My Curious Life

Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path led off the day with a great keynote on new sources of inspiration for interaction designers. He pointed to three specific sources of inspiration:

1. Architecture
2. Film
3. Mechanical devices

He did a great job of covering a ton of potential material in a very tight timeframe … lots of things to consider as inspiration in each of those areas. I was especially impressed by his insights in the realm of film … I’m not a big movie buff, nor do I get the chance to watch many movies. As a result, I’ve never really gotten a chance to study much about film, other than some basics about transitions and sound effects. Dan brought to light some interesting techniques and information about various classic and modern films that I had noticed but never understood their significance.

I highly recommend looking through his slides (PDF) … the visuals alone are inspiring.

Bill DeRouchey of Ziba followed Dan Saffer with an excellent presentation of his own on learning interaction design from everyday objects. Bill brought some humor and open-ended questioning to his presentation that was refreshing, and it was nice to see how his examples complemented the prior presentation. His site, No Ideas But In Things, is a collection of interesting and intriguing things that inspire.

Rather than ramble, catch Bill’s slides (PDF) and grab the audio, too.

Just after Bill’s session finished, I had a chance to speak to him and introduce myself. In typical fashion, I introduced myself, mentioned that I was impressed with his presentation and noted the local connection (Ziba is located in my hometown, Portland, Oregon) and then promptly ran out of things to say. Ugh! So much for good impressions.

The conference wrapped up with a presentation by Cybelle Jones of Gallagher & Associates and Robert Freeland of Quatrefoil Associates, both of whom teamed up to design the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

While their presentation was interesting, the “field trip” to the museum was fantastic. My guess is that just about every adult male in the building reverted to a 10 year old boy, geeking out on spy gear, stories and gadgets from around the world. The museum itself is well organized and covers a lot of ground (physically and informationally). The format is such that it caters to both kids and adults, with interactive exhibits and lots of background information on all of the objects in the collection. Any subsequent trips I make to D.C. will likely include a brief stop at the museum, just for fun.

All in all, UX Week was well worth the time and money. I’ve got a notebook of ideas, sketches and trivia that will inform the work I do in the near term, as well as some longer term material to learn from. I’m looking forward to next year.

Jan Chipchase of Nokia really impressed me with some of his thoughts on research and user human centered design. Starting with the simple questions, like “Who are you?” and “How do you prove it?”, really reframes your thinking about things and our sense of identity. He posed an interesting question, too — “What do our signs say about us?” There’s so much more to our motivations and cultural clues than meets the eye … there is so much beneath the surface. It’s something we know in a way, but so often forget to ask the right questions to get to the deeper meaning. He had three things that work (in contextual research):

1. Make your colleagues smarter
2. Know who you are (and your boundaries)
3. Let go (of your assumptions and control)

There was a lot more, too, that I’ll be mulling over for a while and trying to implement in my work, though it wouldn’t hurt to have his research and travel budget!

Emily Ulrich of Steelcase presented an interesting tool called “elito” that helps capture and frame research, insights and design concepts for a team. The tool documents metaphor, observation, insight, value and concept.

Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path was entertaining and informative once again with his presentation on Making Research Effective. I’m liking Wilkens’ Law and “research martyrdom” as highlights … not to mention the Lego Knight on the slides. Most importantly, though, he made it clear that research results need three things to be successful: value, relevance and to be actionable.

Adaptive Path exposed their weaknesses at an interesting session hosted by Bryan Mason. They have, in their own words, a “cultural tolerance for error” that is admirable and necessary in order to grow as an organization. They also have a lot of fun and learn to laugh at their own mistakes. It’s always nice to see heroes show a bit of weakness and humility … it only further proves their strength and endears them to us even more. Way to go, AP folks!

Josh Porter, formerly of UIE and now running his own shop, Bokardo Design, made a good presentation of social design influences and social psychology research. Nicely summarized and very useful. I’ve followed his blog for some time now and will continue to do so.

Kathleen Hoski and Paris Patton, of Best Buy and Sachs Insights respectively, made a great presentation of some of their joint research into multi-channel purchases. They had select video clips of customers from focus groups, video diaries and interviews. As would be expected, the video footage was very “real” and enlightening. You can’t help but chuckle when listening to customers’ “parking lot confessionals” and making comments like taking into account “the W.A.F. – Wife Approval Factor.” My only complaint, please slow down Kathleen, I really wanted to hear all that you had to say.

