This weekend I am buried in a seminar on how to be a more engaging public speaker. Most of us fear public speaking. We fear being embarrassed in front of crowds or not being seen as credible in what we are talking about. I too have those fears, which is why I am in the seminar.

Our homework tonight was to write our defining moment, a story about why we are talking about what we’re talking about, so here’s mine:

Having started my career as a visual designer, I was quite happy just dealing with colors, objects, and fonts. As long as clients were happy, I was happy. Though throughout that time I found I really struggled with clients who didn’t appreciate my viewpoint on design. Like most designers I felt I was the expert in all things related to the “beautification” of a product.

Then the dot com crash hit and my life changed forever. After a year of underemployment and struggling to make ends meet I landed in the mortgage industry. I was working in a call center taking calls from people who needed their mortgage loan yesterday. I came to the quick realization that people didn’t understand finance nor did I to be frank. Calls such as “now I can afford a home with this interest only loan” & “I need to pay my contractor who started a month ago; why hasn’t this loan closed?” left me more then a little concerned. This would be an ongoing theme in my life as I began the journey towards financial literacy.

Then I landed in the insurance industry working on a change program to shift resources around the company, save money, and streamline the overall business. Here I suddenly had a new voice. I was hired to work on the internal web site redesign and any other admin related tasks. Having come out of the dot com bust with experience in web design I was a perfect fit for this small group. I knocked out the redesign, creating what I would (years later) come to understand were called wireframes and user flows not specs and process flows. They began to move me around to other similar projects and before I knew it I was a business analyst bringing design thinking to business objectives and suddenly it hit me. There was something to the designers way of thinking that was a different more encompassing approach to problem solving then the traditional MBA thinking. I began to explore what this meant and eventually found my way to Interaction Design but it was that project starting as an Administrative Assistant that led me where I am today.

We don’t think about it as it’s second to what we do. I design something then I create this document then it’s huge and I have to condense it and then the client has to extract it then there might be problems and he has to go through all these troubles then gets

Two most effective ways of communicating is talking and drawing. Drawing it out on the white board

But how would I communicate differently if I were right next to the client. I would probably just reach over the wall and talk to him. Create insights on a list and post it up on your wall to live in their space all the time and know them. It immerses you in what your are designing and their needs. Pretend your client is part of your team.

Analog crowd source: a wall of different concepts and then the developer and you can sit down and talk about what you do. Then the developer can feel like they are part of the design process and add the issues with the technical side. The more you talk about your ideas the more you can flush them out. A lot easier on a white board to get ideas across quickly about issues or the emotional appeal on the project.

IDEAS – We’ll make more! If you have to redraw it then it may create a new and better idea after the next iteration.

Clients don’t understand your process if they are new to working with you so you’ll need to educate them that this is a process. Instead of presenting ideas, sketch with the client. Start broad and iterate down to the solution. Like spiraling down from the top of a tornado to the bottom of it.

Don’t turn your website into an app. You just failed if you are going create an app. How are people going to use it and for how long? Sketched in the wrong direction will usually lead to the right direction. Depending on the client… drill down into their logo and how their audience views them. Might open a conversation in direction. Such as BET’s star which is seen as “hope” for up and coming pop stars and rap stars. Utilizing the story of BET we personalized the app with relevance for the audience. Don’t build an app. Build a brand experience. We implemented ways for the audience of the shows to interact with the stars.

———————-

There’s a few different types of people. Those who are very focused. The jack of all trades but the M or generalist is the path of attainment. A lot of these people end up as managers. They work all over the board, changes quickly and very in demand. Currently 15% specialists & 85% generalists. Web designers should do their own HTML/CSS according to 37 Signals. Know your medium.

