Open The Window

Planning for the Kickoff meeting is well under way. but I there are a couple things that I am really happy to announce so far.

REGISTER HERE

We are privileged to have not one but two of our distinguished colleagues speak for the evening.

Thomas Vander Wal will speak about bridging the gap between IA and Dev. Tom has been using HTML/CSS prototypes since 2003 as part of his UX practice.

Nathan Curtis will speak about his approach to building a prototyping working group. Nathan currently leads his own prototyping working group EightShapes, the company he co-founded with Dan Brown.

Once we here from these fine folks, we’ll turn our attention to the group as a whole, matching up people who can help each other improve their prototyping skills.

If you have already registered, look for an email sometime soon with a skills assessment survey and a couple questions. This is important. We’re going to use this skills assessment to match up people that can help each other.

REGISTER HERE

I was tasked recently with performing an exploratory usability test in an effort to find opportunities to improve the functionality of a web-based application. The application serves a very specific need for a niche group of people. Additionally, this group is primarily PC-based.

Looking at my current setup, I knew there were some challenges to capturing these users in their native environment.

• I have a Mac. The would-be test participants use PCs.
• I wanted to use Silverback for capturing the screen, but that application is only available for the Mac.
• I only have a laptop, but these users typically use the application in question in a desktop environment.
• The Mac keyboard and mouse have a different look and feel than your typical PC mouse and keyboard.
• My laptop’s high-resolution display would pose an additional problem when viewing the web application. The app is built in flash/flex and doesn’t scale in the browser!
• I needed a way for the UX associate who is helping with the test to observe the test in progress without risking interference with moderation.
• The tests are being conducted at a client office, so whatever I come up with needs to be portable.

I was pondering these issues when I saw something at the bottom of my external monitor: DELL.

I started to wonder, “If i could get an external webcam on top of this display… and use a wireless PC keyboard and mouse, and run Internet Explorer on a VM… this could look just like using a PC…. and it could run off the Mac with mirrored display… so someone else could watch… that might actually work.”

So I gave it a shot, and it worked pretty well for a first time. Here’s what you need:

Hardware

• External Webcam: Logitech QuickCamVision Pro for Mac, $74.99 (Amazon)
• External Wireless Keyboard & Mouse: Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000, $30.98 (Amazon)
• External Display: Dell 21.5″ S2209W, $216 (Amazon price, but I already had one)
• Mac Laptop: 15″ Apple Macbook Pro, Intel Core i7

Software

• Silverback 2, $69.95 (silverbackapp.com)
• VMware Fusion, $99.99 (vmware.com, on sale w/ 1 year of updates)
• Windows 7 Home Premium, $199 (off the shelf at Best Buy–needed it quickly)

Total cost (excluding laptop): $690.91
not including taxes, shipping, etc.

A portable, cross-patform usability testing lab for under $700? I think that could work.

I excluded the cost of the laptop because I am assuming that you have a Mac that you can use. It doesn’t even have to be a laptop per se, just a setup that works for you. But portability was key for this particular test. But let’s face it, that is one badass laptop, and its performance is a factor in the success of this setup.

Note: It is also wise to add an external microphone. I did not do this, but I  wish I had.

Webcam

I originally purchased a different, more sophisticated webcam, but quickly discovered that it was not mac-compatible (d’oh!!!). After doing some research, I didn’t feel that bad. Since an iSight camera is now embedded into every Mac on the market except the MacMini, Webcam manufacturers have pretty much given up on making their cams Mac-compatible. Once I realized that the cam I had purchased was a no-go, I settled on the Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro. It’s available on Apple’s website, so I took that as a seal of approval.

The cam worked perfectly. Not only does it offer a great picture for what I need, but for some wonderful reason, it overrides the built-in iSight camera in my laptop when I’m using Silverback.

Keyboard and Mouse

Pretty simple: this duo had the best Amazon reviews at a decent price.

