How Ford got social media right – the Fiesta Movement

(contributed by Pat)

Grant McCracken delves into Ford’s recent social media success in his Harvard Business Review article…

Ford gave 100 consumers a car for six months and asked them to complete a different mission every month. And away they went. At the direction of Ford and their own imagination, “agents” used their Fiestas to deliver Meals On Wheels. They used them to take Harry And David treats to the National Guard. They went looking for adventure, some to wrestle alligators, others actually to elope. All of these stories were then lovingly documented on YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

One of the creators of the campaign, Bud Caddell, describes the central concept as…

The idea was: let’s go find twenty-something YouTube storytellers who’ve learned how to earn a fan community of their own. [People] who can craft a true narrative inside video, and let’s go talk to them. And let’s put them inside situations that they don’t get to normally experience/document. Let’s add value back to their life. They’re always looking, they’re always hungry, they’re always looking for more content to create. I think this gets things exactly right.

This sounds like an innovative, smart and daring (considering the affect the GFC has had on many large corporations particularly in the auto industry) campaign. I love how they had a good think about it, understood their audience and how they might influence that audience, then created a campaign that is far from the usual social media approach. Hat tip to Grant’s blog where he announced the HBR article and also shares an interview he did with Bud Caddell.

5 Steps to Building Social Experiences

(contributed by Chris)

Erin Malone has published a Boxes and Arrows article on building social experiences…

Nowadays everyone wants social in their sites and applications. It’s become a basic requirement in consumer web software and is slowly infiltrating the enterprise as well. So what’s a designer to do when confronted with the requirements to “add social”? Designing social interfaces is more than just slapping on Twitter-like or Facebook-like features onto your site. Not all features are created equal and sometimes a little bit can go a long way. It’s important to consider your audience, your product—what your users will be rallying around and why they would want to become engaged with it and each other, and that you can approach this in a systematic way, a little bit at a time.

It’s a good, step-by-step introduction to getting a social experience up and running. There is a lot more than this to driving a successful social experience (including seeding it etc) but this covers some of the low level hygiene factors.

The Apparatgeist calls

(contributed by Angus)

The Economist examines global cultural differences in the use and understanding of mobile phones and asks whether these differences will disappear as the innate qualities of the technology (the “apparageist” or “spirit of the machine”) becomes apparent. Reminds me of a Marshall Mcluhan line “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences

Technologies tend to be global, both by nature and by name. Say “television”, “computer” or “internet” anywhere and chances are you will be understood. But hand-held phones? For this ubiquitous technology, mankind suffers from a Tower of Babel syndrome. Under millions of Christmas trees North and South Americans have been unwrapping cell phones or celulares. Yet to Britons and Spaniards they are mobiles or móviles. Germans and Finns refer to them as Handys and kännykät, respectively, because they fit in your hand. The Chinese, too, make calls on a sho ji, or “hand machine”. And in Japan the term of art is keitai, which roughly means “something you can carry with you”.

Crash course on the history of Interaction Design

(contributed by Angus)

Karen McGrane posts four sets of slides from her course on Interaction Design History…

Practitioners in other design disciplines—architecture, graphic design, fashion—would be expected to have some grounding in historical movements and trends. But most people have no formal education in interaction design, and so they’ve never learned the roots of the discipline.

The third set (Week 3) in particular is full of great quotes and images I hadn’t seen before. As she says in the preface of the post it’s important for people doing interaction design today to have some understanding of the history of the field.

Iteration in the animation process at Pixar

(contributed by Angus)

A great quote about the importance of frequent reviews of creative work as it progresses from Pixar president Ed Catmull, speaking at Stanford’s business school:

In the process of mak­ing the film, we reviewed the mate­r­ial every day. Now, this is counter-intuitive for a lot of people. […]

Sup­pose you come in, and you’ve got to put together ani­ma­tion or draw­ings and show it to a famous, world-class ani­ma­tor. Well, you don’t want to show some­thing which is weak or poor. So you want to hold off until you get it to be right.

