Volunteer info session this Thursday

As they say, it takes a village to raise a conference. So we’re looking for people to help in lots of ways such as marketing, venue preparation, food, speaker relations, party planning, and so on.

Think you might like to get involved? Come on out to an info session this Thursday. We’ll describe the conference plans in more detail, talk about the many ways in which you might get involved, and answer lots of questions.

Thursday, March 1
5:30 pm
Bauer Kitchen special event room
Located in the Bauer Marketplace at King & Allen streets in Waterloo

Yes, brand. And hold on, marketers, before you get all high ‘n mighty on everyone; we know brand was originally your idea. Please realize we’re not talking about logos anymore. We’re talking about experiences.

Brand exists only in the mind of a customer. And we cannot design experiences, at least not directly. But there’s good news still: we CAN design the setting in which experiences take place, which CAN influence the meaning that people assign those experiences in their minds. Our choices as product designers (and developers) can have a huge effect on the outcome.

My thesis here is simple: make brand a product requirement.

Express your brand in terms of the emotions you want to evoke in people and the meanings you want them to ascribe. Then make those expressions concrete targets the product is required to hit. From my experience, this approach is remarkable for its ability to get everyone aligned, regardless of their position in an organization. It’s like magic!

Last weekend, I took the students of Wilfred Laurier University on a deep dive into these concepts at the Laurier Marketing Association’s annual conference. It seemed appropriate, given the conference theme of “The Future of Branding: A Forum for Technology in Marketing”. Flip through my slides below, or click through to Slideshare to view the speaker notes as well.

What do you think: is the concept of brand dead, or is it stronger than ever?

1. The Top Ten Innovation Myths in the U.S. by Scott Berkun

1. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter
2. Gutenberg changed the world on purpose
3. Just build a better mousetrap
4. The greatest thing since sliced bread
5. The Post-It Note was invented by accident
6. Apple invented everything
7. Ebay was started in a garage, for a Pez-Dispenser
8. Henry Ford invented the assembly line
9. Newton was hit by an apple and discovered gravity
10. Edison invented the light bulb

2. Mashable’s Top 10 resources for design inspiration

1. FFFFOUND!
2. Balance Network
3. deviantART
4. Smashing Magazine
5. Abduzeedo
6. NOTCOT.ORG
7. LogoPond
8. Best Web Gallery
9. Kuler
10. Flickr

3. 10 UX (User Experience) Blogs to Watch in 2010 by Whitney Hess

1. 52 Weeks of UX
2. Bobulate
3. Johnny Holland
4. Pure Caffeine
5. UI&us
6. UX Booth
7. Usability Post
8. Uselog.com
9. Winning Content
10. Wireframes Magazine

4. 10 of the best TED Talks by Smashing Lists

1. Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity
2. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry: Sixth Sense
3. Jill Bolte Taylor: Stroke of Insight
4. Mark Roth: Suspended Animation is Within Our Grasp
5. Elizabeth Gilbert: Nurturing Creativity
6. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth
7. Richard Dawkins: Our “Queer” Universe
8. Arthur Benjamin: Mathemagic
9. Malcolm Gladwell: Spaghetti Sauce
10. Stephen Wolfram: Computing a Theory of Everything

5. Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Think Vitamin

1. Speed
2. Instant utility
3. Software is media
4. Less is more
5. Make it programmable
6. Make it personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverability
9. Clean
10. Playful

6. My Top 10 Design Resources by Mr. Joe Payton

1. Think Vitamin
2. Noupe
3. Nettuts+
4. Boagworld
5. Abduzeedo
6. A List Apart
7. Six Revisions
8. Creattica
9. UX Booth
10. Smashing Magazine

7. Chris Spooner’s 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit

1. Form labels that aren’t associated to form input fields
2. A logo that doesn’t link to the homepage
3. Not specifying a visited link state
4. Not indicating an active form field
5. An image without an alt description
6. A background image without a background color
7. Using long boring passages of content
8. Underlining stuff that isn’t a link
9. Telling people to click here
10. Using justified text

8. Gizmag’s Top 10 things you CAN’T have for Christmas 2010

1. Seabreacher X
2. “Mercedes-Benz Style” helicopter
3. The Kid’s Walker exoskeleton
4. The most exclusive motorcycle on the planet
5. LEICA M9 ‘Titanium’ digital camera
6. Top of the line television
7. Domespace rotating wooden house
8. A balcony for your private jet
9. See-thru speakers
10. A quiet getaway… in a “flying” submarine

9. The 10 weirdest questions asked during job interviews from Wired UK

1. “How many tennis balls are in this room and why?”
2. “You are in a room with three switches, which correspond to three bulbs in another room… How do you find out which bulb corresponds to which switch?”
3. “Are your parents disappointed with your career aspirations?”
4. “If I put you in a sealed room with a phone that had no dial tone, how would you fix it?”
5. “If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?”
6. “How would you move Mount Fuji?”
7. “Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between two words in a document… take a few hours to develop a working example…”
8. “Given a dictionary of words, how do you calculate the anagrams for a new word?”
9. “How many hair salons are there in Japan?”
10. “Say you are dead — what do you think your eulogy would say about you?”

10. Fast Company’s Top 10 most innovative design companies

1. BMW Group Designworks-USA
2. Ideo
3. Rockwell Group
4. Pentagram
5. Ammunition
6. Fuseproject
7. Frog Design
8. Potion
9. Attik
10. WET Design

Finally, be sure to check out Top 10 design-related Top 10 lists from 2010. Because everything goes meta.