In hindsight, I wish I had looked for a keyboard that had an actual power switch. Apparently this one never shuts off and that causes it to eat batteries. It easily pairs with my MacBook Pro via a Bluetooth dongle that comes with it. Once it’s up and running, it looks and feels just like a PC keyboard.

The mouse uses a nifty blue light to track its location and works perfectly.

External Display

I have had this display for about a year and a half. It has served me well and is a good compliment to my MacBook Pro. On its own, I knew it would perform well as a pseudo PC.

VMWare + Windows 7 + Silverback

Silverback is a simple program for performing usability tests with just about any Mac. It captures full screen video while using a webcam to capture the participant. When the session is over, you can output the video of the screen with the participant appearing in the corner. Animated highlights appear indicating where the user clicks on screen. It’s a great way to capture a test and is dead simple to use.

VMware is really the key to this testing environment. VMware is a wonderfully stable way to run a second operating system on your Mac. In this case it runs windows better than any PC I have ever used.

I was concerned that Silverback, which captures screen video, might have some kind of conflict with VMware running windows full screen. I didn’t have any outright reason to be worried, but I have seen a lot of perfectly reasonable plans go to crap when it involves running more than one platform.

To my great pleasure, both worked perfectly. VMware provides a great full-screen experience that just looks like you’re using a PC. The only artifact is a small menu of VM-specific options, but even this is pretty unobtrusive.

And, as it turns out, Windows 7 is not horrible. It has remained stable while I have used it through testing. Who knew?

Portability

The last thing I wanted to deal with was a bunch of boxes and wires while setting up the testing station. A handful of velcro cable management ties meant I could set up the session without the testing station looking like a bowl of spaghetti.

Execution

I was able to use the setup successfully with this configuration. I also topped off the setup by putting a bottle of hand sanitizer on the desk. Participants used it regularly since we are in cold and flu season.

Improvements for the Next Round

A microphone! While the webcam had a microphone on it, Silverback did not pick it up. I realized after the fact that all of the audio was coming through the laptop’s microphone, which was not facing the participant.

Let me know what you think!

One of my favorite film characters comes from the movie Pulp Fiction. It’s Winston Wolf, smartly played by none other than Harvey Keitel. He’s a cleaner.

Winston Wolf, or simply “The Wolf” as he is known, is called upon by his boss to clean up a grisly accident and make the problem go away.

“I’m Winston Wolf. I solve problems.”

The Wolf gets right to work. He instructs those involved to clean up the scene, determines how to dispose of the evidence, and leverages available resources to come to a solution.

The Wolf’s practice of assessing a situation and pushing for an immediate solution is akin to a lean version of the Design Strategy process.

Work Like the Wolf

Designer Chris Dietzi explains this process well on the EightShapes blog:

Successful design starts with focusing energy in the right places.   The Wolf focused on essentials to solving the problem given time and resource constraints.  Sound familiar?  If we were only given say, a week, to get all of our inputs, what should we focus on?

The good news is that we already have a shared conceptual understanding of essential discovery inputs.  Though Peter Morville’s Information Architecture (IA) Venn-diagram is nearly ten years old, it’s relevant today to our broader practice of user experience design.

If we focused more purely on identifying problems and opportunities in each area, we can dramatically shorten discovery phases and produce more actionable outputs in the process.   Let’s look at the essential questions we need to answer to design an effective solution:

Context (or Business)

• What business problem are we trying to solve with this design effort?  What’s the most important problem to ‘fix’ with this effort, and how are other problems prioritized?
• What opportunities exist for this product?  Are there any unmet needs that this product could fill?

User

• What are the users needs and interests in this product or product category?
• What pain points do they have that we can address?
• Is there alignment or conflict between what these user needs and what the business needs to accomplish?

Content

• What materials are available to help us shape the product experience?
• What is wrong with the current content or materials available to us (e.g., gaps with, format of, structure of, style, and so on)?

