Chopsticker

If you haven’t already heard about tomorrow’s Innovation in Action event, be sure to check it out. The Waterloo UX Group (aka IxDA Waterloo and the Communitech UX P2P) is kicking off our new season with an event co-sponsored with the Infusion Angels. And it’s going to be great.

Jensen Harris from Microsoft will be sharing stories about the redesign of Office, describing in particular how they conceived of the new Ribbon interface element. I recently saw Jensen deliver this talk at UX Week in San Francisco and quite enjoyed it.

But the real draw tomorrow is likely to be… well, a table.

This ain’t a run-of-the-mill kitchen-table piece of furniture, of course. Microsoft Surface is a very cool multi-touch device, which I admired last year in a previous post.

To get your hands on a Surface tomorrow, follow the RSVP instructions described at the UX Group’s blog.

Looking forward to May 9-10 this year, where I’ll be conducting a 2.5-hour workshop at the Technology in the Arts Conference in Waterloo. Here’s the session description:

For a growing number of arts organizations, the web has become a key communications channel — not just for sharing information, but for cultivating relationships with visitors. To what degree does your website deliver on its full potential? Does its visual and architectural design help or hinder visitors? What does it currently do well, and what specifically could improve? In this interactive workshop, you’ll learn how usability testing can help to answer these questions.

Through a series of hands-on exercises with live websites, we’ll practice planning, conducting, and acting upon the results of a usability test. As a group, we’ll discuss options for how to proceed with a limited budget and some tips for testing with younger audiences. You’ll also learn several simple exercises for uncovering potentially hidden insights, such as people’s emotional reactions to your organization. Becoming proficient at these methods takes practice, but by the end of this workshop you’ll have the skills necessary to begin conducting them on your own website.

Planning to attend the workshop? Drop me a line with questions, requests, or suggestions.

I’m excited to announce this opportunity to work with me at Primal Fusion! Although we’re still in stealth mode, the time nears when we’ll throw off the covers to unveil our first product. In this role, you’ll make important contributions to that product — and to those which follow.

We’ve assembled a team of talented people who are a lot of fun to work with. Our new office is pretty nice too and in a great location, at the corner of King and University in Waterloo. Almost everything you’d need is next door or across the road: banks, restaurants, a pharmacy, Starbuck’s. If you’re so inclined, we’re even upstairs from a head shop…

Read on for a description of the job, then contact me if you’d like to learn more.

– Continue reading this post>

And guess what… I’m fine with that! According to Fast Company this month, interaction designer is one of the “Ten Jobs You Didn’t Know You Wanted“. And we’re in fine company, sharing the list with brewmaster, flavorist, and roller coaster engineer. (Piece of family legend: a distant cousin of mine worked on satellites until one was famously lost in space; he then switched careers to become a design engineer for the Space Mountain roller coaster in Disney World.)

Fast Company describes the allure of interaction design:

Interaction designers work at all stages of product development to design innovative and user-friendly products. In addition to wearing the traditional hat of a designer, they work with executives to define goals for products and systems in development. They also investigate how people actually engage with new products and systems…. [and] enjoy the opportunity “to learn about every walk of life and industry imaginable….”

Suffice to say it’s the sort of job that won’t bore you easily. I’ve had the chance to learn about proteomics, machine vision, embedded operating systems, electricity markets, commercial facilities management, international shipping, computer networks, consumer telephony, radiology, and a host of other domains

Yep, this job rocks.

Just registered for Interaction 08, the first conference organized by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Very excited about this, and not just for the opportunity to visit Savannah, Georgia in February! IxDA is growing into a terrific organization and has attracted most of the world’s top talent in interaction design; for instance, keynotes include Alan Cooper, Bill Buxton, Sigi Moeslinger, and Malcolm McCullough. The conference will also be a fabulous opportunity to put faces to familiar names from the IxDA discussion list.

Check out the conference, but FYI it’s likely to sell out by mid-January.

Heading to Interaction 08? Drop me a comment and hope to see you there!

Talk about innovation! For years, I’ve joked that the product I most desire is a cordless extension cord (followed closely by the microwave freezer).

Looks like the idea isn’t so ridiculous after all.

The other day, I read with interest a story about WildCharge, a very cool product that charges devices such as phones and MP3 players when you place them on its conducting pad. This led to a story I’d missed back in June about some MIT researchers who’ve been able to wirelessly power a lightbulb.

Fantastic!

