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The good folks at Boxes and Arrows have made the audio available from my IA Summit presentation, How to be UX Team of One, and I’ve synced it to the slides on Slideshare. This presentation features lots of tips and tricks for anyone who works as a solo UX practitioner from time to time. It also includes some dirty secrets and ends with a Howard Dean style whoop and holler. Enjoy!
At our recent MX Conference, we set out to capture emerging insights from the speakers using our graphic recording skills. With 4-5 colored markers fanning out from between our fingers at any given moment (picture a wolverine claw), we illuminated the speakers’ talks with memorable visuals and colorful typography. (Pictures coming soon.) On the last day of the conference, as I was running around with a pack of sticky notes trying to identify common themes across talks, it occurred to me: What if the conference participants were involved in this process?
At every conference I’ve attended, I’ve heard people express that they get as much out of interacting with other attendees as from the speakers. Everyone has a story to tell, but there’s only so much people can articulate in response to the FAQ, “What did you think of the talk?” It’s made me think: As design researchers, we often use hands-on, participatory techniques to draw latent insights out of our participants. Why don’t we use these same strategies to draw out and capture conference participants’ ideas?
What are some activities that could encourage deeper conversations and equip people to document their thoughts? What could conferences do to give people something to “triangulate” around — besides the wonderful food? Here are a few I’ve seen (not only at conferences, but at social events, college dorm walls, our office bathroom, etc.):
Graffiti Wall: Put up a giant piece of paper with some initial structure and encourage collaborative graphic recording — where participants can add their own notes, sketches and insights to a giant mural. Stickers and collaging images and words could be provided as well.
Open Whiteboards: Write questions on giant sticky notes (e.g., “What is service design?”) and put them in the halls where people can write on it during breaks. It could give people something to talk about while providing a forum for expression.
Five Minute Madness: We do this in our staff meetings: Someone makes an audacious statement that they may or may not agree with (e.g., “Experience Designer is a meaningless job title.”), and we discuss it for five minutes. Something like this could also be done on giant pieces of paper.
Projected Messages: Have a computer hooked up to a projector where people can type (or Twitter) ideas and thoughts and see them projected. Providing a question or conversation prompt, as described in Open Whiteboards and Five Minute Madness, might encourage participation.
Birds of a Feather: Place a “topic card” on each of the dining tables, such as “design research” or “managing internal experience teams” and encourage people to find a table with a topic that interests them.
Thinking about conferences you’ve attended (or planned), have you seen (or thought of) any other interesting strategies for helping people get their thoughts out there?
Update: UX Evangelist David Crow explores these ideas further on his blog.
I attended MX for the first time this year and as I was chatting with many inspiring UX managers and designers, I noticed the following common challenge in many in-house UX teams: They lack UX quality check points for marketing, advertising, and branding to create a holistic experience. I had the same challenge while I was working within the UX team at Microsoft. For the UX team to build relationships with marketing, advertising and branding, one of the tasks I had was to be a brand liaison that maintained contact between all teams. The goal was to meet and speak early and often and be a part of the product UX review/decision cycle to create holistic integration across web, marketing, and branding experience. As a solution to create UX quality check points for all teams, consider creating a UX liaison. The UX liaison should be a creative designer who can define brand and user experience language for various product experiences.
Last weekend, the LA Times staff went on a retreat to map out their future. What was interesting to me is the output of that retreat.
This poster has all the hallmarks of a graphic recording exercise and is likely the result of a roomful of people and an intense discussion led or recorded by a graphic illustrator.
A few months ago, several of us had a chance to participate in a graphic facilitation workshop, put on by The Grove. I can barely draw a stick figure, so it was a great opportunity to broaden my horizons. Over the course of two days, a dozen of us learned a multitude of tricks for simple, evocative drawing. It was a remarkable experience to learn how to capture ideas with figures instead of just words.
One of the useful things about graphically facilitating - or recording - a discussion is that the creation of a poster during the discussion serves a few purposes. First, people remember things better if they can tie an idea to a picture. Second, in some cases it is very useful to have an instant artifact showing the outcome of a discussion, whether it’s the brainstorm or a roadmap.