The trick is actu­ally to stop that behav­ior. We show it every day—when it’s incom­plete. If every­body does it, every day, then you get over the embar­rass­ment. And when you get over the embar­rass­ment, you’re more creative.

It’s not obvi­ous to peo­ple, but start­ing down that path helped every­thing that we did. Show it in its incom­plete form. There’s another advan­tage to that. When you’re done… you’re done.

According to Ed while showing incomplete work is scary and potentially embarrassing it has two very important benefits, it results in better “more creative” work and it means that when the animator/designer thinks they’re finished they really are finished as stakeholders have participated in the process.

Watch the video

Lorum Ipsum is Killing your designs / In defence of Lorum Ipsum

(contributed by Angus)

Two lengthy posts for and against the use of Lorum Ipsum in wireframes and mockups. Personally I side with Karen McGrane as she argues that Lorum Ipsum is not the problem but a symptom of the problem:

The real problem is an overall process that treats design and content as separate tracks without appropriate communication, collaboration, and checkpoints along the way.

Sketch templates

(contributed by Angus)

Ivana Jurčić shares A Collection of Printable Sketch Templates and Sketch Books for Wireframing and Todd Warfel has made available his templates used for his “rapid sketching and peer review/critique” process.

Control Panels!

(contributed by Angus)

Thousands and thousands of beautiful dials and banks of red lights on Flickr – Interaction designer porn?

Webnographers

There’s some great stuff to be found over on webnographers.org for anyone interested in virtual ethnography. Here’s their blurb…

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnography of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

This is a very interesting area of research, and an area in which our team is expanding with each and every project.
(forwarded by Pat)

The 10 dos and don’ts of website development (that every CEO should know)

Over on the FatDUX blog, Eric Reiss shares his top 10 list for management:

[...] the web has become more important than ever as a means of communicating with customers/clients/membership. But I have yet to meet a CEO who likes website development. It makes business leaders uncomfortable. The web experts speak in a cryptic language – CMS, KM, XML, CSS. The site seems to take forever to build, costs more than expected, and invariably provides less value than the organization had hoped.

No one likes signing a big check without some idea as to what they’re getting. So if you’re a business leader, here are a few basic, non-technical tips that will significantly increase your chances for online success. And they let you do what you do best – lead.

There are some good points in there, and the central point of reminding business leaders to not get caught up in the detail, but rather to be leaders is excellent. These tips were obviously learned and refined over many, many client engagements!
(forwarded by Pat)

Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film

Over on Gizmodo, John Herrman discusses Ridiculous User Interfaces In Film, and the Man Who Designs Them…

Designing a fake dashboard for an imagined supercomputer or a hovering control panel for a worldwide surveillance system is a different process than creating a genuinely usable UI. Your goal is to imply things: that a machine is powerful; that a villain is formidable; that the software is intuitive, but that the breadth of its powers borders on unknowable. At no point does real-world usability factor in, and nor should it—this is pure fantasy, for an audience raised on Start Buttons, desktop icons and tree menus

He forgets to mention the “Unix system” from Jurassic Park, possibly the most ridiculous of all of these movie UIs :)
(forwarded by Angus)

Dimensions of design/Against ahistoricity

Adam Greenfield talks about looking beyond the obvious sources of insight and inspiration, including those who have come before us…

Let’s face it: brighter and more sensitive people than us have been thinking about issues like public versus private realms, or which elements of a system are hard to reconfigure and which more open to user specification, for many hundreds of years. Medieval Islamic urbanism, for example, had some notions about how to demarcate transitional spaces between public and fully private that might still usefully inform the design of digital applications and services. By contrast, the level of sophistication with which those of us engaged in such design generally handle these issues is risible (and here I’m pointing a finger at just about the entire UX “community” and the technology industry that supports it).

