UI DESIGN GUIDE - Web Application Design, Design Examples, Design Lessons » design mentality

SXSW 2010 – Day 4

uidesigner — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:40:55 +0000

Seductive Interactions:

The day has started and it’s been a crazy morning. Stephen Anderson a local Dallas person, is ready to speak. I’ve seen the presentation online. I think it’s much better in person the nuances you get from the live version is well worth it. Stephen will be speaking at Big D in may.

Usability? Meh. Let’s talk about persuasion. Are you designing serendipity, arousal, rewards and other seductive elements into your applications? We’ll discuss specific ways that sites like Dopplr, iLike and LinkedIn leverage basic human psychology to motivate and shape online behaviors.

Speaker: Stephen Anderson

Sensory Integration
Novelty
Social Proof
How to get bounce rate down
increase #registered Users
The ILIKE example – Encouraging more interaction with your new application.
- user goals / business goals -
- immediate feedback loop, but it’s not beat into your head
- visual excitement
- pattern recognition
- recognition versus recall – as opposed to using
- Interactive games – that entice users to use the service.
  - Social Interaction to bring in the game against friends
  - Addictive and fun interaction – “The key here is to make sure the interaction is exciting to use, but not even promoted as such” – I think this is the key here to making an interaction in a social game reach the next level of user, to regular user, to fanatic, to social distribution of an app.
  - Social Proof
- Increasing the motivation factor – to purchase into psychological actions
- Starting design process from a different place.
- “Salting the tip jar” - encourages others to donate more.
- Product testimonials – I think you have to go beyond this execution method.
- Netflix has good examples
- Curiosity teasing with information
- Sabre Interactive – INTERNAL community TOOL wiki adoption less than 10% social internal tool 60%
  - reputation
  - rewards
  - limited druation
  - status
- Conference Signup Page -
- Foodspotting -
- Plugin for outlook – adds point system that weights e-mails and you have points at a set limit
- Adding levity to copy – “” This is my own note: you have to be careful with this depending on your audience.
- Tossing in or setting up default data sets…….
  - Ownership Bias
  - Feedbacks
  - Playfullness
- DOpplr: Example – traveling site. [pattern recognition, gifting]
  - delighters
  - Personal velocity
  - the logo changes – the color does – color signfies cites that you attend
  - Travel report for last year
- Method Cards:

Resources:

Here are some of my own resources I’ve found these to tie into all of the above.

Fun Theory – http://www.funtheory.com

My Resources

UI Design Lessons: A UI Designer in an Agile World, Get Me Out of Hell! – Part 1

uidesigner — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:48:05 +0000

When I travel to conferences and speak with people about their agile UX experiences I come across a lot of repeat questions. Most of these pleas for help are about time management, rapid design sketching, traditional usability approaches, group design mentality, lack of support for UI development, and let’s not forget meeting burnout.

Even today UI designers hear the word AGILE and there mind is flooded with demon visualizations straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Why has this methodology caused so many headaches to UI Designers world wide? Why are they terrified? Can we beat them, or should we join them?

Generally speaking 90% of what a UI designer hears about AGILE comes from an AGILE practicing programmer that has succumbed to the second circle of hell and revels in the fact that you must join them. Let’s face it as UI, Usability Specialists, Graphic Designers, etc.. we work in a different creative zone. A zone hard for many developers to understand – Even if they want to understand.

Well, that’s about to change as I finally delve into some secrets of success. Rapid UI Design is not easy, it’s usually far from a “done” state, and even in a perfect world, the time to refine and refactor both your code, interactions, and design is hard to come by. In order to survive and thrive you need to look at practical solutions and solve real problems with the process itself. In order to truly excel you need to replace perfectionism with iterative perfection. You need to find a way to be a time traveler amongst all the chaos. You need to turn hell into paradise.

Cue flashbacks…..

Imagine it’s your first day on as a UI designer in a company. You are super excited to work in this vast field only to have your boss tell you.

