Earlier this week I attended DUX07, a conference for discussion on designing for user experiences. Forthwith, some thoughts:

“Innovation” is a plague

I had the odd fortune of being the very first speaker at the conference. While I’m only partly pleased with my talk (forming a clear, concise thesis escaped me), I’m (perhaps smugly self-) satisfied with its effect. See, in my talk, I railed against “innovation,” and encouraged the audience to throw things at speakers who used that word. (Why? Because “innovation” has become well-nigh meaningless in its overuse, and it’s the word that designers latch onto in order to be relevant in a business context.) Over the next two and a half days, numerous speakers caught themselves as they uttered the term, and I felt that this really pointed out a challenge in our discourse.

I believe it’s productive to question the term “innovation,” because it forces people to say what they really mean.

Perception is reality

Well, I don’t know about that, but a surprising number of talks dealt with the power of visualizations and ambient interfaces to help us manage the “information firehose,” as keynoter David Pescovitz put it.

Academia just ain’t getting it

My biggest frustration with DUX07 is that it is largely a paper-based conference. As such, it’s beholden to what is submitted. The folks with the most time to submit are academics. However, as I twittered mid-conference, “The moment an academic takes the stage, the conference screeches to a halt.” This wasn’t 100% true, but it was often true, and easily all of the worst presentations were from academics.

But perhaps even more off-putting than the badness of some of these presentations was what that pretty much all the academic research shown was simply irrelevant. The matters at the heart of experience design are simply not being addressed by academics, or being done so in a useless manner. I don’t know if its because the subject is too squishy, multi-disciplinary, subjective, or what, but it was definitely a waste of time.

The conversation is worth having

Perhaps the best “content” of the conference, at least in my personal experience, was a lunchtime roundtable led by Ted Booth from Smart Design, on the topic of what makes a great hardware-software product experience. Around the table were folks from Palm, Schematic, Accenture, Motorola, and a gentleman whose consultancy works on Roomba (I forget the consultancy’s name), and we had a great discussion on the qualities of good products (Ted called out the Roomba and its delightful animal-like sounds); the challenges for delivery (mostly organizational, mostly caused by the siloing of the hardware and software folks); and the need for an articulated vision. We tried very hard to mentioning products from That Fruit Company.

In general, the break-time conversations were great, and I was in awe of the sophistication and savvy of the audience.

This audience deserves more, and better

Speaking of that audience, in my discussions with people at breaks, I got the sense that while they appreciated the spirit and purpose of the event, they wanted more. I know that conference team did their best given the material they had to work with, but I felt the event fell short of its promise (and in talking to other participants, I wasn’t alone.) “User experience” ended up meaning “design of interactive media,” which strikes me as incomplete. There was nothing about environments or services, nothing about coordinating multiple touchpoints or components. (I wrote about this over two years ago: “User experience should not be just about interactive systems — it’s a quality that reflects the sum total of a person’s experiences with any product, service, organization. When I walk into a store, I’m having a “user experience.” When I call an airline to make a reservation, I’m having a “user experience.” And innumerable elements contribute to affect that quality of experience.” And even then, all I was doing was recapitulating Don.)

What surprised me was that, contrary to things I’ve written in the past, user experience is very much not dead, and there are people passionate about the concept. But the passion resides not at the level of point interfaces solutions (websites, mobile, devices) — in my discussions, it felt that the passion was about how these things can be brought together so that the coordinated whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Apart from Adam Greenfield’s product/service ecology keynote, this bigger picture was pretty much never addressed.

(To my friends who were involved in organizing the conference, please take this criticism in the constructive mode it is meant. I know you poured your heart into this event, and I in no way mean to diminish your good work.)

The State of User Experience

After attending numerous design events this past year, I’ve realized that they’re all evolving to a similar place, free from the specifics of their particular domain, and towards a shared “big D design” understanding. The IDSA event, nominally for industrial designers, dealt with many of the same issues as the Information Architecture Summit, the AIGA annual, DUX07, and even Adaptive Path’s UX Week.

And while all these design disciplines have distinctions in their details, what they all share is an emerging orientation to serving the user’s experience. And while DUX07 began to speak to that shared space, it’s interaction-design orientation left it falling short. There’s a huge opportunity to bridge practitioners from across all these design disciplines, to weave their various approaches and challenges into a larger experience design braid.

