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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

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.