More of this outstanding blog entry, here

This method of drilling right to the core of a project stratigy is invaluable. There is no point in embellishing this process one iota beyond where it needs to be.

I have even used this 3-point approach on the fly with effective results.

In a recent interview, I had the chance to walk a prospective client through my design approach. The client outlined a design challenge that they wanted me to work on, talking them through a solution.

Their initial description was lacking in the types of information I need to pose an informed solution. So I ran through a few questions regarding the business context, the user behavior, and the available (or potentially available) content associated with the project.

It was a perfect device for approaching this project on the fly. I will be leading that effort in a few weeks.

In the case of a large-scale project, a period of time must be spent uncovering all the user needs, business requirements, and technical limitations along with other project constraints. This can be pursued through a number of investigative exercises that will set the stage for  the deep dive.

Before you can deep dive, you need to find the pool. Or the Ocean.

Follow Your Nose

I interviewed a number of designers regarding their approach to design strategy. There was a recurrent theme to our conversations: the need for flexibility. Once the divergent, exploratory phase of a project begins, you will likely uncover areas that warrant further investigation.

Because of this, it isn’t feasible to define a Design Strategy process in a fixed, repeatable way. Different companies, users, and content types have different needs, and they all depend of the context of the project.

Here’s the way I reconciled these theories in my head.

Individual activities of divergent thinking, exploration and convergence each take place within the context of the Design Strategy phase of the project. These are described in the book Gamestorming in the context of both project approach and individual exercises.

Some activities are better suited for uncovering issues among stakeholders, so the strategy phase can be further broken down into regions based on subject matter.

A variety of activities will start the exploratory period of the Design Strategy phase.

Once the activites have been conducted, they leave a footprint. This can be a set of documentation, an artifact of some kind, or an idea, a meme, that spreads throughout the project team as a result of the experience. These are the raw materials for aligning the project team and creating focus.

Each of these footprints points in a certain direction, illuminating a path deeper into the jungle for exploration.

The artifacts of these exercises are reviewed in turn.

At this point, attention turns towards convergence and refinement across the entire Design Strategy phase.

This is where the magic happens for the Design Strategy process. There is a period of superconvergence, where the ideas and agreement from all the earlier exercises are brought to bear. Each one of the past exercises acts as a facet of the final project context.

The result? A consolidated result from the entire phase. Different project teams approach this in different ways. Maybe this is a creative brief. Maybe this is a Scope of work. Maybe this is the end of the client engagement. In any case, this is the unified strategic direction for the project.

Let’s face it, not all projects are big, important products that are taking the world by storm. In many cases, the smaller projects are just as important and keep the wheels turning for product owners.

In the event that a project is smaller, there is no need to abandon the strategy phase. While a large-scale strategy phase would follow a Diverge > Explore > Converge model across multiple meeting engagements, a smaller project will provide obstacles to that approach.

With a focus on Users, Business, and Content, it would be key on small projects to take a focused approach.

Move through the divergent, emergent, and convergent phases of the Design Strategy phase smoothly with a tight focus.

An interview with stakeholders, an affinity map exercise, and an initial project approach that reflects on those findings can provide valuable direction on a small to mid-size project with little time or resources to dedicate to strategic planning.

What is the most valuable use of your time? How can you get divergent perspectives on the project quickly and efficiently? And how can you take that minimal amount of information and direct it into a strategy?

Be sure to choose your activities wisely, because they will matter more here than usual.

Ultimately, any UXer should be able to lead a research phase of this scale. Conducting these meetings should be straightforward and very rewarding.

I read Gamestorming recently (Gray, Brown, Macanufo) which outlines a model for integrating individual exploratory exercises into your creative workflow, for the purposes of research, brainstorming, discovery, and gaining strategic alignment, among others.

One of the key notions to Gamestorming is that each activity has three phases:

• Open
• Experiment
• Close

Interestingly enough, I also spent some time with the books How to Make Meetings Work and How to Make Collaboration Work which also outline a similar lifecycle for activities in meetings:

• Divergent: introducing new ideas
• Convergent: creating alignment around those ideas.

