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Since I've been spamming your flist with higher than normal activity about my trip to Alberta... Here are the picture to prove it:



( I really don't do it justice. )

I would document would captions but I do still have work in less than 8 hours.

The conference wrapped up yesterday. While we had a line up a great speakers, by the last day I was a little overwhelmed. So much information to absorb, conversations to record, my brain needs a little time to digest.

Before the last day of the conference, I should note that I took one last trip to town in the morning. I’m amazed at my new-found orientation skills. Not much interesting to note except I came across ravens and magpies. Ravens? HUGE, black, scary birds.

Interesting lessons to take home:

• From Chad Fournier on Agile UX: Doing research, case studies, usability tests yields extraordinary results. Like improving call centres wait time by 17%, and saving the company $10M. It doesn’t have to be expensive, either. You can do testing with wireframes, implement small features at a time. When you’re trying to cut cost, hire more UX people! Deliver what your clients really need, not what you think they need. It’s the “measure twice, cut once” principle.
• From Alex and Matthew’s war stories on Akoha: Design isn’t a technique, or a tool, or a method. It’s a mindset, and it can be trained. Which also means it takes patience, perseverance, and practice. It’s a little like cooking. It requires a culture, trial and error, but it also allows for flexibility.
• Kristina Halvorson totally hit this out of the ballpark. This woman was enthusiastic, sassy, intelligent, funny, inspiring… Lessons learned:
  • IA and content strategist are best friends! None should operate without the other. They need to determine what, why, and tonality of the content.
  • If there’s one person that should be in all the discussion, it is the copywriter.
  • Content is not a feature.
  • Copy is hard to write.
  • Death to Lorem Ipsum! Content informs the design, not the other way around. If content can’t be done first, then it should be done simultaneously with design.
  • Content has a strategy: plan, create, deliver, govern.
  • Allow for divergent thinking. It demonstrates trust in your team, and allows for the exploration of different ideas. (It’s imperative, really, that brainstorming is androgynous so that it can be done in parallel.) Then encourage convergent thinking. Facilitate how all those different ideas and perspectives can come together to produce something novel.
• From Rahel Bailie on Content Strategy: there’s different genres to content (persuasive, entertainment, instructive) and different delivery (formats, outputs, print, browser, utility). The content for each combination is different. You can’t expect to use the same content for the web that you would use for print.
• Peter Merholz was the perfect last speaker, summarizing all the big concepts that the conference had to offer:
  • It’s time to upgrade your mandate from user experience (on the web, on the application) to customer experience (a multi-channel experience from the website to the call centre, to the storefront, everything…) throughout the entire organism that is your business. You need everyone, everyone to believe in your vision. Once you’ve truly achieved participatory design, you transform your employees to your advocates. And it resonates with your customers.
  • Sometimes, it’s a CEO (say, Steve Jobs) that marshals that vision into an experience, sometimes it’s a mantra (Tivo), other times it’s a thing (like a pill bottle). It’s hard to convince an organization that it needs to change in order to make that one legendary thing. It’s more concrete to show them that thing and the things they need to do to make that happen.
  • To this point, it reminds me of the story of TOM’s Shoes.
  • “Communicating UX clearly to others is as important as understanding it yourself.” (- @burgertime) “Because it’s going to be a slog.” (- @peterme)

On the way home, we stopped by the city of Canmore. Same amazing, wooden architectures all around. Such grand buildings! And stars, oh my gosh, so many stars.

Met so many intelligent and amazing people: Collette, Yvonne, Matt, Kelly, Murray, Colin, Annie, Darrell, Kaylen, Karen, Rahel, Ammneh, Jess, Dennis, Samantha, Sam, Mikael, Jerome, Lawrence, Loren, Chris…

It’s my last day in Alberta. Currently in the Country Inn and Suites in Calgary. I can’t wait to get home.

Thank you nForm for hosting and flying me to beautiful Banff!