Boss ”We work in a 1 week iteration agile development environment. ”

At first you may panic, you may want to quit. You may not even have a clue what Agile means . All you know is that you were hired on your UX skills and your damn awesome portfolio. You are still a bit light in the experience department, but are self-motivated and driven by a passion to create memorable, exciting user experiences. You have spent hundreds of hours refining small personal projects, none of them were quite near finished and you always had more time. Even fresh your college professors gave you a generous amount of time to come up with the perfect solution.

You turn towards your new boss and ask the simple question. “What does being an Agile UX designer mean to me?”

Boss “We try to build something quick and let our 200 users test it in the field, we then iterate and make refinement to the functional and design elements of an application. And by quick, I mean rapid development & rapid design.”

Now the sweat starts to build as you think to yourself? What the hell have I gotten myself into? All you know is that you can create semi-decent sketches of vague application functionality, but over the course of a week or longer. Time is your enemy, speed is your weakness.

Your stress level and blood pressure begins to rise. You start to frantically gasp for air, the questions racing in your mind.

How can I produce something that will immediately be built into a functional application.
What about my training in persona usage, usability testing, card sorting, etc…?
What about multiple sketches for each application path?
What about refinement time?
What about missing user stories or requirements
What about running out of time?
What about failure?

The questions just keep on coming as your pulse races. And then the boss chimes in.

“We know it’s hard work, but we know our audience well. We have daily SCRUM meetings, and have a direct channel open to our clients and customers. Our work flow is continuous. You’ll do just fine.”

As you stand there awestruck you are thinking “No…No I wont.”

Fiction Takes The Form of Reality

The preceding story was not fiction it was true story. Imagine you have 1 day to develop a new major application piece. You need to be able to quickly move from ideation to sketches, to wire-frames, and you have a deadline of tomorrow morning? Add on the fact that a large number of programmers are waiting on you? What do you do? At the most, you may get out two different designs. This my friend is how the fast paced world of Agile UI design works. Don’t fear it, but don’t let the process control you. (I’ll talk about this in another article).

There are several key factors that will help you tame the wild beast. Take a breath and let’s start to look at making the chaos manageable.

If you are one of the lucky souls that works on a well structured UX team this process becomes a bit easier (future article Architecture of a UX Team), but if you are a UX Team of One. There is a good chance you just messed yourself. It’s hard to imagine adding on even more roles to an already overloaded work schedule? Estimating time management, researching the problem, defining the problem, identifying primary and secondary application functions, sketching rapid paper-prototypes, understand stories (AGILE), Understand complex work flows, Refining the design, Gaining Buy-in, More Sketch refinement, and ultimately the next day ready to program. Wow! If you have ever experienced week AGILE iterations then you too might have felt this pressure.

So let’s take a look at this EXTREME situation first and then in future articles talk about refining the process itself.

Help What Should I Do First?

For this article lets imagine we are building a fictitious site called “babyspace” It’s a place for babies and is used to track developmental growth (I actually will cover this in another article as well from a design perspective.).

Step 1: Ideation & Brainstorming

You want to begin where you excel and that is brainstorming. Use a whiteboard, paper, napkin, toilet paper, whatever you use but make it fast, but also make sure you keep a copy. (I recently purchased a Livescribe pen and keep all my brainstorming sessions in there with recorded notes. It has helped me remeber the most intricate details of a brain storming session and saved lots of time.)

Hopefully, while you are doing this the business or you yourself have gathered up user stories (small chunks of functionality), and prioritized these. From the stories you need to figure out what relates to the user interface. Take notes and jot down tasks where you see a UI component being designed. This is going to help you immensely when you go to a Sprint or Iteration planning meeting. You want to be armed with as much knowledge as possible in both function , form, technology and design ideas.

Step 2: Ask The Right Questions, Who Needs What? Why Do They Need It? How Does This Benefit Our Users?