Reminds me of the importance of encouraging ridiculous or even impossible ideas when attempting to innovate a product or service. If you start from somewhere safe, you’ll end up somewhere boring. Start from somewhere crazy and you might end up with a terrific idea that’s practical to pull off.

The Waterloo User Experience (UX) Group is hosting Roger Martin at our monthly get-together. This is a terrific opportunity to spend time with Roger, as he’s quite in demand as a speaker on the topics of design and business.

It’s a free event. Head over to the UX Group’s blog for details on the time and location.

A few minutes ago, an email from Amazon landed in my Inbox. It suggests that, since I’ve purchased books about interaction design by Alan Cooper, I might also like this upcoming release titled Bravery Awards for Aerial Combat. Check it out:

Um, okay, design can be pretty hard sometimes, but not sure it warrants an award for bravery. It’s downright silly that Amazon would blast this recommendation out to customers who’ve bought books by the other Alan Cooper. For their sake, I hope nobody blogs about it… oops.

Where are you, oh promised land of milk and honey known as the semantic web?

And our first event for the season is in three days, on Thursday September 20. Visit the UX Group’s website to learn more about our planned events (spoiler: Roger Martin in December!) and about our affiliations with IxDA and Communitech.

A few days ago, I hosted a web seminar about personas for the folks at Thomson Scientific. Interest has grown there after a successful introduction to personas, which I’m told were a useful resource during their redesign of the ISI Web of Knowledge. This got me thinking: I’ve already posted some information about personas here and intend to write more in the future. So to provide an anchor for these thoughts, here is a summary of my…

10 steps to personas (in three parts)

Begin by setting your objectives and gathering data:

1. Define the problem that you want personas to help solve. For example, “These personas will help us understand people’s behaviors around exchanging electronic documents, to help us design a website for that activity.” It may be tempting, but try to avoid general statements such as “help us understand our customers better.” What specifically do you want to learn?
2. Identify the people you need to study in order to understand the problem you defined. Best practices in persona development require you to spend time face-to-face with current or potential customers. To plan for this, you need some model of the market to help identify the people you’ll want to recruit. Customer segmentation models from marketing can be a useful input for this step.
3. Get into the field and meet the people you identified. Interview them, ask for demonstrations, and observe the environment in which they would use your product or service. Augment this with information from other sources such as subject matter experts, articles, blogs, and market research studies. Be sure to do some research beforehand to get a basic understanding of the domain, as you’ll learn more in the field if you’re already up to speed on some basics.

– Continue reading this post>

Work with me, people. Literally!

This position has been filled. Thanks to everyone who was interested and keep an eye peeled for future opportunities.

I’m excited about this position that’s just opened up here at Terapath. We’re looking for a web developer who’s savvy with all the latest buzz (Web 2.0, AJAX, etc.) and techniques for building rich internet applications. Why am I excited? Because I’ll be working closely with whomever lands in this position — and we’ll have some good times together, I’m sure. (Note: must love sushi. <grin />) We subscribe to the “fail early, fail often” and “serious play” philosophies here, meaning we like to iterate quickly and burn through design concepts. In order to do this properly, we need someone who can whip together working prototypes of our favorite ideas, then help usher the very best to market.

I’m happy to answer questions, but if you’re serious about applying, please get in touch with Jeff Fedor here at Terapath.

Web Application Developer (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada)

About Terapath

A startup in Waterloo, Terapath has assembled a talented and experienced team to commercialize an exciting innovation. In fact, virtually all of us left comfortable positions at successful companies to participate in what we’re building here. Intrigued? Read on. If you’ve got what it takes for this position, we’d love to tell you more.

– Continue reading this post>

I was very pleased when Mark Maxted from Blue Coat agreed to speak at last month’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo. Of all the engineers I’ve worked with in the past 15 years, Mark is perhaps the most well-versed and committed advocate of usability and user-centered design. In this talk, he draws upon 24 years experience across several companies to share some advice on introducing usability and UCD to an organization.

The highlight for me was Mark’s metaphor for the topic: by applying techniques of “organizational jujutsu,” we can redirect an organization’s energy to increase our leverage when introducing campaigns for usability. Mark identifies four pressure points of an organization that will influence our choice of tactics.

• Technical: Is the back-end architecture sufficiently decoupled from the front-end UI to allow for rapid prototyping?
• Process: Are current processes, especially those regarding product requirements, well defined and do mechanisms exist for changing them?
• Culture: Does the organization value interdisciplinary teamwork and encourage people to admit “we don’t know what we don’t know”?
• Product/market: Is this an early market in which product features are the driving force, or a more mature market in which you’re competing on a whole solution?