The User Experience field is still crying out for leadership. Currently, all activity is coming from the bottom up, from practitioners doing work in their various fields and recognizing that they’re working toward some interesting larger challenges. I think we need a bit of top-down leadership, though — people who aren’t simply reacting to what they’re given, but establishing a coherent vision for experience design, a vision that people from across these creative disciplines as recognizing as relevant to them, and helps them orient their work toward a larger purpose.

Brandon’s take on “The Long Wow” provides guidance for business on how to sustainably create satisfying experiences again and again. It’s an excellent essay and I expect it to hear about “Long Wow”s for a while to come.

I had cause to write up some thoughts on the future of local content on the Web. I thought it’d be good to get this out in the larger world and maybe get others’ take. This is very web-focused (because of my original reasons for writing it).

It’s not about the site

Very few sites are able to claim “destination” appeal. Banking on “http://yoursite.com/” to be *the business* is tragically short-sighted. The challenge is figuring out how to get that content to where the users are. I’m a fan of things like the integration of local content with http://city.ask.com. RSS feeds of frequently updated local information could also work (I access Chowhound.com and Upcoming,org solely through my feedreader).

Local == Mobile

If you’re truly seeking a next-gen experience, having a clear vision for mobile is crucial. Local information is most valuable in the moment, on the street. I can’t tell you how often I punch up Google Maps on my iPhone, or do Chowhound or Google searches when I’m out and about. As mobile devices evolve and increasingly embed themselves in people’s lives, local content must be available on the street.

Be a good web citizen

Content sites, particularly those that have been around for years, tend towards a publishing model that is more concerned with “stickiness” then with truly valuable customer experiences. Open up your content to others; receive content for other sources. Imagine Upcoming.org events and geotagged Flickr photos integrated with the local-business profile pages.

Assist decision support

This requires some research to understand more fully, but I suspect (based on my experience and what I’ve seen with others) that the biggest challenge facing local content sites is not the content itself, but is about helping people make decisions about what to do and where to go. Right now, none of these sites offer strong tools for decision support over time — apart from saving a business’ profile page. I’m talking about things like on-the-fly comparison charts; saving collections of items and share it with others; placing a selected set of choices on a map; and asking questions (think answers.com) for local-specific matters could all help users not just find information but figure out what to really do with it.

I just finished putting together a “slidecast,” which is an online presentation synced with audio. It’s for my talk “The Experience is the Product”. Just press the “play” button and enjoy! To see it full screen, click here.

If you just want the audio, listen to the d.construct podcast. Jared’s talk is also very much worth listening to.

I love to eat sushi. I’m intrigued by the mechanics of global capitalism, particularly the logistics of shipping stuff all around the world. I’m amused by cultural contact and integration, the fusion and braiding of different (and differing) societal mores. As such, Sasha Issenberg’g The Sushi Economy was just right for me.

It’s a good, not great, book. Mostly, it’s a solid piece of investigative journalism, wherein our intrepid reporter travels the world, uncovering the wherefores of the global sushi boom. The stories I most enjoyed were those of the original tuna import from Canada to Japan in the early 70s; the workings of Tsukiji fish market (which I observed a while ago); the history of pressing fish on rice; and the establishment of top-quality sushi in Austin, Texas. There were many chapters that didn’t interest me — I just skipped over them and it didn’t matter, as each chapter is pretty much self-contained.

…that I have yet to see a PC, “in the wild,” with Vista on it. Every Windows machine I run across is still running XP. Does anyone use Vista? We Mac types jump on new operating systems like a tiger pouncing on a gazelle. (or is that a lion?)

As I mentioned earlier, my biggest revelation at the IDEA conference was Michael Wesch, and I was quite enamored of two new videos he showed. He’s now released them publicly.

A Vision of Students Today


This is perhaps my favorite video of the ones he’s done. I love that it came out of a collaborative project with his class. I am fascinated by how he uses the physical space of a classroom as a character in the piece.

Information R/evolution


This is for all the IAs in the house. Or anyone whose read David Weinberger’s book. Or anyone dealing with information. Which is everyone, I suppose.

