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Microsoft catches a lot of flack for some of their user experience decisions, but one invention that received a lot of warm feelings from the community is the new Microsoft Office, featuring the Ribbon. Jensen Harris, who has been writing about the development of the new Office UI for years now, has just signed on to present his Story of the Ribbon at UX Week.
Don’t forget, if you register by Monday May 19th, $100 of your registration fee goes to support the LIVESTRONG Foundation.
Among the podcasts I subscribe to is BusinessWeek’s “Innovation of the Week,” featuring interviews with people on the subject of design and innovation. So I was excited when BusinessWeek reporter Matt Vella asked me to talk with him about our MX 2008 conference, and our new book. You can listen to the interview.
As Roland mentioned in an earlier post, last week we had a lunch time visit from Andrew Blau, the Global Business Network’s head of practice. It was a great talk, and the team started sketching all these ideas they had in relation to what was discussed.
GBN is best known for their scenario planning practice, wherein they work with a client to create a set of stories (usually 3 or 4) about the client’s business 10 years out. These stories are purposefully diverse, so that they can help the business prepare for any number of possible futures.
It made me think about the role of futures in our experience design work. Design is an inherently futurist activity — planning and sketching things that don’t yet exist. We’ve begun to engage directly with futurist notions in our work, whether it’s tangible futures (designing the poster that will trumpet our success), concept videos (what will it be like to interact with mobile devices in 3-5 years), prototypes, and more. What I realized is that, in our practice at least, our application of futures thinking pretty much stops 3-5 years out. I scrawled the following on a whiteboard, as I considered how our experience design work and GBN’s scenario planning work complements one another. Be warned, it’s barely half-baked!
I found myself wondering if experience design is in it’s nature limited to crafting futures no more than 3-5 years out (what we generically call Visioning). If you get out much farther than that, your ties to designing for actual human engagement get pretty thin, because there are so many variables that you’re needing to design for multiple possible futures, which is quite taxing.
Now, I don’t know if I believe that experience design is limited in this fashion… Even we are working on a concept video for 2018. But I wanted to get this out there because I think there’s a lot of opportunity to explore the intersection and integration of experience design and futurism, the role that experience design can have in charting paths for organizations. I’d love to hear what you think!
Just a quick note that after tomorrow, the registration prices for our UX Intensive Minneapolis and UX Week 2008 events goes up. UX Intensive offers 4 days of intense training on core user experience practice. UX Week mixes inspiration with information, offering sessions on a variety of essential topics, half-day workshops on subjects like storytelling and sketching, and field trips to museums to learn how experiences work in other realms.
Use the promotional code BLOG and get an extra 10% off!
The schedule for UX Week 2008 continues to form, and with every update, there are amazing new speakers.
We have added a number of main-stage speakers. There is design critic, science fiction author, and all-around mindblower Bruce Sterling, the information architect for TheDailyShow.com Audrey Chen, and human-robot interaction designer Aaron Powers. Peter Samis, curator at SFMOMA, will discuss the design of the whole visitor experience for their upcoming Frida Kahlo exhibition. And Katherine Jones and Randall Macon from Milkshake Media, will talk about their experience designing brands that build community, including Lance Armstrong’s LIVESTRONG Foundation.
We’ve also added workshops. Adaptive Path founder and book author Indi Young will teach how to Unpack Stories to Serve People Better. CMU Design professor Mark Baskinger will follow up his excellent article in the latest Interactions magazine with a workshop on Drawing Ideas: Quick Sketching for Interaction Design.
The workshops are new to UX Week this year. On Day 1 and Day 2 we’re having seven of them run simultaneously — you’ll have to choose one each day. We are giving preferential choice based on when you register. The earlier you register, the better chance you’ll get your top choice! We will launch a workshop picker closer to the event.
Also, Sign up by April 30 and save $400 off the full registration price. Use the promotional code BLOG and receive an additional 10% off!
To give an additional taste of what’s to come, you should see Johnny C. Lee’s presentation from TED. It’s only 6 minutes long (we’ll have him on stage much longer.)
And here’s a recent talk by Bruce Sterling at an Interaction Design conference in Germany.
Our forthcoming book, Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services in an Uncertain World, lands in bookstores (on- and offline) any day now. We’ve gotten our first copies in the office, and it looks great. (We know some of you have been waiting for a while… there was a printing problem with the first run, which set us back a little… But we’re on track now!)
I need to share with you the testimonial Don Norman wrote about the book:
Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound.
I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful.
That excited us.
Also, Derrick Story from O’Reilly just posted a podcast interview/discussion with Brandon, David, and me. It hits on the high points of the book.You can preview the first chapter of the book.
In our forthcoming book, Subject to Change, we close with a chapter titled “An Uncertain World,” about how the approaches we suggest will help businesses manage no matter what comes at them. In it, there’s this passage:
One key opportunity driven by this uncertainty is how the old categories will break down. David Weinberger discusses these trends and their implications in his excellent book, Everything Is Miscellaneous. Though the book is ostensibly about the nature of information in a digital world, the forces underlying that miscellany pervade all aspects of society. Google and Yahoo!, once technology companies, are now media players, and their advertising-based business models mean they compete more with Los Angeles and New York than their Silicon Valley brethren. Apple began as a computer company, but has morphed into a consumer electronics company (iPod, iPhone, Apple TV) and the third largest music retailer in the United States, which means its competitors are not only HP, Dell, and Toshiba, but also Sony, Wal-Mart, and Best Buy.