Context incongruity at the gas pump. Feeling thirsty yet?

On a related note, if you need Coke in bulk, I guess the Amco Station in Kitchener is a good bet.

“I’ve taken my Segway 108 mph without a helmet.”

And with that statement, The Woz had his audience hooked. Not that he needed a hook, mind you, as over 700 people packed into a ballroom in Waterloo to hear him speak: that’s about, oh, 670 more than the original plan had assumed, according to Iain Klugman of Communitech.

User experience, design, and usability emerged as strong themes in Steve’s talk. I especially enjoyed hearing him give credit to Jef Raskin with first instilling these values at Apple, which you’ll find at around 21:20 in the recording:

One of the things Apple is good at is keeping things simple because we got a reputation in the early days for being oriented towards simplicity and ease of use. Largely came from one guy that came and joined Steve [Jobs] and I in the early days, and Jef Raskin was his name…. He said you should always take the effort to put the design effort into your product to make it work easy and well… I took that in my head to mean, the human is more important than the technology.

Many thanks to Communitech for organizing the event! And thanks to RIM also, for buying breakfast for such a huge crowd. Word on the street is this was the largest-ever turnout for a Techworking Breakfast.

Note: I recorded the above MP3 with my iPhone’s Voice Memos application, not sure what to expect in terms of quality. To my delight, it turned out reasonably well, given the simple technical setup: it sat on a chair next to me.

Two days ago I found out just how tough my iPhone actually is.

This iPhone had already survived multiple drops to the floor, including a dramatic 4-foot fall onto concrete and numerous incidents while being handled by my 2 -year-old kid. Never has the screen scratched. It’s developed only cosmetic scratches on the back and sides. So I’ve become accustomed to these everyday abuses to my phone — but nothing prepared me for this experience.

My story begins two nights ago in my basement, during a serious winter thaw. As a good home owner, I was checking my sump pump to make sure it was functioning properly, because the local weather forecast was calling for massive amounts of rain. Severe basement flooding is common in these winter scenarios. So I did my thing: I lubricated the float rod to ease its range of motion; I inspected the electrical and plumbing connections; and I made sure the water in the pit looked clear. Everything looked good so I decided to go back upstairs.

I turned around quickly because one of my kids was yelling my name — and suddenly heard an alarming “splash!”and “ka-plunk!”.

At first I thought, “Oh shoot, I dropped the WD-40 inside the sump pit full of water.” I turned back around to fish out the spray can… and to my horror (and I mean horror!) observed my iPhone shining back at me from under two feet of water. Yeah, that’s right: it was still turned ON, with a lit-up screen. I guess when it fell out of my case, it hit a button and activated the screen.

“@?%$##!!” I gasped, then snatched it out of the water ASAP.

“@?%$##!!” I exclaimed again as water kept draining from the phone. “There goes three hundred bucks and a 3-year contract!!!”, I miserably thought.

“@?%$##!!” I concluded (but to myself of course, as my children were somewhere nearby).

I powered off the iPhone right away and shook it for a good five minutes trying to drain all the water from its casing. I placed it under a lamp for three hours — then let it sit overnight. The next morning, I steeled myself and tried to power it back up again. And to my amazement, IT WORKED! Phone, speakers, GPS, wireless, headphones, battery charging… EVERYTHING! This puppy was sitting under two feet of water, still turned ON, but came through without a hitch. It’s still working fine, two days later.

In fact, as I type this e-mail, I’m listening to music on it.

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.

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.

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.

User Experience Designer

Itching for an opportunity to work in an environment where design really matters? Here’s your chance. From the beginning, Primal Fusion has understood the critical role that product design will play in the success of our business. We’re now looking for another designer to help us conceptualize and sweat the details of our web applications’ user experience.

As a User Experience Designer at Primal Fusion, you will:

• Imagine new opportunities to hit the “sweet spot,” that place where our products delight customers while fulfilling our business goals.
• Develop a deep understanding of our customers’ motivations and behaviors through user research methods such as field studies.
• Lay the groundwork for new products by modeling workflows, crafting personas, writing scenarios, and sketching storyboards.
• Design the form and behavior of our products by creating prototypes of increasing fidelity and detail, from concept sketches to wireframes to interactive simulations.
• Improve your craft by subjecting your work to rigorous assessment, including usability studies, A/B testing, and web log analysis.
• Help to further elevate the practice of design at Primal Fusion.

Before applying, please make sure you meet these requirements:

• A passion for design. “Design thinking” isn’t something you turn on and off — it’s how you think all the time.
• An entrepreneurial and energetic spirit. This is a startup environment in which things move quickly; you’ll have the opportunity to wear many hats.
• Demonstrated experience in designing elegant and highly usable websites and web applications.
• A proven understanding of why, when, and how to create artifacts such as workflow and mental model diagrams, personas, scenarios, sitemaps, and wireframes.
• Graphic and information design skills. You have a demonstrated ability to make visual design choices that guide users in their interactions with a product.
• Experience in communicating design requirements and shepherding products through the development process.
• Expertise with Adobe applications such as Fireworks or Illustrator.

Bonus points for any of the following:

• Experience in designing for large-scale consumer web applications.
• Experience in conducting usability studies and A/B testing.
• Ability to code in CSS+XHTML, Javascript, or Flash.
• Strong written communication skills, especially for web copy.
• Post-secondary education in Design.

This is a full-time opportunity, though we are also interested in independent contractors who feel they fit the bill.

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.