Do notbe afraid to ask questions. If you need to refine either your user stories or clarify your own UI tasks. Do it! Sometimes it’s easy to miss a crucial detail when you feel the clock is ticking. It’s better to get as close to the right answer before you start, as opposed to after you start. It’s not fun to rip apart a fully designed application or UI because a crucial story element was missing (Keep in mind this is different then actually refining your UI each iteration).

As a UX designer you want to know these questions so you can put yourself in the shoes of your user. If you utilize personas you want to match up your personas to these user needs and desires (preferably several weeks before the project begins). Always, Always, Always ask the following question:

How is this is benefiting our Customer ?

When a team looses sight of this redirect the conversation. I highly recommend asking this same question of your team in different ways.

“Why would a user need to do this?”
“Why would persona A care about this?”
“Is user really going to have a need to do this?”
“Does this make it easier for our customer?”

Restructuring and rephrasing your question helps to get people to notice the different sides of a story or requirements. It helps to draw out those that talk to much in a meeting and those that don’t talk at all. Engaging and intriguing questions will save you time.

Stay tuned over the next few months as I roll out Part 2 of this article. We will continue to cover lots of other tips and techniques, as wella s more of my process. Soon I’ll be able to notify my readers if my panel (core conversation) is choosen for the 2010 SXSW conference.

Developing an Effective Corporate Social Community with Baby Steps – Part 1

uidesigner — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:33:27 +0000

So let’s talk a bit about effective corporate communities. Social network and social connectivity is all the rage. So much so that it has become the first “thing” some businesses look at when they build out an on line presence, or look to make changes to an existing one.

The truth of the matter is not everyone wants to be part of your happy business centric community. With all of the communities, facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, there are just too many groups and activities for your average customer to get excited about. Not to mention, the community craze has become so widespread that there are even community sites built around harnessing the power of communities. With all this noise how can you expect to succeed in all the mass hysteria?

A Lesson In Speed - Not Design

Think back to the early days of the Internet (cue flashback). Around 1996 every company was racing to get on line. The need for web sites being created was in such high demand designers could hardly keep up. Back in those early days, every company felt they had to either be on line, get on line, or plan a strategy to move business on line. The problem was everyone raced to get “some site up.” The web was a virtual cornucopia of terrible design. One of Pepsi’s original sites back from 1996 was abysmal. Mcdonald’s nearly blinded you with the bright red and splash page complete with animated gif of their 1996 web creation. Chrysler’s crazy menu had us wondering where we should go? The goal back then was to get something on line, anything. It didn’t matter what that “something” was because the market on line was relatively small. There was not nearly enough to warrant the same type of dollars as pumped into traditional marketing campaigns. Thankfully, since the start of the Internet age, businesses have begun to grow up, or have they? Perhaps now instead of racing to be the first on line it’s about the race to build social communities. A race if you will to trap and manipulate users. When is the last time you went to Mcdonald’s and wanted to stay there for 8 hours. If you couldn’t stand doing that in real life why would you do it the web? Companies are exploring and in so doing failing.

The Path To Community Success is Paved In Failure

Rushing to get your community on line is going to drown you in sorrow. It may appear to be cheap on the surface, but beware you are dealing with your social brand. It’s not about plopping a web 2.0 (I hate that term) feature here, and then placing a twitter widget there, mix it up with a profile page and viola! You now have an instant community. These tools in combination are means to end an can only help when your community has a strategy – A driving theme behind the growth and prosperity. Without this failure is imminent. It’s not just about saying we have a corporate blog, or are talking directly with our users. It’s about an attitude driven through-out the core of your web site presence, business model and participatory level throughout your company.

Next we are going to talk about the strategy, and role development, as you make plans to implement your own company social strategy.

UI Design News: Vote For My Agile UX Panel At SXSW 2010

uidesigner — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 02:58:33 +0000

Hello Everyone:

Greetings to all my readers and fans. I recently submitted a panel for the 2010 SXSW interactive conference.

