I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural AIMIA Customer Experience Forum today along with James Breeze (Objective Digital), Stuart Edwards (Profero), Yuri Narciss (Google) and Klaus Kaasgard (Telstra).

As a new group it’s not looking to compete in the same space as the UPA or CHISIG as it’s aimed less at practitioners and more squarely at the broader online business community.

My presentation was on ‘Innovation through Design Research’ which I’ve embeded below.

A few months ago I was invited to present at the UPA (Usability Professionals Association) Sydney’s 2nd anniversary party alongside the excellent Cameron Adams who talked about the design of Google Wave.

Having presented a few case studies ,over the course of the year, I decided to take a different approach to this talk and explore a more blue sky topic. In this case - the progression away from the Direct Manipulation paradigm towards Indirect Manager via Intelligent User Interfaces and the Semantic Web.

I’ve only now got around to posting it here, better late than never!

I was fortunate enough, this year, to be able to present a session at UX Australia.  The aim of the talk was to describe a methodology we applied at NDM to modelling user activities, behaviours and philosophies through the use of a mental model.  This mental model (and other associated artefacts including personas, workflows etc) was generated through the use of cultural probes.  You can find out more about what we did in the presentation below.

Online Advertising: Factors That Influence Customer Experience
“In this article, I’ll discuss the cognitive elements at the intersection of advertising and human behavior. By taking an approach to advertising that looks at the impact psychological factors have on customer behavior, I’ve learned that customers respond directly to online advertisements, as we can see from their emotions, behavior, and interactions on the Web.”

How to take great notes during user testing sessions
Suze ingram explains her technique

Fluid’s Persona template and analysis of other’s persona templates
“This persona format was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas. The format chosen was based on the competitive analysis of many persona examples”

Writing headlines wrong
“Are there a collection of common mistakes that bloggers and content marketers make with their headlines — mistakes that we can help you overcome?”

Last week Josua Porter posted a thought provoking post The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for. It suggested looking at existing designs for the cause of unwanted user behaviour. This made sense to me, but the debate in the comments and some follow up tweets from Joshua reminded me that designers have a tendency to get caught up in the interface/interaction design & neglect the “design” & utility of delivered content or service.

This relisation caused me to take note of some recent posts on the issue of content design & track down some older helpful items.

• Christopher Detzi writes an excellent post on The Content Conundrum, “The content that sits inside of our design framework is often the final arbiter of success, yet we sometimes diminish its importance and separate ourselves from it. The more we separate our design activities from content development, the greater the risk of design failure.” He puts forwars some great ideas for dealing with the problem chief amongs themfor me “(Really) Collaborate with your content partners”
• Karen McGrane has a presentation on SlideShare called Content Strategy: Content is King! “Why do users visit a website? Most likely it’s for the content. Then why is content strategy the most neglected aspect of user experience design?”
• Erin Kissane writes about Content Templates “A content template is a simple document that serves two purposes: it’s a paragraph-level companion to your website’s wireframes (or other IA blueprints), and it’s a simple, effective means of getting useful information from your experts to your writers.”

For those working in the design research field, check out the Digital Research Tools Wiki.  It’s a very rich resource of tools, predominantly used in academia, but which have application for practioners.  Now, if only there was the ability for users to recrod their evaluation of these tools.

The kid’s view: Giving up my iPod for a Walkman & Twitter is for old people, work experience whiz-kid tells bankers - & a cautionary note that the “The plural of anecdote is not data”

The behavior you’re seeing is the behavior you’ve designed for
“It’s a simple statement, really. All it means is that what is happening on your web site or in your web application is a result of the current design you’ve created.” -Interesting discussion in the comments too about whether content is seperate to design & which is responsible for behavior

100 Years of Design Manifestos
30+ design related manifestos from 1909-2009

The Effect of Mobile Communication on our Culture
“When considering how you serve your industry, how you can grab the attention of prospective customers, inspire your staff, or find other ways to solve people’s problems, you need to factor in the ways mobile devices are reshaping our culture. You can’t fight these new behaviors, you can only adapt to turn them into opportunities instead of barriers.”

“Best Bets” functionality for search systems
A discussion of the pros & cons of the Best Bets design pattern

Triumph of the Default
“One of the greatest unappreciated inventions of modern life is the default.”

You Can’t Innovate Like Apple
A good summary of what’s known about how Apple innovates.

Chroma-Hash
“a sexy, non-reversible live visualization of password field input”

Qualitative Research Puts the Human Touch in Digital Out-of-Home Content

If  you are interested in how Agile Development & User Experience design can work together (especially for media organisations) you should follow Leisa Reichelt as she posts about the implementation of Drupal as a Content Management System for the Economist.

She’s already posted about “Sprint One” in which she outlines her very hectic sounding weekly schedule:
- Day One: Research
- Day Two: Planning, Designing & More Research
- Day Three: Design, and setting up next week’s research

Also interesting is the ongoing investigation into whether content editing should occur via a seperate “traditional ‘Admin System’ interface” or via “entirely ‘in place’ editing”.

Just spotted a link to this website on Twitter (thanks @janepyle). Other than to progress beyond the instructions on the first screen (and the startburst interrupt poll) there is no clicking involved, only almost gestural movements of the mouse.

It’s kinda weird at first but you soon get used to it.

What do you think?

It’s a sad day for the USiT team, we’re losing our big toe. Stephen is moving on and whilst this is a great loss to the team, we wish him all the best.

I for one can say I have enjoyed working with, and learning from, Stephen and that his expertise and camaraderie will be sorely missed.

This is an interesting post from www.Baekdal.com, not least because of the interesting visualisation which tries to examine how and where people have and will get information / news in the future.

Visualisation of news sources over time (with permission www.baekdal.com)

It’s an fascinating visualisation, I’m not sure I agree with everything on there (or the use of a variable timescale), but there are some good ideas and things to discuss, such as the suggestion that social networks will provide less “news” in the future and that “social news” (news straight from the people who make it) will rise in importance.