The day wrapped up with a discussion panel by Lori Adams and Dermont Waters of CNN.com. Humorous, entertaining and honest, it was another great presentation of the ups and downs of what good design is all about. For how large CNN is as an organization, they seemed to be fairly nimble in their redesign project. I have some fun quotes, like “teetering pile of data” and “Relaunch Protection Program” that added a special flavor to their session.

If I hadn’t jetted out the door right afterward to take a very pleasant evening trolley tour of D.C. with my wife, I would have had a chance to meet Bill DeRouchey of Ziba at the closing night party. Ziba’s the big dog of design in my own backyard, and Bill’s presentation is on my schedule for tomorrow, so I’ll just have to see if I can catch him after his presentation and say hi.

I must confess, I spent way too much time last night walking around D.C. playing tourist with my wife. It’s been about 5 years since my last trip to the D.C. area, and my wife hasn’t been here since she was in the 8th grade (and while it’s been a long time since 8th grade, I’m not at liberty to discuss her age … I do enjoy sleeping in a bed, after all). We spent about five and a half hours on foot touring D.C. and getting some great shots of the landmarks at night, like this one:

The evening ended with a late night meal at the hotel bar, entertained by some other attendees and their libations, then downloading and reviewing photos on my laptop until about 2am local time (which still only feels like 11pm … I’ll adjust to the time zone difference about the time I get back on the plane home).

End result: a fuzzy recollection of most of the sessions, with the exception of Leisa Reichelt’s talk “Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good”. Leisa proved to be very entertaining while touching on a subject that many people are having issues with … design/development processes. Waterfall methods are widely agreed to be a death trap by many in the design realm, but the alternatives of agile development and user-centered design (UCD) each have their weaknesses. Her proposal of a “washing machine” methodology, the best of both agile and UCD, has lots of promise. Leisa’s blog has been on my reading list for a long time, and will continue to be … there’s a great mind behind that marvelous accent.

Interesting opening by Deborah Adler of ClearRx fame, much more soft spoken and hesitant than I would have guessed. Great ideas, nice to see her prototypes and hear about the process she used to arrive at such great results.

Kevin Brooks of Motorola Labs was very engaging and entertaining, as would be expected of someone with his background as a professional oral storyteller. In fact, he’s produced a CD of stories, called Kiss of Summer, that sounds very interesting. It’s definitely on my buy list now.

Kate Rutter, “Sticky Ninja” and member of Adaptive Path, did a great job turning the humble Post-It note into a weapon of mass instruction. Were Kate left on a deserted desert island with nothing but a few packs of stickies, she’d surely be found weeks later having build a vacation resort there out of nothing but determination and stickies. I sincerely hope she has stock in 3M.

Hey, MightyGirl, was that you in the elevator? What a cutie you’ve got in the stroller! Nice to see that UX Week is a family affair.

Ryan Freitas, also of Adaptive Path, did a great presentation on the parallels between working in a professional kitchen and working as an interaction designer. His published article on the same topic in Ambidextrous magazine is a good summary of his presentation.

Jess McMullin of nForm spoke to a topic that I can relate to — The Designer as Facilitator — and had some solid suggestions about how to “grease the wheels” so to speak, and increase influence and work through business roadblocks to make good design (and implementation) happen.

Liz Sanders of MakeTools really wowed me, though, and capped the day with two sessions back-to-back — a presentation and a workshop — that explored the history of the design research landscape and where she sees things going in the future: generative tools. I have a ton of notes from her presentation, with a bunch of brain sparks in the margins. Nothing compares to seeing how she’s using these simple, but incredibly powerful toolkits to empower people (not just designers) to make meaning and create the future. Liz is tops on my list for the day … what a great way to wrap up the day and finish energized and motivated.

I’m looking forward to seeing what tomorrow brings …

Capping the whirlwind that has been the past couple of weeks, I’m in Washington, D.C. now for UX Week, which promises to be a pretty exciting and inspiring event. Adaptive Path has a great series of speakers lined up and the locale is quite nice.

I’ve followed a number of these folks’ blogs for some time now, but there’s a whole depth of communication that comes with in-person, live public speaking that you just don’t get in the written word. I’m always been amazed at how the personality of a speaker adds so much more to what they have to say … and once you’ve heard their voice in the real world, it’s easier to pick up the subtleties in their writing that you might have otherwise missed.

Come on people, let us hear your voices!