There are over 2000+ panels up for voting this year and only about 300 will be selected. If you want to vote for me, I encourage you to do so. You can find all the information below.

Vote for My Agile UX Panel at SXSW 2010.

Here is a little information about my UX panel.

Title: Rapid Development – Where’s The UX?

The structure and the format is yet to be fully determined, but here are some of the questions I hope to answer as well as provide some detailed examples on.

What does Agile Mean to me as a UX designer?
How Can I succeed as a UX Designer?
How can I cope with rapid iterations?
What steps can I use to improve my own design process?
Where do I fit in the process?
How can I prevent meeting burn out?
What pitfalls should I avoid?
How can I tell I am succeeding in the process?
What does agile mean to developers vs UX designers?
What traditional design methods work and do not work?

In the coming months I have at least one article scheduled to appear and I would love your feedback.

UI Design Dissection: Jack in the Box Self Order Machine

uidesigner — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 18:20:52 +0000

Today for lunch I decided to swing by Jack in the Box. Little did I know I was about to have a unique UI experience. Upon arriving we were introduced to the brand new (at least in this area) self order system. And thus began my customer experience.

My initial reaction was one of horror. I don’t like ordering what is “on the menu.” I like to order a customized combo. All I could keep thinking was how well was this machine and more importantly the touch UI going to hold up to my customer demands? Join me as we dissect the Jack in the Box Self Order Machine.

Employee v.s Machine

Initially, an employee walked us through and showed me the usage of the machine. While my friend stood by and casually joked
“Does the food come out the back?” They all laughed. Personally I thought that would have been awesome, but no they still have to cook it. All the while I was thinking here we are 2009 and no Jetson’s technology yet, oh well. And now back to the topic at hand.

The Interface

The interface was quite pleasant to use. The initial screen had very large buttons with images depicting the various type of food categories. Each touch passed you through to the next round of choices. After studying the menu on the wall I decided I wanted a #6 combo. I noticed the image button with white and black outlined lettering with the word “Combos.” Easy enough so far.

As I proceeded onto my next select the system spoke very loud and let me know my current location (bread crumbs may have helped here). My design brain kicked in at this point and I thought. Awesome so far this system seems to be on the right track, let’s see what else it can do!

I next choose my combo size which the system graciously suggested three size options. I choose “large”, and was asked to choose a drink followed by my side item (free curly fry upgrade for using the system? Hell, yeah that’s incentive!)

Now came the true test, the system presented me with two buttons on the bottom Pay – Customize ( I’m not sure of those were the exact names because I’m trying to remember the system).The employee kindly showed me how to customize the order by touching a “customize” button.

I have sketched out this part of the UI from memory because, I only decided to examine the UI after the fact. Essentially, I was presented a screen with the items I ordered and a scrollable list that allowed me to choose 1-4 options for each of the items on my hamburger. I found the mustard option and set it to none and then clicked “Pay now.”

I was then presented with 3 buttons credit card (no debit card?), cash, and one more which escapes me. And since there was a ton of available real estate on the screen I thought these buttons could be even larger, and the addition of an arrow or text could point towards the actual manual interface options on the machine. In this case the credit card slot.

I proceeded to swipe my card the “wrong way”, like so many of us do. (Perhaps someone could build a better system for swiping cards – double strip maybe?). The ticket then was manually handed from the employee to the person cooking the food. I believe this was simply an issue that the machine wasn’t fully integrated yet with existing point of sale systems at the store. It was odd to have the order ticket handed to the back, but oh well. Next thing I knew my purchase was complete.

The Experience

To my surprise a lot of things went right. The system was friendly and the voice cues left me feeling confident about ordering. I was moved around the screen without issue, and even if the employee wasn’t there I still believe there would have been a fast and rapid transaction.

The UI never left me guessing if the previous selection was done correctly. This was especially important, since I had a pre-conceived notion of what my experience would be like. And like any other user experience that is a tough roadblock to get over.

