Two students from IIT went ahead and defined what ethnographic research is and how to conduct it. It was a great refresher for me. Thanks to Todd Warfel for originally posting this on his site.
Getting People to Talk: An Ethnography & Interviewing Primer from Gabe & Kristy
If you haven’t already caught wind of the news. Interation 09 will be held at my old stomping grounds: the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at SFU. Definitely looking forward to seeing the new grads, professionals and students at the school. I think all of you who do attend will be very impressed with the facilities. See you there!
Another small announcement is that I’ve moved to the Blast New York office. It’s a slight change of role but really a very fresh and exciting opportunity. Will be seeing a lot of you shortly at the many great local groups 
The Interaction Design Association held their inaugural design conference early February 2008. Unfortunately I was traveling in China and didn’t get an opportunity to go but I’ve been told it was quite the gathering of minds. For those who also missed it you can access the majority of the speaker sessions at Brightcove. Unfortunately only a handful include slide and speaker documentation. Stick to the larger talks (i.e. Alan Cooper or Bill Buxton) they have been edited and are easier to follow.
The New York Times recently reviewed Toyota’s Scion brand’s online marketing efforts: Scion Speak. What I can’t believe is the surface level evaluation by NYT.
“With an eye to the social networking ethos that made Facebook and MySpace wildly popular”.
What eye is that? The lack of social connection and a sense of place?!?!
“Harnessing, imitating and creating social networks to promote a brand.”
This is a social network?!?
What they fail to see is that the logo application is not integrated in anyway. Yes you can download it and if you wanted to put it as an IM icon you could but what are we talking about here? Well this is a car company, why can’t this logo be integrated with parts or decals for my vehicle? Why aren’t groups formed around these logos to create a sense of purpose or collectiveness? Of course these groups would need goals but even at the very base leveraging existing social networks to proliferate whatever message they’re trying to proliferate. You can’t even see how well your creation is doing amongst the vast valley of other logos: a high priority item of an ego surfer.
To me it seems like a lot of bloat that people may come to dwell on, even create a logo but there is no reason for someone to stay or return. The tool itself only allows for a limited range of creativity.
In the end, if this is the bar of a satisfied client, marketing agencies will be happy to know that they will be gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.
Stephen P. Anderson recently put together a primer on this topic. What business leaders are slowly becoming aware of is that it’s not good enough to be more efficient or feature rich. They need a new tool for a post-industrial world. One that leads to innovation. Design thinking is traditionally a part of the process that delivers great products and artifacts. Take that to a higher level and you can be designing ecosystems where many products and services live. This is knowledge that is vital for companies in a new frontier of competition.
This is why we’re seeing traditional B.Schools like Rotman promote their integrative thinking toolkit as a main differentiator.
Anyway have a breeze through these slides you should come out of it with a better understanding of “design” as a verb not a noun
A new prototyping tool on the horizon from adobe:
” ‘Thermo‘ is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.
Features:
Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.”
See a demo from Adobe MAX Chicago. I haven’t looked through it yet but thought I’d share
As always, Jess/Gene and the gang are hosting CanUX, a Canadian User Experience workshop, Nov 25-27 in Banff. The lineup looks terrific:
If you’re want to find a very inclusive, intensive workshop with the beautiful Canadian Rockies as your inspiration, this should definitely be an event you consider.
I stumbled upon this site about apml a few weeks ago from a post on the Sig-IA mailing list.
When i saw this diagram
I immediately began thinking about how a browse could be created through these interest clouds. If we took the interest clouds and mapped the information to a critical mass of users you could get a collaborative filter that would allow users to browse interest based on their own. If we want to add reputation we could remove anonymity as well (of course this would be voluntary). In essence it would be a creation of Interest networks from ambient attention data. Passive behaviour = a very cool user driven browse.
About a year ago I mentioned that Teehan + Lax started a UX Fund where they invested in stocks they deemed to have good user experiences. Well I’m happy to report the fund is up more than 42%! Of course good UX isn’t the only factor in making these stocks appreciate but when your senior management buys into design and crafting good holistic experiences the outcome is proving to be quite positive for everyone.
For the past year I’ve been working on projects in a traditional waterfall model. I’ve come to realize that this favors the design team since we have lots of time to research, conceptualize and design. This model puts a lot of pressure on technology to make assumptions based on documentation. The reality is that once the coding begins is when our back end team gets a real sense of how large a beast they are dealing with. Each project presents new challenges and getting into the sandbox as early as possible helps technology make better estimates.
Fair enough, so now we are trying to work agile into our projects but it seems we’ve went from one extreme to the other. Where agile puts little stock in up front research it puts pressure on design to create an overarching vision for our products without properly understanding the domain or the users.
We had general training on agile and the principles I got from it I loved:
Although I left the training with some less than desirable feelings. My gut was telling me that without the upfront research we only have a partial plan of attack and as things change in future iterations they affect all of the previous iterations. As the evolution of interaction evolves by iteration 5 it means we need to refine iteration 4,3,2,1.
Anyway I’m still open to agile but I think a hybrid approach makes the most sense.
In the end we need to service these three areas:
With waterfall we focus on users and business, with agile we focus on technology and business. Fingers crossed in my hybrid world we get it right in the middle.