For the last session at IDEA 2007, the entire conference delegation crowded around near the stage, and talked about what we’d heard over the two days. Essentially, we were all processing the event. I wrote down key themes as they were uttered. Blurrily, they are:

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I think there was a stronger thematic pull this year than last. Apart from the general “designing complex information spaces of all kinds,” the only other intentional theme had to do with urbanism and, specifically, New York City. It was interesting how neither of those really cropped up at the end. There were two main thematic poles–Blurred Edges and Context–with a kind of secondary theme of Networks are Everything.

It’s hard to have a theme broader than Context, but I think we addressed it pretty specifically. One of the challenges that designers of information spaces have is recontextualizing the information they are providing access to. Interactive media are notoriously without context, in that they are very often simply flat screens with stuff on them. This is why so much of interactive media design involves providing context — navigation bars, breadcrumbs, “page 1 of n”, and the like.

There are many avenues for providing context (or, as the photo shows “recontextualization of disconnected media”). Some of it has to do with the theme Physical World/Physicality of Information. This came out most evidently in David’s discussion of ambience as an opportunity to communicate information in concrete ways (like, say, clocks), and Mike Kuniavsky’s presentation on WineM, which makes all the metadata about wines (varietal, vintage, region, vineyard) accessible through a wine rack.

Another opportunity for context is storytelling. Michael Wesch’s opening keynote impressed the importance of storytelling in the Papua New Guinea culture he studies, and how the imposition of bureaucratic means of census and other modes of classification have lead to strife because context had been removed. Or, in Jake’s work, narrative is an explicit tool for communicating information.

The other big theme, which I titled Blurred Edges (appropriate for that blurry snapshot) is more about practitioners trying to make sense of their roles. There was a great moment were someone brought up the challenge that information architects have long had defining themselves and their activities, and Michael Wesch, bringing his background in linguistic anthropology to bear, said that such confusion is actually a sign of Productive Disarray, which suggests a life and liveliness of a thriving profession. It has become our responsibility to Create New Roles and Careers, because this stuff hasn’t been defined, but someone has to do it. Folks like Sylvia (a self-described graphic designer), Rachel (who studied interaction design), or Jake have had to essentially make up what it is they do. Perhaps the most interesting in this regard was Chenda, who studied at the interactive media program ITP, and who is now, essentially, a bureaucrat, managing the systems behind the scenes at New York City’s 311. (And Chenda easily has the coolest bureaucrat job ever.)

As we make our way in this professional array, Networks Are Everything, introducing us to people who can support us as we try to Make Sense of the World. Similarly, networks drive the Connectedness that is bringing people together.

I’m realizing, as I write this, this is all still a little too abstract. I don’t have the energy right now to concretize it, and, frankly, I think doing so could easily fill up a book. Luckily, all the sessions were audio recorded, and you’ll be able to hear for yourself what transpired, and make your own connections.

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This past Thursday and Friday I hosted IDEA 2007, a conference on the design of information spaces of all kinds. This photo captures the themes we identified in a conference-wide discussion at the very end of the event.

It was an awesome event. Thanks to the efforts of the IA Institute‘s many volunteers, I could focus on paying attention to the speakers, and they were, across the board, great.

My biggest revelation was our first speaker, Michael Wesch, professor of anthropology at Kansas State University. Michael is most famous for his The Machine is Us/ing Us video. I didn’t know what to expect from him — I invited him because of the video and his background in anthropology. I admit, I was concerned he’d bring The Discourse and get all academic on us. Instead, he was an excellent speaker, clear, bright, passionate, and clever. He’d be ideal for any event having to do with technology, education, or information, and I’m proud to have introduced him, personally, to a new audience. He showed off two new videos that he hasn’t yet released, both of which will make huge splashes.

There was so much other great stuff, too — Sylvia Harris sharing her case study of redesigning (or rather, simply *designing*) the wayfinding system of Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan; The Brad Paley Experience; Hasan Elahi’s on overwhelming the watchers; Chenda giving us a glimpse behind the scene of New York City’s 311… and I could go on.

In a second, and longer post, I will go into detail on the themes we captured, because they truly get at important characteristics of what it means to design in an information-drenched and uncertain world.

The program for DUX07 (the “designing for user experience” conference) is nearly complete, and looks pretty good, and I don’t say that just because I’m the very first person on the main conference program.

And they’ve extended the early registration, so sign up soon to take advantage of the cheaper rate.

See you there!