The customization order screen was clean, not cluttered only showed me the options I could configure. Had I struggled at any point in this process. I would have probably never used this machine ever again.

Many of us have experienced or designed systems that attempt to automate the human interaction and fail miserably. This was not the case with this system. I actually believe I could order faster over time. Jack in the Box could even take this process to a whole other level where the system could recognize your name login ID or something and you could have a one button order of your favorite food. This is actually one of my favorite options on my ATM machine. It saves time and thought.

A Designed Experience With Thought

Let’s face it, the lunch crowd is probably the perfect audience to try out this machine. The only reason I felt guilty using this machine was for the simple fact that it does such a good job. A better job then other automated systems that have been around longer.

How many times have you been trying to race out of the grocery store at the “AUTOMATIC” checkout line only to be thwarted by this “friendly messages.”

“please place the item in the bag.”
“please wait for attendant.”
“please put the item back on the scale.”
“your coupon could not be scanned” (yep happened today)

When it comes to these grocery store touch interfaces it’s about a 50% satisfaction rate for me personally. I would much rather wait in line because the machine just usually ends up telling me to “wait” for human interaction to solve my issue. Beyond that how hard is it for the store to build in extra space so you can have room to put your groceries. Just like in any interface you don’t want the “ERROR: You Are Stupid.” to pop up on the screen.

The next time you are at the grocery store using the automatic checkout. Take a look around and see how many people it takes before the designed interaction of the system fails to produce the required user response. In fact, take a look at other touch interfaces around you and see what their failure rate of failure is.

Conclusion – Cheeseburger Harmony

Jack in the Box put some thought into this design, or at least hired a company that did. And that my friends is what a well thought out interface does.
This is the experience you want all your customers to have. And any UX person worth their cost should know that slapping a UI onto a product, application, etc… is just going to bite you in the ass.

In the case of J&B the return was not only well thought out but delicious.

Blog Response: What’s Your Design Sign?

uidesigner — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:05:39 +0000

This morning I came across a great article on Overdesign for IPHONE applications. While the article focuses primarily on new IPHONE design the same holds true for all aspects of UI Design. Consistency is your key to a usable application.

When you examine say Norton,or Adobe products, the consistent design allows the user to quickly locate and find your way around other different tools in the suite. Furthermore; if you are going to push a consistent product brand your design needs to fall within the expect mental model.

If a stop sign said GO would you know to stop? If the color changed would you know to stop? The same is true for your application. If you as the UI designer changed your cancel and your ok buttons around, would the user be able to predict the next screen interaction?

In the end it comes down to the customer experience. Yes, you still want your application to have that “wow” factor, but don’t sacrifice the “wow” for the now. That is to say don’t interrupt me by changing something I’m used to. And if you DO MAKE ME THINK. You better make damn sure the application is and will continue to be worth my time and money.

Fighting The Brains Trained Responses

Take a look at how hard Bing is working to remove the image of google from our heads. When you think search most users automatically think GOOGLE. When you think Tissue most users think Kleenix.

A consistent application UI can be a powerfull tool when trying to associate your interface with a particular word or phrase. Attaching an easy to recognize and predictable interface is your key to promoting your brand. Without it your just holding up a green stop sign.

UI Design Software Review: Flair Builder v1.6

uidesigner — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:53:29 +0000

Recently, I received a copy of Flair Builder , a new wire-frame, mock and interactive prototyping tool. As many of my readers know, I am very much for utilizing paper prototyping for the first few iterations of a design.

Of course, when I need to present something to a client I try to clean up the design as well as illustrate complex interactions. This is where a tool like Flair Builder can come in handy.