Hard Skills IA, Visual Design etc
Soft Skills interpersonal, presentation, etc

Hard Skill: Information Architecture is about making things more simple. If you can’t back up your ideas with at least 2 sets of rational, try harder. Three areas to check for information:
JJG’s Visual Vocabulary
Eight shapes Unify
Boxes & Arrows
Graffletopia

Hard Skill: Visual Design: skin & look and feel
Smashing Magazine
Creatica
Method and Craft

Hard Skill: Presentation Layer Coding: HTML, CSS, Javascript
Smashing Magazine
960 Grid System
Andy Osmani

Soft Skills: Presenting
Note & Point
Slideshare
Sliderocket

Presentation Zen
Interpersonal Presenter

Soft Skills: Interpersonal Skills
Letting go of the deliverable
Give and receive
Knowledge sharing
Conflict resolution
Office politics
Collaboration
The art of project management – Scott Berkun
FYI For your Improvement

Soft Skill: Planning and time management
Lose the fire helmet
Be early, drive and the bus: Better to lead then follow
When to use which tool
Lifehacker.com
43folders.com
Teaux Deaux

Sharpen one blade at a time and then grow the others. The more you can contribute outside your area the more you can move up the ladder. Most designers according to A List Apart have a degree, a blog, time online 10 years, are often in larger organizations, most are freelancers / self employed (interesting how he skips over that as an option), top 10% are making 6 figures plus

What do UX Managers Do?
Internal: evangelize, network in company, hiring…
External: sales and clients

FYI For your Improvement a guide for development and coaching

Interviews
Must have an online presence – show a portfolio (It shows you care and are enthused)
Infographic resumes show your passion for design

What managers are looking for:
Passion
Good critical thinkers
Good communication
Coding ability
Serious commitment to the UX community
Soft Skills

Ability to think on your feet… even those with awesome portfolios fall flat here…. Can you get up and illustrate you can think on your feet in a second

Barriers to success:
Not asking questions: repeated technical mistakes
Slow skills development stuck in old methods
Working alone too much
Lack of accountability for problems
No prioritizing, scattered, always putting out fires
Overly focused on micro areas of interest

In summary play the odds and be a generalist. Technology changes and be ready to adapt. Sharpen one blade at a time and build then a 6 figure income is completely within your grasp.

Google infographic resume

Turntable.fm is a music streaming & sharing application that allows users to create rooms with up to 5 DJ’s to rotate songs within their own particular music genre(s) of choice. It was recently featured in TechCruch as the latest early adopter addiction.

Words cannot do justice to explain just how addicting this app is especially when you’re at the tables in a room full of people. You find yourself feeling that anticipation a DJ must feel when they are up on the tables, beat matching song after song, hoping to see the floor moving. “Will they like my song? Will they hate it? Oh no, they aren’t dancing! They must hate it. Oh wait, there’s one person dancing now, now another… Ok, ok, this is going to be ok.” Now you may wonder “but how do people ‘dance’ virtually?” I’m glad you asked for Turntable.fm has thought of that. Users dance when they click the awesome button on the application. DJ’s can get booted if the audience clicks lame enough times. Awesome clicks win you DJ points which allow you to get bigger and bigger advatars.

Like most things social, human behavior factors into the enjoyment of the app. In this case, users have created their own rules for some rooms. One of the most popular rooms “80′s Play 3 & Step Down”, was started by one user with the rule that you can only play 3 songs then you must step down. The moderation of the room passes from one person to the next to ensure the queue stays constant and consistent with new users stepping up and stepping down based on whether or not they have already played 3 songs. This rule started because users found that many of the DJs would just stay on the tables even long after rooms would fill up, never giving others a chance to step up and spin.

On the flip side it was interesting to step into some of the other rooms which were less considerate. I stepped into the country room and watched as one DJ got “lamed” out of their seat at the tables including chants from the crowd, “Lame her out. Click lame! Do it. This is miserable. Lame! Lame! Lame!” Crowds can be brutal. But I imagine it to be no different in some ways to being a real DJ in a real club. All you can hope for is that people like what you play.

Turntable runs on the Amazon EC2 servers and occasionally has trouble with lag, songs won’t play or will play a different song then the user has queued, and could use some way of customizing rooms a bit more by adding rules around how many songs you can play so more users get a turn. I’d also like to see other ways of integrating my music to the DJ queues (uploads don’t always work so perhaps a partnership with iTunes &/or Youtube. In fact, might be fun to have a Video DJ in the same room spinning video). Private messaging would be nice too if they can also create a way to block a user from communicating with you. A random button would also be quite nice so when you add your songs in you can click random and they will shuffle.

Much like Guitar Hero played to our dreams of being rock stars, Turntable, plays into our dreams of being a DJ, and it does it really well. I’d love to see it affect the real world with DJ spin offs in the clubs. Would be quite fun I think.