The apparent similarity led me to think more about the expansion and contraction of thought in the creative process, and how this can apply not just to a meeting, but to a larger project phase. So I began to explore models for the Design Strategy phase of a project that employ the collaboration-oriented approach found in Gamestorming and these other references.

The Strategy phase can be viewed as one big gamestorming space that undergoes a few steps to create an effective design strategy and a strong sense of alignment among project team members and stakeholders.

The space itself is empty, and is also called the phase.

As you can probably infer from the smushed hexagon shape, this is drawn on the Gamestorming approach.

There are three periods within the phase that define the goal for the individual Gamestorming activities to come.

More on these activities in the next post.

A couple months ago, I started to look at the Discovery phase of the design process.

I’m defining the Discovery phase as the initial investigation of a project’s constraints and context which results in a focused direction for design efforts.

Right off the bat, I got a great piece of advice from Brent Canfield:

Stop calling it “Discovery.”

As a UX practitioner at a marketing firm, Brent found that “Discovery” sounded too fluffy. This created a legitimate barrier when selling services in to a project plan, as the value of the Discovery phase wasn’t initially apparent.

Brent began calling this phase the Design Strategy phase, and it gained far more traction among clients. In the context of design Strategy, it made more sense to talk to users, interview stakeholders, and conduct usability tests in an effort to define a scope of work.

The process itself is amorphous. Design Strategy serves the role of simultaneously creating alignment around the current context of a project while illuminating the path forward towards and effective and valuable product. In other words, it’s an effort to describe where we are and define where we’re going.

I had a great time over the last few days at the IDEA conference in Philadelphia. You could tell that a lot of hard work went into putting the program together, both on the part of the organizers and the presenters. Moreover, things went pretty smoothly during the actual conference, thanks to all their hard work and the efforts of an army of volunteers. Well done!

And it was in a great city. With good food. And booze. And there were four(!) weddings in the hotel where conference attendees were staying which made for a pretty entertaining few days. Search Twitter for #idea10 for more insight from others, 140 characters at a time.

Slides from the presentations should start surfacing here soon.

Highlights

There were several strong presentations over the course of the conference, but here are a few standouts.

A Practical Approach to Designing Valuable Meetings
Pre-conference workshop
Presented by Kevin M. Hoffman, Kate Rutter, Dave DeRuchie, Brett Harned

Meetings are a medium for transferring ideas, collaborating, communicating. If the meeting itself is dysfunctional, then the product of the meeting will suffer. This workshop provided a few different models for running meetings, and devices for facilitating group conversations. I found all the information useful, relevant and immediately actionable. And on top of that, anyone who asked a question or voluntarily participated got a free book. I walked away with this one. A good time!

We are all Content Strategist Now
(scroll down a bit for description)
Presented by Karen McGrane

What do you get when you mix a masterful presenter with a timely and relevant topic? You get this presentation. Karen McGrane was introduced as the first IA to work at Razorfish, so we can assume she has seen the best and the worst of the Web over the last 15 years. In her presentation, she made an impassioned plea for all IAs and UXers to wake up to their responsibilities as Content Strategists. She had great stories to tell, accompanied by insigtful observations.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!
(scroll down a bit for description)
Presented by Andy Budd

Another masterful presenter. Another fantastic presentation.

We were welcomed everyone to his presentation, the first one following lunch, by a bit of dessert in the form of throwing chocolate into the crowd. This was followed by an engaging, witty, fascinating, and informative presentation highlighting a few of the powerful ways that UX design can nudge users in the right direction. Moreover, the presentation ended with a reading list so we could take things to the next level on our own.

The People

The Twitter follows and LinkedIn invites are starting to percolate in, so a big ‘hello’ to everyone I had the pleasure of meeting. I hope we’ll have the chance to both work and play together down the line!

