Sensorial’Org

While Banff is breathtakingly beautiful, as beautiful as the literature claims it to be, I never got to explore Calgary. In the Country Inn that I stayed at there was nothing within a mile radius except dry grass and concrete roads punctuated with hotels and fast-food restaurants. The most interesting thing I saw was the Bingo Palace, and I was quite tempted to go knocking.

The aerial view was completely different, however. As I flew into the city the plane hovered above an ocean of cotton-white clouds, and as it descended I saw patches upon patches of farmlands. It reminded me of the optical illusion by 423432. As the plane got closer, houses emerged like buildings on a Monopoly board, but the land still seemed soft, and it seemed close. Inspired by the illusion, perhaps, I wanted to springboard off the plane. That was in the morning.

I am flying home at night. Staring out at the city now, it has transformed again. Gone are the farmlands and the roads. At liftoff, columbus clouds floated about the city skyline like whip-cream on top of coffee. They were so close to the ground. As the plane ascended and houses disappeared, the city came to life in an organic arrangement of orange lights against the darkness. Far off in the horizon, I can still see traces of the sun. Orange at the bottom, blue at the top.

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!

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.