Even if you don’t like Adam’s writing style, this is a thought provoking piece. Especially interesting was the introductory quote from the book Responsive Environments: A Manual for Designers which outlines how design can actually make people do things – as suggested by Jon Kolko and argued against in the recent Sydney UX book club.
(forwarded by Angus)

Walt Disney’s Creative Organization Chart

Delphine Hirasuna writes about the typically unique way in which Disney went about things, in this case the humble org chart…

The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff? In an idea-based, rather than a manufacturing-based, economy, how should a business organize itself?

(forwarded by Angus)

Content Strategist as Digital Curator

On A List Apart, Erin Scime examines the role of curator in digital media…

When a site launches, your audience arrives to learn more about what you know most about. It’s critical to create a content experience with purpose, that is consistent and contextual. This helps to assert your brand’s authority, establishes relationships with your audience, and secures a return visit based on your content’s value. The content strategist-as-curator is the one who makes this happen. How?

(forwarded by Angus)

Landline phone numbers in electronic forms

Jess Enders shares the results of her research on how to best format phone numbers…

The research findings: one long string is the clear winner. Like the mobile phone numbers, one long string of digits—including area code—was the most common method of data entry: out of 640 landline phone numbers provided by interested research participants, 39% were entered as one long string of 10 digits (i.e. no spaces and no chunking).

(forwarded by Angus)

4 Out of 5 Viewers Leave If a Stream Buffers Once

Janko Roettgers reveals some interesting video-related user behaviour…

More than 81 percent of all online video viewers click away if they encounter a clip rebuffering, according to a new study by Tubemogul. The Emeryville-based video distribution and analytics startup took a close look at 192 million video streams over the course of 14 days to figure out how much rebuffers matter. The result: 6.81 percent of all streams rebuffer at some point, and around 2.5 percent rebuffer twice.

(forwarded by Angus)

How UCD and Agile can live together

David Farkas sets out a framework in which UCD and Agile can work together:

Diagrams are pretty, Gantt charts set expectations, but reality is far from perfect. At the end of the day, a project manager must own the project and there must be some sense of reporting. Depending on the project manager’s background and personal goals there will tend to be a focus towards the needs of UCD or Agile… Finally, friction exists from misaligned expectations from UCD practitioners forcing their methods too late in the game or agile practitioners trying to wean out hard requirements before purpose is fully understood.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Huffington Post wants to add paid tweets to its articles. Will advertisers bite?

(or, an alternate headline offered by one commenter, “HuffPo Sells Remaining Fraction of Soul for Ongoing Revenue Stream”?)

In Advertising Age, Nat Ives reports…

The Huffington Post has started offering marketers the ability to inject their own paid comments among reader comments and place paid Tweets among the live Twitter feeds the site assembles around news subjects and events.

Marketers haven’t bought in yet, but they seem likely to be intrigued. The biggest question is whether marketers and the Huffington Post can execute the program without marring visitors’ experience reading and interacting with the site.

(forwarded by Sophie)

Should journos have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change job?

And, on the subject of journalists tweeting, Mumbrella asks whether journalists should have their Twitter profiles taken from them if they change jobs:

There’s an argument both ways. You could view it in the same way as when a reporter changes newspaper, they’ll take their contacts book with them. I’ve now got business cards and contacts books stretching back 20 years. I’m not sure what use the private phone number for Farnborough ambulance station in the UK would be for me now, but I’ve still got it somewhere.

(forwarded by Sophie)

US universities reject ‘inaccessible’ Kindle e-Book

The E-Access Bulletin reports…

Two American universities have rejected the market-leading Kindle DX electronic book reader as a textbook replacement due to its inaccessibility for blind students. Both Syracuse University in New York State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison have chosen not to use the Kindle - manufactured by Amazon.com - as a teaching-aid, after their own trials found it was not fully accessible.