Yet as a gamer and one that has been doing a lot of research on Facebook games of late, I find a lot of the games have little things that drive me up the wall. Some are slow to respond. Others have pop over layers that fly in my face constantly. In one case in particular, I could be in the middle of picking up goods, xp, or coins I need to keep my city alive and, “POOF”, yet, another annoying popover. Still, I keep going back because there’s an emotional element of accomplishment within the game that keeps me tied to it. “I must become mayor today!”, I think as I clear trees, build businesses and housing, working tirelessly to build my city into something I am proud of.

Thus if you take this emotional element and combine it with user experience you get nirvana! Which makes me curious, why then are UX professionals fighting over what we call ourselves when what we need to be focused on is, why even hire us? We are after all, information architects, content strategiests, visual designers, librarians, business strategiests, interaction designers and more. UX is a melting pot of an industry full of creative, intelligent, amazingly talented folks who offer solutions to common business problems. Therefore, shouldn’t we focus more on results and what we can deliver to our clients then trying to figure out what to call ourselves.

Just my 2 cents, anyway.

They then drilled into, “What does it mean to be a master?” “You have to start at the beginning. Being a beginner sucks but you need to practice, practice, practice. Once you learn how to complete tricks then you can mimic the masters. Once you figure out how to mimic the masters then you can innovate. Take baby steps on innovation.” In other words, “Observe, mimic, practice, practice, practice, innovate, and repeat.” Be willing to fail at something. Be willing to experiment. Be willing to just simply try.

Next up they asked, “How do we get on a plan to mastery?” Let me preface this with Jane McGonigal’s TED talk. In it she said it takes 1000 hours to master something. One thousand hours. Reed speaks about how the more “I know about anything, the better prepared I am to handle what comes up. The more I know, the better I become at my art.” What surprised and delighted me if as a performer he even claimed to understand the behind the scenes tech. As a former stage hand and sound technician who has worked with such names as Ugly Kid Joe, Corrosion of Conformity, Richard Marx, Steven Curtis Chapman, Coolio to name a few, I was taken aback repeating on twitter several times just how much this impressed me. As most of those named cannot make the same claims. Jared added that we need to consider the “Broken Comb Model”. Gain expertise in various areas. Some will be stronger than others but look to gain understanding not just in UX but in game, business analysis, strategy, IA, etc. Practice by continuing to build on that knowledge. Practice is not work. Practice makes us a better person. Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. No one will make a game out of it for you so try different routines and different things to keep it fresh. Magicians talk about what it takes to practice but we as an industry never talk about the time, space, & budget that it takes to practice.

Great talk guys! May just end up my favorite of the conference.

Now I hate to run and hate to ask people for money so why in the world would I sign myself up to do this!? There was the rub. I wanted to in every way push myself beyond my boundaries and found this to be a “safe” spot to try. Fundraising is challenging and I have found it to be even more challenging by the simple fact I am being faced with all my issues regarding money. The running seems easy in comparison. Even the 5 mile run I did the other day across hilly terrain.

Next I come to discover that in every possible way the fundraising system I was “gifted” with for the process is inherently broken. I went in and imported my address book from Gmail, started editing the email addresses one by one to ensure names were correct, only to come to discover that none of it works! I cannot select from the address book any of the names in the system because they are still the original names I imported (ie asmith rather than Alicia Smith). Nothing had changed at all! What’s up with that!? Talk about a user experience nightmare! I mean the site itself is an absolute disaster and then I come to find that I cannot even get letters out as I expected!? No wonder fundraising is such a nightmare. The systems the poor NGO’s of the world have to use are antiqued and painful and that’s on the plus side!

Here I wanted to challenge myself and in the process honor my mom who is a 30 year non-Hodgkins Lymphoma survivor and yet I have to work with antiquated, painful systems! So can you help a girl out here and donate? At least encourage me despite the horrible system I have to work with? I’d appreciate it either way. After all this I’ll make sure to straighten them out. Thank you so much in advance!

Update: TNT was quick to help me out and resolve my issue. They have added my requests to a list of updates to be done to the future state of the site. I appreciate TNT’s willingness to jump in and resolve the issue as quickly as possible. However, I had to quit the race for this year since I was unable to pull in enough funds to feel comfortable recommitting.