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

Half-way through the conference, and some thoughts:

General conference comments:

• Small conference with a mix of workshops and speakers. Read: close and intimate interactions, good chance of meeting a fair amount of people, conversations as opposed to broadcasts.
• Excellent way of connecting with people who share the same passion, but more importantly, the same frustrations. If not to learn how they overcame their problems, then to share our communal misery.
• Beautiful location, friendly town, great food.

The specifics:

• The Design Slam (people were split into different groups to solve the same problems) was a great, relevant ice breaker. Topic of the year was designing an inventory system for a fictitious food bank. All the design solutions were fairly similar, but there were a few notable presentation techniques that I’d consider using:
  • While all the other groups prepared their “slides” ahead of time, there was one group who drew their visuals real-time as another group member narrated their system flow. It kept the audience engaged. And as a fun gimmick, the flow chart took the shape of a happy face which you don’t realize until it comes near the end.
  • Another group performed a skit with paper props. We worked newsprint and sticky notes, and the sticky notes became the food items that were being transported in paper bags and sorted in paper shelves.
  • Collette Ostler began our presentation by acknowledging the strengths of each of the previous teams.
  • Jerome Ryckborst brings an interesting an empathic angle to the system by considering food bank recipients as one of the stakeholders. While they weren’t our end users, the experience of the workers and the recipients aren’t entirely distinct in that workers get an altruistic fulfillment by working in a food bank. So the distribution portion of the system is designed as a kitchen cabinet where the recipient is taken through the kitchen to select their food items. As an aside, I think rebranding the package experience as a choice between different meal choices (as opposed to item choices) would also contribute to dignity and humanity without sacrificing the efficiency of packaging.
• UX trading cards? Ingenious giveaway item that’s handy in the attendee’s day job, and as a tool to get people to start talking to another.
• Presentation from Lane Becker, the co-founder of Get Satisfaction and Adaptive Path. Solid presentation about why organizations needs to start listening to their customers (because no matter how big a company is, they aren’t bigger than the network that is Google, Twitter, Facebook–some recursive thinking there), but I think it it’s directed at the wrong audience; we aren’t the ones that need convincing.
• Modular Web Design by Nathan Curtis from Eight Shapes. Perhaps the most relevant talk so far. We all talk about modular design to our clients, but rarely do any of it come into practice. We need to start building libraries, and a common language between UX, Design and Development.
• How do we illustrate multichannel interaction? With business origami! Think paper theater puppets and pop-up books. It’s a nice low-fidelity exercise to good through with the client to identify the actors, business goals and user values. A lot more informal than UML process diagrams which communicates the same ideas, but in a language that anyone can understand. This reminds me of an article I read about using vocabulary that resonates with the goal the product is trying to accomplish.
• The show and tell was like a science fair: people who had work were stationary and people who didn’t moved around. I tried to do a bit of both. Had a fantastic conversation with Collette and Colin Bate about designing for user motivation and psychology. Did a bit of show-and-tell myself which launched a discussion with Matthew Nish-Lapidus about the tools that we use, and the advantages and disadvantages of them. I need to give Indesign and Mindjet a try. Annie Tat also had an interesting story of a info visualization project she did where she incentivized people to participant in a usability test by giving out postcards of visualizations that their activity generated. How appropriate!

And that brings the second day to a close! Thus far, I feel that the talks are a little theoretical. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t have to fight tooth-and-nail with management about the value of user driven design, there would be an infinite amount of resources, and no overhead between the different teams. Yet this is the reality. I hope tomorrow there would be more techniques and strategies that we could use to deal with these constraints.

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

And by afternoon, I still mean morning.

After my breakfast at Melissa’s, I took the server’s advice and visited Cave and Basin National Historistic Site. On my hike there, I fell twice and almost froze to death. And falling is probably the prequel to death. I was too cold to feel the pain, and it’s so remote that I’m afraid I would freeze to death if I couldn’t move.

But it was worth it! The mountain scenery is breathtaking. The weather is beautiful today, so I saw the great expanse along a clear, blue horizon. Pictures from my crappy phone when I get home! I wish I brought my camera. Even the altitude was higher, the steam from the spring warmed me up significantly. I walked up wooden trails, saw the the top of trees, the water trails, ponds, the Rockies–all against this brilliant blue backdrop.