I followed a link in a tweet from @semanticwill to a blog post on UXLeadership (highly recommended). The post highlights a video where TEDx presenter and brainiac anthropologist Simon Sinek illuminates a concept he call the Golden Circle: three concentric circles, form the center out:

Why?

How?

What?

Sinek’s argument is that many try unsuccessfully to construct their business, their conversations, their arguments, their products, from the bottom up. But there are a few, far more effective, who communicate from the top of that list down.

One of his key examples is Martin Luther King Jr, a man with a strong set of principles that guided all his actions and decisions. His inner principles, the “why”, were so deeply internalized by others that they can then take on the cause, not just follow through with the actions.

As Sinek says, people didn’t attend the march on Washington for Dr. King, they did it for themselves.

In looking at this through a business lens, I see some of the same tenets described in Built to Last. Visionary Companies, as described by Collins, each have a set of core values. However, there are some examples of core values that stand out as a compass for the company on the “why” level that Sinek is talking about–a deeper cause.

One of Sony’s core values is an ongoing effort to improve the standing of Japanese culture in the minds of people across the world. This is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the company was formed in 1946 when perception of Japan was mixed at best, nuclear at worst. In this case, you could frame the Golden Circle in a business context by adding “work” in some capacity to each layer.

Why do we work? To improve the standing of Japanese culture in the minds of people across the world.

How do we work? With diligence and innovation.

What do we work on? The Walkman, Playstation, Blu-Ray, Cell phone etc.

The “What” makes a lot more sense when you arrive at that point as a conclusion stemming from the “Why.” The same can not be said if the argument were carried in the opposite direction.

In my own working situations, I often ask colleagues and clients to bear with me while we work together, because I will ask “Why” on a seemingly never-ending basis. The absence of a “why” in a company, project, or task, gives rise to doubt, boredom, poor production. It is, in many cases, a lack of leadership.

The push for excellence demands finding the “why” whether someone else provides it or if one must find it themselves.

DC Week, or Digital Capital Week, is upon us. It’s a bit like SXSW Interactive, an extended bar camp, tech cocktail and Apps for Democracy all rolled into one. Got that? Probably not.

Description

Why is this happening? There is an amazing amount of talent in the technology and media space here in the DC Area. Showcase this talent, stimulate discussion and bring people together.

What’s involved? Panel discussions, seminars, working sessions, meet-ups, hack-ups, booze-ups, whatever fosters communication between people. Shiny Heart Ventures and iStrategyLabs are partnering up to make this work. A ton of sponsors are getting in on it.

Why you should care: If you are a tech type, open source developer, blogger, geeky socialite, gov 2.0 hacker, start-up founder, VC, or anything in-between, then this event is for you.

Time

When: 6/11 – 6/20

Schedule: http://schedule.digitalcapitalweek.org/

My Curated Calendar: Download it for iCal or other .ics file-friendly apps [.ics file] — I was trying to make a nice, subscribe-able Google calendar but it didn’t seem to work. Boooo

What should I go see? There is actually a ton of good stuff. IP law seminars, start-up camps, hacker meet-ups, blogger co-working, tweet-ups, etc. Something for just about everyone.

Highlight: Interaction Design panel, including Oonie Chase, Will Evans, Whitney Hess.

It’s biggest feature: Apparently, parties. Within the same week:

Monday 6/14: Mediabistro Cocktail Party

Tuesday 6/15: Progressive tech happy hour

Wednesday 6/16: Ignite #4

Thursday 6/17: Tech Cocktail DC

Saturday 6/18: Closing party at the 9:30 club.

Place

Main Venue: UMC Conference Facility [map]

Main Site: http://digitalcapitalweek.org/

Main Venue: UMC Conference Facility [map] but there are MANY MANY others. Still couldn’t find a flat-out google map of events, though…

Cost

What about registration? How much is it? It’s sort of an un-conference, so there doesn’t appear to be a flat-out registration fee, but instead you can register for and pay for individual events. Many are free. Some are $30+