“I haven’t done a wireframe in 2 years.” starts Todd Zaki Warfel in his talk about his intensive, iterative ideation sessions with clients followed by prototyping and discusses in this video why you should prototype. (Hat tip to theuxworkshop.tv.)

The process goes as follows:
1) Sketch: Start with quantity over quality. In about 5 minutes sketch 6-8 ideas.
2) Share: Throw them up on a wall side by side and present to the team. (Three minutes to pitch. Two minutes to critique. Four to 6 cycles in a day.)
3) Prototype: Figure out what to prototype (top 3-4 ideas).
3) Build: Bring it to life.

Why Prototype:
1) Work through our designs: Does it work? What doesn’t work? Where’s the hole(s)?
2) Communicate concepts: People are visual. They grasp what they see.
3) Sell an idea
4) Gauge technical feasibility
5) Test concepts with customers

What happens if you don’t (prototype)?
You get a domino effect. You think it’s going to work and testing shows otherwise. Yet you are in the middle of development. Or you have users screaming at the screen.

Six Guidelines:
1) Know your audience and intent.
2) Plan a little. Prototype the rest.
3) Set expectations.
4) You CAN sketch.
5) It’s not the Mona Lisa.
6) If you can’t really make it. Fake it.

Games are invading the real world — and the runaway popularity of Farmville and Guitar Hero is just the beginning, says Jesse Schell. At the DICE Summit, he makes a startling prediction: a future full of points in the making. While brushing our teeth, getting enough sleep, everything we do we collect points for tax breaks, special incentives by companies. In one case there are points for the amount of soda we drink because we are not that far from every can of soda having a CPU and small camera to monitor our behaviour.

Sketch-a-Move from Superflux on Vimeo.

I’ve missed a couple weeks due to deadlines at work but here’s the next installment of UX Video of the Week. This one is a lot of fun to watch and only 5 minutes out of your day for some amusing commentary (by the girls in the video) and inspiration. Here Anab Jain and Louise Klinker, both graduates of the Royal College of Art’s Design Interactions MA program, show a nice example of the use of video for prototyping. (The project was also featured in Bill Buxton’s book “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design”.)

Nathan Shedroff argues in his keynote address to the IxDA that we can no longer separate business, design, and sustainability. For companies it’s not just about products anymore.

What, then, is the intent behind consumption? We aren’t going to stop consumption. We can be taught not to be wasteful. New York City requires citizens to recycle or their buildings are fined. This requirement meant I needed to get educated about what should and should not be recycled. I found it unfortunate, when I moved away, that other cities in America are not also teaching this.

Meaning is the deepest connection that can be made between people or people & objects. Meaning is a hulu hoop around us that expands out to values, emotions, price, & features. Most buying decisions are based on emotional engagement.

There are 15 core meanings, such as, accomplishment, enlightenment, redemption, beauty, freedom, security, harmony, creation, duty, justice. We need to reframe “Less is More” to “More for Less” for everyone outside the sustainability & design worlds.

Interaction Designers are the most well posed to make meaning happen as we have models, research methods, comfort with ambiguity, are service orientated, and customer focused. Freedom and security can have different expressions based on prioritization & meaning.

Personally, I question that without some sort of business training, can designers speak the language of business so that they can be heard?

Being Human is NOT Quantifiable from Jeff Parks on Vimeo.

The Following are the Key Takeaways I got from the Video:

“Behaviour is a function of the person and their environment.”

You cannot sum up behaviour as easy as a bunch of numbers. “The experiences in our life ultimately determine our perspective. It is the culmination of experiences that ultimately shape our unique reality.” Not just one event.

Business/IT tends to care more about their processes and code then the user. Much like in family feud, the user stands in the sound proof booth and they know the answer but can’t tell the people who are up on stage (business & IT). We don’t take the time to talk to our users. Take the time to find out about the people you are designing for.

Seek First to Understand Then be Understood:
Find the reconcile force… Write out all the things you disagree about then move forward on all the things you agree about. This is where personas and wireframes come into play as a tool. They are tools to communicate ideas. Move forward from there with the how. (How do I get buy in for my ideas?)

No One is an Expert:
The industry is only ten years old. How many ten year olds do you know that have the answers to everything? According to Malcolm Gladwell it takes 10K hours to master anything.