Flair builder is built as an Adobe Flex application and allows for quick and rapid building of both lo-fi and highly interactive prototypes. In total I would estimate it took me about 1 – 2 hours to feel comfortable enough in the application to actually get to building out a project. Projects allow for both multiple pages, as well as master pages which I found to be useful when coping elements across new pages such as a menu
As for the individual components Flair Builder does a good job of giving you some highly interactive pre-built components. Some of these include, dynamic menus, interactive tab structures, graphs, charts, trees, multimedia controls, datagrids, etc…

I was especially happy with how easy it was to align elements on the screen. As I dropped a new element into place a cross-hair was displayed with which you can use to line up your current element with previously placed elements. In addition, most of the interactive widgets provide states for interactivity. These events could be.
modified to perform other interactions when in preview mode, like launch a pop-up .You can view this interactivity by switching to preview in the “View” menu.

The application looks to be in the very beginning stages, but does have a lot offer for quick prototyping. In my tests I was able to do almost everything I wanted to in illustrating my application UI. There were a few small bugs I came across, but nothing that prevented me from getting the initial master page and a few demo pages put together. There is an active community for the tool and the developer seems to be open to suggestions and ideas for interface improvements.

The Good:

Flair Builder did not seem to slow my designs down and made it quick to make interactive mocks that users could read(my handwriting isn’t the best).
Rapidly constructed wire frames with out a hitch
A large assortment of widgets with a variety of interaction states
The ability to group elements and quickly copy an entire group.
Developer has been actively pushing out new builds
Ability to work on multiple projects
Easily able to visually present complex interactions: modals, messages, etc..
Large assortment of icons available to use

The Bad:

No print option directly from the File menu. I frequently want to print out iterations of a design to Paper.
Currently only one theme for the widgets
Doesn’t remember my last saved project

Conclusion

Compared to other tools on the market flair builder is lacking in a few key features, but as of the initial writing of this article. Over 2 new versions were deployed. I also really want to see some advanced printing features in the next version. I like to take and scribble on my mocks. I really feel the strong points of the application are in the interactive prototype features. It’s a strong contender and I look forward to seeing what will come next.

[xrr rating=3/5]

UI Design Challenge: Redesign A Filter Widget

uidesigner — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:33:26 +0000

So I am bringing back the UI design challenge and wanted to try this a bit different. I want this to be an interactive experience. If you listen to my audio blog posts: http://boo.fm/b29310. I talked about recent research I was conducting to locate a new house.

During the course of this research I used many front-end UI interfaces and house databases. I came across one such search that was extremely tricky to use. Notice the image below and see that I am required to type in a zip code, but then I am presented with a GIGANTIC list of options in a multi-line text box (some 100+).

So here is the challenge to the community. If you want to participate great. For this particular problem your goal is to come up with a new and better design for the interface presented. If you want you can post a comment that goes to your design illustration etc, or you can simply e-mail me and I’ll be posting some of the entries here along with author and web site link.

There are no prizes. This is strictly for education purposes. There are no right or wrong answers. On To the challenge!

The Challenge:

Area Search OLD WIDGET

My Example:

In my example below I took two routes. One allows the users results to be filtered down to a smaller number by choosing the area in a drop down. The other route I added some interactivity with the mouse. Based upon the 2 filters search type, and area a user could click the “LET ME DRAW IT” and would be presented a zoomed map of the region. Then they can simply draw a box around the region of interest. Click search and then a number of different things could happen. A user could see houses pop up on the map, they could see a directory listing to the right. The point of this challenge is to design something different and hopefully better than the original

My New Design Prototype

Your Design Examples:

Site News: The State of the UI Design Guide Union

uidesigner — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:32:37 +0000

I’ve been extremely busy working on a new article series, as well as some more work on agile UI articles. Beyond that I have added a few things to the web site. The first was linking my TWITTER account directly to the blog. It provides me another way to quickly provide news, articles, etc without having to write an entire article. You can see this on the right the navigation of the site. I really try to twitter about things UI related.