Then I took a tour of the town:

• There’s 3 types of shops: gift shops that sell moose, geese, and beaver figurines, and maple syrup; sports stores with ski gears, and sweet shops of chocolate and fudge. (I’m having trouble find a grocery store so that I don’t have to spend so much money on food, but no dice.)
• You know those Christmas cards of little cottages underneath snowy mountains? It feels like that here. The architecture is low, wooden, and covered with a thin layer of snow.
• Restaurants for breakfast opens at 9am. Restaurants for lunch opens at 12pm. Forget trying to get food at Toronto time.
• There’s wifi everywhere! I’m typing this at Bruno’s (the restaurant that was recommended to me for Breakfast that was not open when I came at 7).

Time to head back to campus, and explore that area. And maybe find a loaf of bread along the way.

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

I’m typing this, half as a log for my adventures, and half as an exercise to unfreeze my fingers. It is 7:30am in Banff, i.e. 9:30am back home.

It took me a total of 14 hours from waking up Wednesday morning to checking into my hotel room at the Banff Centre the same evening, but as it is my first time taking a plane and traveling alone, I’m taking it as a personal victory. I was too tired to do anything yesterday night; however, some notable things:

1. I spent $20 on TELUS paycards to call home… Except it’s not readable on any of the pay phones that’s 2 meters away from where I bought the cards… So I iChatted back home. I love my Mac.
2. For dinner, I spent $6.55 on one slice of bread (not even toasted!), a “slice” of black forest ham (I didn’t even get the full slice), 2 pieces of cucumbers, and a banana.
3. While I was taking a shower, the motion sensor light went off. And I freaked out for two seconds, but I guess it sensed me panicking and turned itself back on =)

I woke up at 6 (8 EST) this morning. After getting dressed, I went out to the reception, got a mapped, asked for a breakfast recommendation, and headed out. It was still dark as I was trying to make my way to town. Even with the trails mapped out for me, I had to ask for directions every 5 minutes. Taking the mountain trails in a strange town before the dawn broke was probably not the best decision I made in my life, but I survived!

Then I realized that nothing is open at 7 in the morning. I walked around for half an hour before I arrived at Melissa’s, which is where I’m typing this. I love this town’s network of free wireless! The staff here is super nice, and I just found myself a local tour guide. Next stop, the springs! Then the conference registration.

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

15 Hilarious Divorce Cakes. I believe in love, really =)!

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

All this said, Amazon is not a good model for other sites, because the pages are overwhelmingly complex with much too many features, many of which don’t help users in considering the current product.

Amazon can get away with this complexity because most users are familiar with its design because they shop there so often. But a first-time user would be baffled. Since most sites don’t have people who shop there as much as they do on Amazon, most sites need a simpler design.

See also: Interview with Web Usability Guru Jakob Nielsen and Amazon No Longer the Role Model for E-Commerce Design.

Crossposting from Sensorial'Org

Happy things:

1. My manager was dog-sitting and brought in a 10 months old Maltese, Einstein. The first time he brought him in and I was holding him, every time my manager left for a meeting, he would look in his general direction and whimper. Yesterday, I had him on my laps for 2 hours as I worked, and he was sooo good. He didn't whine, he didn't squirm; he just sat there being adorable. During one of our internal meetings, he jumped from my manager laps into my arms when I was typing. SOO MUCH LOVE. Then at lunch, people just gathered around sitting on the carpet to watch him eat.

2. My mom called me over to the backyard this morning. There was squirrel sitting on this roof above the staircase leading to our basement. It stood on its hind legs with its tail flowing across its back. My mom was holding a bowl of oatmeal, and we both just watched it.

3. For the last 3 days, I've been playing squash either at 7:30 in the morning until I needed to go to work, or at 5:40 in the evening until I had dinner. My body was incredibly sore today, but it was great.

4. I went to the science center today, and at the entrance, there was this Flogo machine. My friend and I watched it for a bit. Then one blew low enough that people were able to touch it. Then adults and kids alike chased it, trying to touch it, until the wind reclaimed it. That sight just made me really happy.