Most of our work is about conveying meaning to others for others. By focusing on data points, we miss the emotion and the perception. (ie the Human Side AND the opportunity to connect.)

If you seem stuck then the answer may not be logical. Draw, do something creative, it’ll free up your mind and help you think outside the box.

Children have endless capacity to create. but we kill creativity ruthlessly. (When we design for human beings we take the human out of the equation.)

Trust is predicated on an understanding of what it is that you are trying to communicate. Trust is the biggest issue on the web, in the marketplace, in business, in government… it’s everywhere today. The web is a conversation but do you know WHO you are talking to?

We define the people we meet by WHAT they do not WHO they are. Human experience and what we remember cannot be put into a number.

“Designers have imagination, empathy, and intuition, which is just as legitimate as statistical data and are grounded in knowledge and principles. Design is an argumentative process and as the design must be argued for so too must the data. Neither is the final answer or truth; instead there’s a process of discovery and understanding.” – Uday Gayendar, VOIP for Oracle, Adobe, & Cisco

The only way to truly understand someone is the ability to connect with them in a balanced way.

“…no one will remember you for the car you drove of the things you owned. In life, what matters most at the connections you make with other people and the personal impact you had on their lives…” – William Oliver, Farmer (My Dad said something similar to me when a close personal friend died unexpectedly: “No one will remember you at the office.”)

We have so much potential and yet we squander it on useless data points.

Other Video’s & URL’s Mentioned by Jeff are as follows:
StoryCorps
Jake Barton
Jesse James Garrett
Lego Universe
Boxes and Arrows Podcasts
Podcast with Greg Vassallo

Special thank you to Jeff Parks for taking the time to share with us his thoughts!

I have to ask all UX professionals everywhere, “Why the divide?” Aren’t we as professionals in User Experience supposed to be about the design of that experience no matter the medium?

You could argue, much like Marshall McLuhan, “The medium is the message!” After all a content rich site is going to need a good IA to wrangle all that content but then that IA needs to also create the interface for the user to interact with all that content. Isn’t the interaction design?

On the flip side, you may have an interaction designer working on a content rich site such as CBS News is going to need to know how to wrangle all that content in order to increase find-ability. Isn’t that Information Architecture?

How much are we really different from each other? And does it really matter? In the end isn’t it all about the user and their experience anyway?

As a designer, I am responsible for the experiences I create for my users. Whether creating a financial web site or a game, I need to consider how people will interact with that information. What excites me about this video is it takes an everyday object and creates a new and unique experience which changes the behaviour of the user. Interesting.

Another example is Mint.com.

Most people would say that they 1) do not understand finance and/or 2) find it rather boring. I am included in that population. Until the day I found myself working in finance, I can honestly say I didn’t understand it. No one spent time explaining it to me. School never had a class in it. How was I ever to understand it? I was frustrated with money.

Enter Mint.com and all of a sudden you have users who say, “Mint.com has changed the way I view my finances.” Really? Why is that?

Mint adds color and graphics. It talks to you about your money. Shows you where you are spending, where you can cut, helps you budget, watch your investments grow, etc. It provides a simple interface for ease of use and understanding. It has changed behaviour and the user’s understanding of their money.

How much more as designers can we help our users understand things they do not and affect behaviour within applications, web sites, games, and other digital means? What can we look to, to help us explore new forms of interactive understanding? Every project differs. In the case of JunoBaby it simply needed to be a simple module to help users understand the company. In the case of AEG (redesign live soon), it was an interactive flash piece that explained the historical timeline of the company through imagery and video while matching with the historical periods in time to help users better understand the time periods the company was making such decisions.

I was watching Top Gear on the BBC and they were discussing the design of the road signs for the highways (Fast forward to 4:45 within the video).

In the 1950′s when the government was developing the motor ways in the UK, they realised that the current signs were not going to work. Thus a professor and his former student got the job to redesign all the road signs around the UK. They utilized colors and upper and lower case lettering for faster reading. They also changed up the design of the “children at play” sign to look like the student and her brother when they were young. Their objective was to make the signs clear and easy to read while moving at traditional speeds in the UK. You can find the final product here.

I remember my design classes at design school taught the importance of clean & clear design. Not to mention with road signs you need to consider not only your local audience but the tourist who may read the imagery of the sign differently than you intend. How then does this translate to the web or other forms of digital media?