Interesting lessons for anyone else considering an e-reader device, and who wants to make it useful for as wide an audience as possible.
(forwarded by Pat)

Clients could make better use of research

Adweek recently published an article reporting…

Consumer research is ingrained in the cultures of many large corporations but relatively few are maximizing its use, according to a new study from The Boston Consulting Group [...] In fact, based on a four-stage scale of research development that BCG used to evaluate the 40 global companies it surveyed, nearly 90 percent were in the first or second stage, where research is generally tactical and applied in limited contexts.

This has generated quite a few comments, and criticism, although nobody seems to disagree with the basic sentiment of the report (that research could be more prevalent and better used). What do you think?
(forwarded by Pat)

Map of the design landscape

Over on DesignAday, Jack Moffett shares a timeline visualisation of the major—mostly US—design disciplines created by one of his graduate students.
(forwarded by Angus)

IA tools: storyboards

Matt Hodgson shares his thoughts on storyboards…

Storyboards are a great way to describe a user’s journey, their thoughts, feelings, attitudes, capabilities, behaviours and expectations, throughout a single scenario. They’re light-weight, easy to do, and as a visual tool can be used in workshops or just by a couple of members of the team. They also work perfectly on agile projects because they’re visual and, therefore, an instant placeholder for a conversation.

(forwarded by Angus)

So you wanna be a user experience designer

Whitney Hess shares her five guiding principles for working in UX…

I have collected a set of guiding principles for user experience designers, to encourage behaviors that I believe are necessary to being a successful practitioner, as well as a set of guiding principles for experience design — which I think anyone who touches a product used by humans should strive to follow.

(forwarded by Angus)

Getting to the customer – why everything you think about User Centred Design is wrong

On Black&White, Thomas Petersen discusses solving the right problem at the right time…

What you are solving in the wireframe phase is problems inherent in the wireframe phase, not problems with the product. What you are solving when testing the prototype is problems inherent in the prototype not in the final product. There is only one true test and that is the final product. Not until then will you start to receive valuable feedback in combination with quantitative feedback. You will get it where it matters.

This is something we’ve talked about in our team on a number of occasions. It’s an important aspect of the UX design process to get sorted out.
(forwarded by Angus)

Google tests streamlining search options feature

Over on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan tells us how Google is tackling its “UI jazz problem”…

“I don’t like jazz, because you never know what’s going to happen next,” Mayer said, continuing on to apply the musical style to Google’s search results. “I’ve been calling this problem ‘user interface jazz.’ This result looks this way, and that result looks that way [something much different], and it really does slow you down.”

(forwarded by Angus)

Some design principles from the Global Agenda Council on Design

Tim Brown, of renowned design and innovation consulting firm, IDEO, shares with us seven principles as discussed at the recent World Economic Forum event in Dubai…

Design is an agent of change that enables us to understand complex changes and problems, and to turn them into something useful. Tackling today’s global challenges will require radical thinking, creative solutions and collaborative action. Here is a set of principles identified by the Global Agenda Council on Design that could help your Council to develop ideas and strategies to address the complex problems facing us all.

(forwarded by Angus)

On Friday the 2nd of October, two of the USiT team (Pat and Alun) gave a presentation at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. The presentation told the story, in 25 minutes, of the research and design for the SuperRacing website. The slides are shown below.

At the risk of becoming known for the phrase “I might be a bit slow on the up-take but…” I’d like to share with you designgames.com.au. Created by my friend and fellow Aussie UX expert Donna Spencer, this catalogue of workshop techniques is a great resource for anyone looking to facilitate a workshop and get useful output, anywhere during the project life cycle.

For example:

Divide the dollar Participants are provided with a list of features and $100 to ‘spend’. They distribute the money across the features according to how important those features are and explain why they have divided their money in this way.

While most of these games are fairly well known to experienced practitioners (or are based on classic techniques) some have been given a fresh spin, and by publishing them to a blog and allowing feedback, Donna has allowed those newer to the field to add them to their toolbox.

This is of interest to our team as we’ve recently done some workshop facilitation training and you can never have enough workshop activities up your sleeve!

