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.

Innovation Parkour

• Presented by Matthew Milan
• 3 myths: innovation is expensive; innovation takes a long time; it takes a special kind of people to innovate
• The premise of innovation parkour is the assertion that we can learn to innovate and that means we can get better by practicing
• A video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jquXcwooV6A (not the video shown in the conference, but to give you an idea of what parkour is
• There are no obstacles; use obstacles to innovate as opposed to seeing them as barriers
• Routine creates efficiency and predictability
• Pilots recognize the constraint of their environment, and learn how to be calm in critical situations, and how to overcome them.
• Observe => Orientate => Decide => Act
• Interaction: reacting, regulating, learning, balancing, managing and entertaining, conversing
• Innovation is a conversation with constraints.
• Parkour is not about running and climbing, it’s about navigating uncertainty in real-time
• There’s four facets: unconscious incompetence (not knowing what we don’t know), conscience incompetence (knowing we don’t know), conscious competence (knowing we know), and unconscious competence (don’t knowing we know)
• Proposition: innovation favours the prepared mind which allows us to navigate uncertainty
• Tennis drills are repetitive and relentless because they teach the body to think so that the mind can focus on strategy.
• Similarly, there’s no secret about yoga. All the poses are well established across many styles, but it is a bottomless practice.
• Each of these practices is about the synthesis of flow and repertoire: knowign the tools so well as to let you unconsciously create value
• Kino-cognitive model: doing and thinking are one and the same => flow + repertoire = innovative insight
• How do we practice innovation?
  • Visualization: practice seeing; insight is reframing what we already know
  • Collaboration: practice trusting other people and the value they can bring
  • Participation: practice openness even though it can be risky
  • Innovation: practice freedom by embracing obstacles, freedom to let go of yourself because there are not leaders
• Delicate balance of being in complete control (think poetry and knowing the language and mechanics completely => no soul), and being complete out of control (you no longer make sense)
• The adrenaline rush makes you think of things in interesting new ways.

Breaking it out into multiple blog posts because summarizing 5 talks in one go is a lot to digest.

Social Design Patterns

• Presented by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
• Designing for social experiences is more compplicated than interface design. Human computer interaction is lonely–you have a human, a computer, and interface between them. What about other people?
• You can control an interface, set the stage, environment, boundaries, rules, but you can’t control how people will interact with each other.
• Let your users finish your design for you; change the rules if need be.
• 5 steps:
  1. Give people a way to be identified so that other people can find them. E.g. aliases
  2. Have objects that people can claim and talk about. E.g. pokemon
  3. Give people something to do, the activity design patterns. E.g. 1-1 sharing, broadcasting, feedback, collaboration. Note that conversation is facilitated by the social object.
  4. Enable a bridge to real-life events. Enable users to bring online experiences offline, and offline experiences online again. It lives and enriches the online product.
  5. Let the community elevate people and content they value.
• 5 principles:
  1. Pave the cowpaths: observe how people behave then facilitate what people want to do; support their behaviour, don’t restrict them. Users aren’t stupid for trying to do something your system doesn’t support.
  2. Talk like a person: there’s no use hiding behind a site; we know websites are built by people. Set the tone: we’re humans, we’re friendly; avoid legalese and defensive talk.
  3. Be open, play well with others. Let data be taken from your system, and integrate external data to add value. Lego is the standard! Help build the web, as opposed to building a ship inside a bottle.
  4. Learn from games: playfulness, rewards and punishments; use appropriate currencies.
  5. Respect the ethical dimension: when you ask for private information, you are making an commitment, implicit or explicit, to keep it safe. Be conscience of what you’re doing and the consequences of how you use the information given to you. Ask: Am I tricking people, or am I giving them a good reason to trust me?
• 5 anti-patterns:
  1. Cargo-cult: you can’t steal or copy and interface unless you understand all the factors and conditions that went into the decisions that were made for the product to be successful. It may not apply to you.
  2. Don’t break email: users have habits, they come to expect things (if notifications come to their emails, they should be able to respond to them via email); leverage what you know about your users memories and experiences
  3. The anti-password: it doesn’t make sense for users to have the same identify on two different sites when there’s no good reason, e.g. avoid trolls. Make use of other tools like OpenId and Facebook Connect.
  4. The Ex-boyfrirend bug. The “people you should know list” on Facebook is actually the people you hate list. There may be good reason why two people aren’t friends even though they have 54 friends in common.
  5. Potemkin Village. When you first set up a system, there is a great temptation to build a complex taxonomy from the get go. Let your users to decide what the separation should be and when it should be made. If you have too many buckets, even if you have enough people to fill them, they won’t be able to find each other. Let people organize themselves.