– Continue reading this post>

If you’re in a profession where “billable hours” comes up frequently in conversation, you’re likely familiar with various methods and tools for tracking time. Very few of them are pleasant, at least based on my 10 years experience in consulting. In fact, even though I left the billable-hour game 6 months ago, I’m occasionally hit with waves of panic on Friday evenings: “Timesheets! Crap! I didn’t do my timesheets! Oh, right… phew, not anymore.”

At last month’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, Peter Benes introduced us to Hourly, a new Mac OS X desktop application for tracking time and invoicing clients. Peter is a graphic designer (his studio is Atomic Wax) who, as you’ll hear in the video, hates the administrative work that’s required in running a business — particularly time tracking and invoicing. So he enlisted the help of some friends to design an application that would simplify the process and free up more time for creative work.

The result, Hourly, has apparently done just that for Peter. Macworld recently featured Hourly on its website, so hopefully others will experience similar outcomes.

– Continue reading this post>

I recently signed up for a YouTube account. Today, I scrolled down my profile page for the first time and got a virtual slap in the face when the following notice prominently slid into view:

Ouch! I have no friends? Yeah, well, you, I dunno… you’re UGLY, YouTube!

– Continue reading this post>

As more organizations adopt agile development methods, folks who practice the various disciplines related to user-centered design are forced to adapt. At the 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo on June 14, we heard one such story of adaptation from Christina Wood and Craig Miller, from the usability team at the local office of NCR.

Christina and Craig described the challenge of being “parachuted in” to support 30 applications in different stages of product development. They have found a successful model for integrating activities such as prototyping, but have lacked resources for proper usability testing. They are currently evaluating Morae, a usability testing tool from TechSmith, hoping that its time and cost savings might improve their ability to perform tests in an agile environment.

– Continue reading this post>

At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, Declan Whelan of Whelan & Associates talked about how to fit user experience/design/usability into an agile development process. I’ve had the pleasure of working as a UX designer with Declan on an extreme programming (XP) project and can vouch for his ideas: thanks to his leadership, that project boasted some impressive metrics in terms of productivity and code quality. Also, I was thrilled to find that most of the developers grew increasingly interested in front-end design issues, often challenging the wireframes or prototypes I delivered and following up with some clever suggestions. That level of teamwork really improved the quality of the product.

Declan provided the following summary of his 7-minute presentation, though I highly recommend you check out the video below so you can see him smoke through 55 slides in the allotted time. Woot!

– Continue reading this post>

I have a love/hate relationship with usability testing. I love the feedback it generates, but I hate the administrative make-busy work that surrounds it, especially when a test takes on a life of its own and becomes <shudder> an Event. When that happens, teams begin treating usability as an end in itself instead of as a design tool, its proper designation.

At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, I briefly introduced an exercise I’ve come to love called the design checkpoint. Design checkpoints are non-events. They are simple to prepare for, even simpler to conduct, and let designers sit down with customers to get useful feedback. In my talk’s title, I hint that checkpoints are an alternative to usability testing, but more accurately I see them as a complement. Checkpoints fill the gaps between usability tests — gaps that may otherwise feel more like gaping voids.

– Continue reading this post>

Despite a wide-ranging interest in personas (aka user profiles) by web and software designers, concrete examples of actual personas are surprisingly hard to find. So I’m happy to contribute an example here, from a chapter I wrote in the book User-Centered Design Stories. Click the thumbnails below for full-sized images, or download a printable PDF.

Here’s a bit of back story on our persona, Timothy Powell. Timothy is one of three personas I created to inform the design of a web application for a client called… well, the legal hurdles in identifying this particular client weren’t worth the effort, so let’s call them ClickDox. ClickDox had an idea that people would be willing to pay good money for a web application that lets them send and receive confidential documents online, as opposed to sending them by courier (too slow and expensive) or as email attachments (too insecure).

– Continue reading this post&gt;

In a few days, the UPA 2007 conference will kick off in Austin, Texas. It’s here that many people will get their first glimpse of User-Centered Design Stories: Real-World UCD Case Studies, a new book by Carol Righi and Janice James. Carol and Janice have assembled an impressive collection of real-world case studies from 22 different contributors, covering topics from promoting and establishing UCD practices to the nuts and bolts of research, evaluation, and design.

Each chapter in the book reads like a story, complete with characters, dialogue, and in most cases a plot, which makes for an engaging and often entertaining read. – Continue reading this post>