New book: Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction

Way over a year ago I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in a project initiated by my friend and former colleague Dr Linda Leung from the Institute for Interactive Multimedia, University of Technology, Sydney. Linda is the a Senior Lecturer, course coordinator and one of the founders of the Masters of Interactive Multimedia offered by the Institute and I used to teach with her in the subject Digital Information and Interaction Design. The subject

encourages students to critically engage with interdisciplinary approaches to information and interaction design

and to apply their own interpretation of these theories

to real-world design project in which students work with a client, with advice and input from industry professionals.

Typically the real world project was developed for iTV and that in itself required students to translate the principles of web design and information architecture to the development of interactive television (iTV) interfaces.

I was one of those industry professionals involved with teaching the subject (during the time I was also working at Information Architect for the Institute). One of the challenges Linda identified when teaching aspiring experience designers is (in her own words)…

the awkward rise of a discourse and discipline finding its feet and which still needs to grow with the support from its older cousins. Indeed, the necessity of turning to other design disciplines is acknowledged by Shedroff (2001:2 in Leung, 2008): simultaneously having no history (since it is a discipline only recently defined), and the longest history (since it is the culmination of many ancient disciplines), Experience Design has become newly recognised and named.’

So that is where I came in. I was one of ten industry professionals working in digital media who came from backgrounds diverse as education, feminism, fashion design, architecture, cultural theory, film-making who had moved into experience design. Linda recognised that these backgrounds had significant impact on the approach we as experience designers had towards the work we now did and provide a framework for understanding our discipline in a multidisciplinary way and so she set out to write a co-written book with the nine of us.

My own background is in fine art and although I don’t often make the connection consciously, my early training in fine art (I now recognise) has helped me along the way in understanding users particularly in relation to how they interact with the visual and aesthetic properties of digital media. It’s also helped me understand and work with visual designers. My contribution to the book can be found in chapter ten entitled Art and Articulation: The Finer Points of engaging the User in Abstract Concepts and Lateral Thinking. To give you a taste…

Fine art challenges its audience to engage with abstract concepts that may not be easily articulated and require introspective reflection. The art gallery offers a rich metaphor for conceptualising digital experiences: just as the gallery is the space where the spectator engages with works of art, digital worlds represent the interface between users and content. Furthermore, the art world creates experiences that enable uses to tackle challenging content, and elevates content to the level of the sacred. This can be applied in digital design to contexts where ideas take primacy. However, conceptualising an online environment as a gallery and its content as “art’ can mean contravening web usability principles which assume task-orientated, utilitarian and time-constrained online interactions.

This chapter examines the ways in which art is presented, and the design of experiences of art. The instruments which ‘frame’ an artwork and scaffold the experience for the spectator are discussed in relation to how such techniques can be translated for digital contexts.

I’m excited to announce that tonight Digital Experience Design: Ideas, Industries, Interaction (Edited by Linda Leung) is being launched by Dr Elaine Lally, Senior Research Fellow and Assistant Director Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney and  is available from Intellect Books and Amazon.

It’s been an amazingly insightful experience for me to work with Linda and gain some knowledge into what it takes to turn an idea into a book. I have utmost respect for her determination and academic resilience to the writing, editing and review process and thank her immensely for the opportunity it has given me. It’s exciting also that the book will be utilised as the set text for two subjects: Digital Information and Interaction design and Digital Sound and the Moving Image in the Graduate programs for Interactive Multimedia at UTS. I’m dying to read all the chapters as collection and ponder the mulit-disciplinary realm of our practice myself. If you are reading this an happen to go on to the read the book I’d love to know what you think, maybe post a comment here on our blog. In the meantime I’ll leave you with Linda’s summary from the back of the jacket.