The second change is I started doing 2-3 minute audio blogs to supplement articles as well as other topics on my mind. The first one was posted today The audio blogs will show up in the twitter feed to the right. You will also see them show up if you are following me.
I plan on doing an article featuring some of the best of my Audio Blogs every month or so. Thank you for your readership. The next upcoming article I’m working on takes a look at a fictious application “Babyspace” as we look at rapidly testing usability and design and knowing what to test when.

Also I will be posting a blog roll sometime in the feature of all the hundreds of blogs I pay attention to. Right now I have about 1000+ articles to skim so I am a little bit behind in my daily routines.

Find Me On Twitter, AudioBoo: @uidesignguide

Big D Design Conference: Dallas Texas May 30, 2009

uidesigner — Sat, 30 May 2009 14:08:56 +0000

Registration was off to a slow start this morning. After finally getting registered met up with some friends. I have some pictures, this post will be updated through out the day with things I find interesting, exciting, revolutionary, or all around RAD.

The keynote is about to start and looks to be good ” True Confessions of a Design Therapist” – NORM COX.

True Confessions of A Design Therapist

Bio: 30 years in the UI field.

The love of titles the title generator: There is a great image of a slot machine breaking up the titles into a random assortment.
I love the fact he talked about the birth of interaction design. The initial creation of typewriter displays here in Dallas Texas for XEROX.

Right now he is going over some details about Markup(1976 Alto) application.

9:32 – There are a lot of god pictures on the screen right now of ICONs from the 1978 – 1979. There is no change with the crazy arguments you have. Norm is referring to the lengthy (Monthly) discussions about the arrow directions on windows…

9:37 – IBM’s recognizatin that user experience was a major part and portion of brand idea and maintenance, Norm becomes consultant in UI design, and they become preachers of UI.

9:39 – he work on the Atlanta Olympics campaign,

9:44 – New project working on some pizza instructional materials. – for a large comapny (pizza hut? perhaps)
“Youre building your pizza upside down” – There is an aesome slide of the worst document for making pizza’s ever.
What’s the real problem with this crazy interface (think of the worst poster you can possibly think of that instructs you to do something and is all messe dup).

My Summary:

Does a title mean you know how to do your job? Or is a title simply a way to pigeon hole someone into a position and silo them off into an area. Then again if you have a title that is not seen to be helpfull or directed to a job in today’s market you just aren’t going to be hired. You can have skill sets outside of the main but without some indicator how does someone get recognized and eventually hired? Food for thought!

I want pizza!

10:07 - Welcome to the New World: When Creative Meets UX

The presntation is as one person put it “pretty lite” I missed blogging becauseI was up on the stage representing one of the users in the “space of user expereince” Basically a visual illustration of your users expertise grouped by product / task experience.

10:36 – 2nd speaker for this session is up here. Talking about brand and experience with Starbucks example.

How do you measure brand and the perecption of branding, because I have a giant speedometer my car goes super fast!

10:42 - http://www.socialmention.com - It was an example of changine a user experience by delivering excity perceptions.

SHowing Word with every option showing – vs notepad - “Comment – Reminder that microsoft is a sponser:) – That was funny thing to point out. Personally I’ll use whatever brand is going to help me get the job done quick and with the least amount of bullshit.

10:48 – My space brand is a mess – I agree, but then again people like living in that mess. So who’s right and who’s wrong?

11:04 : MOved to Usability or Strategc User Experience – Communication Value to Executives:

Usability testing is good – but it is not the end all be all.

Designing the enitre user experience – On a side note: This is one thing that I am a big advocate of. I attempt to design from a systematic approach. Of course this is going to depend upon the system and so I sometimes end up designing from outside in. Sometimes you just cant do that.

Pictures up on ascreen of Peach Tree Accounting, redesigning the UI. Peach tree is still a crazy complicated piece of software. Heck quickbooks has some of the same problems.

11:18 - Peachtree case study, particpartory design,

Why would peach tree fail – Registration process was limiting the product, web registration only during off hours (WOW) 18 screens to register online. No wonder no body wanted to use the product, hi prices,

This was actually a pretty interesting and engaging conversation so far……

11:23 – Turning more to the topic at hand.