Oh, the perils of book publishing! Word is coming out that Apple is now the premier music retailer in the country, having surpassed Wal-mart and Best Buy.
What industry are you in, again? Who are your competitors, really?
On the evening of April 9, we’re hosting a presentation by Jan Chipchase (who spoke at UX Week 2007) and Duncan Burns from Nokia Design. The description:
Street Hacks: From Design Research to Prototype to
How long have you been using your current cell phone? And what happened to your previous model? If you live in a country like India, China or Ghana the answer is likely to involve the vibrant used phone market and, somewhere along the line the informal repair cultures - guys on the street who appear able to fix pretty much anything using little more than a flat surface a screwdriver and knowledge.
This presentation will highlight the mobile phone hacking skills available on the streets of cities from Accra and beyond, the sophisticated ecosystem of reverse engineered repair manuals and highlight how it challenges our thinking about what it means to make, distribute our products. The presentation will introduce Remade - a phone made from upcycled and recycled products.
Brandon will offer up a preview of his forthcoming IA Summit 2008 presentation:
The Long Wow
Customer loyalty — the idea that a customer will return to you repeatedly — is a hot topic these days. It’s been in the spotlight ever since business author Frederick Riechfield introduced the “Net Promoter Score,” a simple calculation used to measure the loyalty of your customers.
Although it’s become easier to measure customer loyalty, it’s just not that simple to create it. Rewards cards, frequent-whatever-programs, and other artificial attempts at customer loyalty just get in the way. Instead, engaging customers in more meaningful relationships over time is what builds true loyalty. And that is where well-planned, notably great experiences can play a big role in business.
This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.
Doors open at 6pm, Brandon speaks at 6:30, Jan and Duncan at 7:15.
Adaptive Path is at 363 Brannan Street in San Francisco.
Please let us know you’re coming by marking us “Attending” or “Watching” on the event page on Upcoming.
The LA Times story on topless meetings, featuring commentary from Todd and Dan, spurred a number of television news crews to our offices yesterday. The one that gives us the most play came from local NBC affiliate channel 11:
CBS affiliate channel 5 was the most sensationalist:
It even made it to ABC Nightly News with Charles Gibson, who were wise to include our friends at Dogster, because, hey, dogs make for great video!
Congrats to Dan on his coinage (even if it doesn’t have only 4 letters.)
Recently, we had a discussion on an internal mailing list about eyetracking, specifically around why we didn’t use it as a research tool.
Brandon:
First, lack of availability of it and familiarity with it as a research tool.
Second, I find it difficult to interpret the data. So someone did look at something first, second, third, and then ignored some of the rest of the page. I think a good information designer could have devised the flow of the eye on the UI on their own. What I value is the interpretation, which I can get from a few participants “thinking aloud” when walking through a prototype.
Andrew:
I agree that the data may be difficult to interpret, or, at least read into great detail. But, eye tracking can help identify hot spots on the screen or interface that enable the designer to refine the placement of important content or interactions.For example, having the 3rd spot on Google’s Adsense ranking is often desirable. It’s the top spot on the right hand column of ads. Studies have shown that eyes are drawn there more than eyes are drawn to the first and second ad spaces at the top of the page. This affects how some companies buy ads.
Same goes for understanding car dashboards. Knowing where users eyes rest or gravitate towards when faced with continually distracting circumstances helps designers focus on those important locations.
Peter:
Long ago (when I was at Epinions), I looked into eyetracking as a research tool. It was prohibitively expensive. Since that time, I’ve done quite well without it, and haven’t felt the urge to go back. And you rarely hear about eyetracking leading to crucial insights.That said, I just finished watching a presentation that should probably be considered must-see at Adaptive Path — Jensen Harris’ talk at MIX08 on the development of the UI for Office 2007. It’s long (the presentation is 75 minutes, with another 15 for Q&A), and remarkably detailed. Jensen shows many paths considered but not taken, and explains how they got to where they did.
Among the tools Jensen’s team used was eyetracking. When you’re making detailed UI design decisions, eyetracking contributes to some crucial understandings. He showed a movie of someone trying to find the Find feature in Office 2003… It was pretty much all he needed to persuade the Office team that a serious reorganization of the features was necessary.
Todd W:
I did a good bit of eyetracking work a few years ago (even published some papers) and was left with the feeling that it’s not really worth the expense except in very specific situations.Consider my experience: We were evaluating different interfaces for searching video content and wanted to know whether text or still images were most helpful for different tasks. People weren’t good at reporting where they looked, what they spent the most time on, or what was most helpful. Eyetracking helped us figure out that text was still more important to them than a still image — though a small animated clip was most helpful. We spent thousands and thousands of dollars on equipment and many hours getting it to work — these systems are horribly complex and unreliable. I came away feeling that we could have gotten to the place we did much faster and cheaper by just iterating quickly and evaluating all of our concepts with users. While they may not be able to explicitly articulate what they are doing, over time you can figure it out with some trial and error.
The allure of eyetracking was that it gave you statistics — great for academic papers — and cool images of sight paths. It counts as EVIDENCE in a way that other forms of quick and dirty research don’t — sounds like this was the big win for Jensen Harris.
Eyetracking is helpful when you need to know something extremely tactical at a very precise level of detail. But we should think very hard about the payoff. There’s a great deal of overhead and it’s difficult to make this a flexible, nimble process.
Given Todd’s concerns with the cost, I looked around a bit, and found some attempts at using simple webcams for eyetracking. I’d love to know more about such low-cost approaches.
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