Digital Experience Design chronicles the diverse histories and perspectives of people working in the dot.com world, with contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds offering autobiographical accounts of their careers in the digital experience design and interactive media industry. This is a book of ideas about digital experience design expressed through the voices of practitioners and seen through the lenses of the disciplines in which they originally trained. From the perspective of older disciplines such as education, fine art, and cinema, this volume investigates how dot.com practitioners balance the ’science’ of usability with the ‘art’ of experience design and  the more abstract, emotional and atmospheric elements of users’ digital interactions. Digital Experience Design seeks to borrow from alternative fields that have richer traditions and longer histories in experience design to assist current online designers and practitioners. Covering  a range of forms of digital experience design, be it computer games, DVDs, touchscreen kiosks or mobile phones , this edited volume is a valuable resource for industry practitioners and students and teachers of interactive media.

Interesting post by Bruce Tognazzini about whether Apple’s software product design ethos is too simplistic.

Now (confession time) not being an Apple aficionado I can’t really pass comment, however his general points seem quite valid. One of the founding principles of Interaction Design is to create solutions that are eminently understandable by the novice, but grow as the user become more competent then expert.

So, we aim to make the initial state as simple and as closely aligned to the user’s mental model as possible. Simplicity does not mean lack of functionality (which I think could be the issue with Apple), it means a fast initial learning curve and consideration of the number of concepts a user needs to understand.

However, the product should have a built in path to higher proficiency, facilitating enhanced functionality, high speed interaction and minimal application feedback as the user requires it.

Tognazzini seems to be implying that Apple software products are well suited to ‘Leading the novice’ but fall short on ‘empowering the expert’ . Certainly, in the past, Apple have not really carried out much in the way of design research. Could this be at the heart of some of these issues?

Do any of you Apple users out there think Tog’s argument is justified?

The USiT team has had a running conversation of late about prototyping techniques and tools. We have been debating the value of sketching, both in terms of quickly producing and documenting ideas as well as for prototyping (where low fidelity can be a useful attribute when putting designs in front of a user).

Some of this was exposed through the comments on a recent blog post regarding wireframes, in particular Chris’ comment on a sketchy wireframe stencil. So we’ve collectively been thinking about documenting and prototyping and how important “sketchiness” is.

To further fuel the discussion, I want to refer to Russell Wilson’s review of 16 user interface prototyping tools. I like how he categorises his “picks” into “Low fidelity mockups for idea exploration and communication”, “Interactive prototypes to test and communicate interactions” and “High fidelity drawing tool”. This is much more useful than saying one uses Axure (for instance) to prototype, like any one tool or technique could ever fit all situations. There are some interesting comments on Russell’s post too.

Also on this topic, Todd Warfel is running a survey on prototyping tools for his upcoming book. Be sure to check it out and have your say, this is adding some clarity around the various characteristics and pros and cons of prototyping techniques that will be of use to the entire community.

And it will help answer the question raised in the title of this post :)

Will Evans has written a piece entitled Shades of Gray: Wireframes as Thinking Device, on the role of wireframes in the UX design process (for an upcoming book on UX design by Russ Unger).

The whole post is interesting, but I like this bit in particular:

I think it is quite common for UX folks to view design as problem solving. For me, designing through the use of wireframes is a search in a problem space of alternatives; it’s a process of problem setting as much as it is a process of problem solving, which means that I always start with the context.

I like this; “problem setting” rather than “problem solving”.

The whole piece can be found on Will’s blog, along with wireframe examples he has created for the book.

(This may just prompt me to finish a long-running draft on “the truth about wireframes” which I have been working on for some time. I guess wireframes—or more accurately how they are abused—are a pet hate of mine :)

Generic Work Process : “This toolkit offers an overview of the methods and techniques which can be used throughout the user-centered design process.”

How do you design? : PDf draft of a book looking at 100+ different designer’s processes. “Our processes determine the quality of our products. If we wish to improve our products, we must improve our processes; we must continually redesign not just our products but also the way we design. That’s why we study the design process. To know what we do and how we do it. To understand it and improve it. To become better designers.”

The first suggests to me that the design process has been solved and commoditised, the second while warning against ad hoc design processes suggests there are many very different models and that ongoing process evaluation and improvment is essential.