Sensorial’Org

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.

Skipped out on work to attend Idea 2009! Loving my internship. First, to summarize the big ideas (to be reflected on when I have the time to internalize and digest it, and possibly apply those tactics):

The Dawn of Perfect Products

• Presented by Tim Queenan
• Will we interact with less and less inferior products over time because of the influence of social media?
• Products will always have flaws, whether they are perceived, or inherit via some conscious decision (e.g. volume, physical decay, usability, usefulness–think products sold by amount, accessories, preservatives, product features, new releases).
• The latter thought is a bit scary. It makes business sense; however, we know that companies are not designing products to the best of their capabilities because it’s not in their best interest to do so.
• Social media rightfully puts sucky experiences in their place; it weeds out products that suck, and promotes products that are good.
• If you have a shitty product, social media can’t fix it.
• Business breaks down the product into pieces because they want consumers to buy more; it builds momentum, enhance and extends the product lifecycle.
• Twitter is not a service in which you sell products, but to share points of views. Don’t see it as a different channel for the same behaviour.
• Social media isn’t a tactic (?); it’s a fundamental way to rethink how the business operates. Recall Michael Jackson’s death. Most of us learned through Twitter as it happened, not through the news hour. News stations were following Twitter feeds because that’s all that they could do. They didn’t have access to the information.
• Rise of end-user prototypes => better products; see Quirky.com; it’s about products that we co-create so that when the market appears, we advocate (step above promoting) for it.
• Traditional way to think of products–it (mostly from the manufacture’s POV, not the user’s):
  • fulfills a need or want
  • has either a niche or mass-market appeal
  • has high margins
  • has high perceived value => rise of brand and brand awareness
  • must be replenished or repurchased by the customer often
  • need multiple products and services in order to stay competitive
  • is easily upsold or crossold
• Old way of thinking: Understanding the need; new way: understanding the behaviour
• Experiences increase in value as more people interact with them; harness the network effect. Recall Dove’s True Beauty campaign. It was not to settle the debate of True Beauty once in for all; the conversation increased the perceived value of the product.
• Experiences live as part of a network in real-time to stay relevant, and encourage more authentic interaction. Organizations are passive unless they interact with their clients in real-time because the platform is already out there, and people are using it.
• Think of behaviours we want to incite and organize for it vs. feature-itis or user preferences.
• Social media challenges perfect products to be intuitive, elastic, intelligent polarizing and enterprising.
• Designing for the masses means designing for no-one => small is beautiful.

Hello World (and people of nForm and organizers of Canux)! My name is Veronica, and this is why you should fly me to Canux:

Who I Am?

In a nutshell: while I’m not necessarily starving (and it’s difficult to find me without a snack), I am a student studying computer science at the University of Toronto specializing in software engineering with a minor in economics.

Currently, I’m four months into a year-long IA internship. I’ll be back in school to finish up my undergraduate career next September. After that, world domination–owing to the fact that Canux is going to show me how to take the world by a storm with unrivaled user experiences. No?

Why I Care?

About UX. About Canux. When it comes to UX, I believe in the Invisible Hand. I care because I have aesthetic, emotional and functional needs. Businesses care because I care; so in theory, the process should be self-regulating.

Except it isn’t. Businesses don’t care, or don’t care enough to invest. At the end of the day, my needs aren’t met, so I’m not going to hand over what’s left of my dollar. Everyone loses; nobody’s happy.

What’s Important to Me?

I need to wake up each morning and be excited about my work. I’d love to sketch by the lake with a pack of M&Ms everyday. But until that becomes a recognized job description, I’ve found a neat alternative in design where I’m still eating sweets. In front of a screen, but with the comfort that the lake is 20 minutes away, polluted though it is. And I get to tell businesses how they can satisfy my demands. How awesome is that?

What Will Canux Mean?

Towering mountains, undisturbed waters, hot springs, caribous and mountain goats? I don’t need to be convinced.

Oh, and then there’s the opportunity to be in the company of people who are passionate about user experience design, take pride in their work, and really believe that it’s the beating heart of any project that wants a fighting chance in spite of especially in today’s economic landscape. That’s a bonus.

Not Convinced?

In seriousness, I can bring together a unique set of perspectives. From technical to creative, and not necessarily all related to the web, I’ve been involved with conceptualization, engineering, design, production, and quality assurance. I’d like to take this opportunity at Banff to dive deeper into user experience because I see it as the centerpiece and the glue that ties everything together, and it’s fascinating.

Fly me to Canux!