“Changing organization structures and incentives to refocus on the customer is hard work.”

11:27 - Switching to Kaare Hanson

Experience design creator at Intuit, changing an organization from the inside out:

Leading, Directing,

11:35 – Brand attributes to tackle,

Complainers > Problem Idenitifier > Problem Solver
Primadonna > Preacher > transparent driver
Narrwoly Focuse d- To connected to the business.

Customer experience map – with starbucks example watching a person inside of starbucks to watch the journey of the person. Tis was kind a neat thing. Speaking of which I must find caffiene!

1:35 -

There was a great sketching session that happened earlier during lunch. It’s now 1:35 but there is one drastic problem there are no PLUGINs!. My laptop is at critical mass, the battery is about die. So what comes next!

1:40 Most people dont know what users experiece design is – Teresah (speaker)

3:02 – I have found a power connector just in time to get into the

Erica O’Grady

Write that down! Van Wilder’s Guide to Social Media

While were waiting for this to start.

Social media consultant do you know that social media pay ranges are from $250-$500 an hour. Wait till the market starts to settle out.

Van Wilder’s 8 Life Lessons

Companies Worry About

– Loosing Control
– Time Constraints
- Trade Secrets
- Buzz words (social Capital)
- Personal Brands

Handle overwhelm with day tight compartments - YOU & Your Company LIfe (picture of phones with past , present, future)

Search A monitor – Chartbeat, Anlaytics, Twellow, Twitter Search, Tynt,

AUTO POSTING: Tweetlater, Blog Posts, Link Posts,

GTD: 4 hour work week

FOCUS: Simple messages, meaningful, realtionships.

3:25 -

Stop Focusing on Influences, focus on the people that have the passion.

Treat everyone like a VIP, Be Remarkable, Become genuinely interested in your clients and customers, promote and support the thigns you clients care about too,

Social Media Failures

House M.D., Quiznos, Motrin Moms, Skittles, Burger King,

CUT IT OUT

Singing up for every social meda site, being inconsistent, focusing too muhc on buzz, too much on the virtual world, Bankrupting social cpaital, too much monetizaton

WUFFEE – Factor (BOOK)

3:45: Social MEdia experiement the Presenter is experimenting with how man people can we really get to know and call friends.

4:04 - What is social medial – LARGER CORPORATIONS

Social media should be a conversation……a GREAT GREAT big one…

Over 41% of Internet users visist socail networks, And a lot more statistics …, Twitter-Jacked it’s a cute name just like the hey day of cybersquatting…

4:08

Same motrin media campaign was shown up above but it was funny because they showed the FAKE video involving what else but boobs!

4:14 – Why should I do the Social Media Thing? - What is the point?
Four-step approach to social strategy (people, objectives, strategy, technology) - FORESTER’s

CUSTOM SEGEMENTATION FOR SOCIAL MEDIA

Creators, critcis, collectors, joiners, spectators, inactives,

4:18 – How Do you do it right?

Engaging, education, introductions, humanizing, brand monitor, early intervention, intelligence gathering, trend watching.

Use For Evil:

astroturfing (fake posts) shouting, preaching,

DELL has down a good job of this: IDEA STORM - I saw this and heard the community manager speaker at SXSW it was a really good idea and shows how social media can expand and be used in your business.

4:27 -

How do I integrate:

start from the inside out, bottom up works better than top down, listen, converse collect knowledge, be committed, be willing to risk,, (this is a key factor risking is a natural issue with social media growth and building.

CLosing DOWN – i’ll have closing remarks about the conference later…

CONCLUSION

Wow, so I just saw the stats about 500 people were in attendance at the 1st annual BigD Design conference. I would consider that a success. There were a few panels that were good and I can imagine that if they choose to do this next year it could only get better. To those that I met today please look me up online I would love to continue our conversation. Also you can follow me on twitter! @uidesignguide.