techniques can help as users ‘experience information’.

– April 10-14, 2008 (Miami, Florida USA)” – (About the Summit)

I went to last year’s summit and found it very informative. You might consider checking it out – it’s in Miami!

(hat tip: InfoDesign)

Tags: [iasummit2008, information architecture, Partial Recall, user experience, usability, interaction design]