Road signs in digital media are usually navigation based. Interaction Designers and User Experience Specialists will recommend things like breadcrumbs, as well as, utilizing colors and font sizes to help users figure out where they are within a site. For example when I worked on the CBS News redesign we explored colors like yellow for the Early Show, red for 60 Minutes, and blue for 48 Hours. These visual clues give users an immediate (unspoken) impact which says I am in X section of the site. It’s the way the users find their way or what UX professionals call wayfinding.

Though with that in mind, I ask my fellow UX pros if perhaps when talking about UX with people whom don’t know or understand what we do perhaps we need to use road signs to explain how people find their way through a site. What road signs will users look for when they come to your site? Will the signs say move forward?  Dangerous curves ahead? Stop? What does your site say about you and will users manage to find their way?  Will they find your site a nice drive in the country?  Or a dangerous rocky road ahead?

First I want to state that for 2010 I think I will be talking about User Experience in a more generalized way.  I find I put too much pressure on myself to say something profound in my blog. Like every blogger in the blog-o-sphere must say something profound that has massive universal impact rather than simply saying, “I think this about that.” Thus in order to take the pressure off and to encourage more blogging, I will blog about anything I think impacts experience or technology. I’ll ask more questions. I’ll talk about stuff that inspires my thinking. Speaking of, my biggest inspiration lately has been gaming.

Girls and Games.

Ask most females and they would tell you they are either 1) not a gamer or 2) there aren’t enough “girl games” out there for them. What does that really mean though?

Let’s start with point one: “I’m not a gamer”

Any girl who tells you this is simply lying. Truth is they have probably played several games as a kids. As a member of the female gender, they play games with their friends, lovers, and others they come across. They are just not the “normal” type of game we might think of. Girls are competitive in nature.  If you don’t believe me, watch females play soccer or volleyball. (Or fight over a man.)

That brings me to point two: “The games out there aren’t interesting to me.”

I had an interesting conversation with the people at Playdom during an interview a few weeks back. It turns out the game, “Sorority Life“, has a strong appeal to women in their 30/40/50′s whom have the desire at the end of the day to “kill”. (In other words they love the fight feature where they can challenge other women and win battles for money, power, status, or game items.) It is a release of stress for them.

While I was not a fan of Sorority Life (because it felt too girly),  ”Mafia Wars” (by Zynga) appealed to me for much of the same reason. Fascinating, isn’t it?

Why then aren’t more games built for girls that allow us to play to our competitive natures? The game industry is missing a key component to the type of experience girls would want in games. Perhaps there would be more peace in the world if we could take out our aggression within games?

Then again, probably not.

User’s Brain vs Your Design – A Brief reminder of gestalt principles as applied to 2D design.

The Yahoo Pattern Library – Good to help explore ideas on how to design something. Not an end all be all answer.

The Semantic Web and a semantic search for Information Architecture.

Why Couples Therapy for Designers and Developers? – We often use a conveyor belt method to manage products. Designers do their work up front, then “hand off” their creation expecting it can be built and won’t change. Then the Developers need to create something they’ve previously had little involvement with. It’s critical that these transition phases be a two-way channel, and not the closing of a door. The detail of what works might be specific to your team, but in the end, our research shows that communication is what makes great teams work. Successful projects are built around the involvement and engagement of all parties at every phase of the project. How do you facilitate this? Bring everyone, including designers, developers, and stakeholders into the earliest discussions. Involve team members in solving problems that you encounter. Hold reviews after every phase during the project.

Other News:

The Top 10 Best UX Blogs
Interface Design Patterns (Data Visualization Collection)
Imitation, Sincere Form of Flattery?
Downturn Accelerates Demand for Open Source Software
Track Your Happiness with the iPhone

Social media is about connections and sharing experiences. It will not suddenly give your business a boost without your business having a product/service your customers (ie users) fall in love with. If you as a business create a product that the users love they will run to Facebook or Twitter or any other service to let their network know about it. On the flip side, they will also say how much they hate it.

Business needs to understand this important distinction and consider their business strategy before implementing a social media tool to their toolbox. They need to ask why they think they need it and strategize that need along with exploring what users need. Combine the two with a social media strategy that fits your business and you might find you have utilized a tool to create a solution.