Some of my co-workers who are much handier with a marker than I will be graphically recording some of the talks at MX next week, so those of you attending will get a chance to see the process up close.
Even more about graphic facilitation: The Center for Graphic Facilitation
As the year comes to a close, the web becomes filled with lists – Top 10-this, Top 100-that. I love these lists and wanted to throw one into the mix. Below is a list of software and web services that we use here at Adaptive Path. If you haven’t made use of these, take a peek:
Software
Adobe InDesign – All our proposals, project narratives and a good chunk of our deliverables are done in InDesign. It’s an amazing page layout tool that allows you to assemble all your models, charts, visual designs and wireframes into consistently designed deliverables for your clients.
Adobe Illustrator – Many of us use Illustrator for drawing models, graphs, wireframes and design comps.
Adobe Photoshop – We honestly don’t use Photoshop to any large degree. But for tweaking images, cropping, minor editing, etc., you can’t find a better tool.
Adobe Acrobat Professional – PDFs are our deliverable blood. So, making the most of Acrobat is important. Often, we’ll use the sticky note features to provide feedback on designs or ideas. We’ll convert our presentations to PDF for release to the public after events as well.
Adobe Flash – We use Flash for creating prototypes of interfaces and applications. Thermo looks promising for this, but we’ll have to wait.
Keynote – One of our most favorite applications. Keynote is not only used for our presentations for events, but also for deliverables to clients. When you absolutely need a fast, powerful and simple application to convey your ideas, Keynote is the one.
OmniGraffle – Graffle is a great tool for creating wireframes and other diagrams. It’s faster to get started in Graffle than Illustrator sometimes and it’s made for wireframes. Many of us use this on every project.
OmniOutliner – Another fine tool, especially for taking notes that later need to be translated into a presentation, narration or deliverable.
Coda – This is a great little app for code editing and FTP services. The guys at Panic make awesome software.
SubEthaEdit – We use this during client meetings and sales calls. The Bonjour enabled document editing makes it so easy for all of us to take notes on one page. This saves time combining notes later and allows us to make corrections on the fly.
Microsoft Office – We use this a lot less than we did a year ago. We’ve stopped using Word for our proposals and communication. But we still use Excel for accounting purposes.
OS X – Of course, we’re a Mac house, so OS X is our most favorite “app” of all!
Web Services
Twitter – Twitter is great service that allow us to maintain connections with each other and with the community. Not only do most of us have our own accounts, Adaptive Path has an account where people could follow our office antics.
AIM – Instant messaging is still king for instant fast communication. Since we’ve grown to use two floors in our building, we rely on AIM for quick intra-office check-ins.
Harvest – Rather than doing traditional punch-in timecards, or submitting our project hours via email, we’ve switched to Harvest. It’s a great online service that makes it easy for the practitioners and the project managers.
Basecamp – Couldn’t run projects as effectively without it. Though it’s basic in many respects, it does 80% of what we need and our clients love the ability to communicate with us in such a simple and direct manner.
Wordpress – Our blog is powered by Wordpress and we’re happy with it’s ease of use, configurability and industrial strength.
MediaWiki – Instead of an intranet, we maintain a wiki. All the office and personnel stuff goes here. Everyone can edit it and we use it daily.
We’ve also experimented with using Google Docs and Spreadsheets with clients. We’ve tried countless online file storage delivery services. Most of us are on LinkedIn and Flickr.
Software and web services are crucial to doing our jobs, but face-to-face interaction and clear communication skills are the best tools you can have in your arsenal.
We’ve been using Basecamp for quite a while now. In order to make it do what we want, it sometimes takes a little encouragement and some hacks.
Things like making use of the existing CSS code to stylize your messages, or using Ajax to dynamically hide and show images to embedding Google calendars and video. Sometimes these little enhancements help you communicate your ideas more effectively.
I’ve created a free Basecamp site that has examples and the code that we’ve collected. Feel free to use and tweak as needed. If you have any others, or better ways of doing something, leave a comment here or in the Basecamp Sandbox below.
Site: Here
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