Boxes and Arrows: Stories by Jeff Parks

Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management

Jeff Parks — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

iTunes Download mp3 Del.icio.us Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue I had the pleasure of talking with Jeff Lash and Chris Baum on their two part article, Transitioning from User Experience to Product Manager. We talk about how more and more UX professionals are looking at taking on the role of a product manager. This is a valuable conversation for those looking to make a change in careers; an honest discussion about the pros and cons of each profession. We discuss: *Product Vision - The importance of creating a vision and educating others about it.* We discuss the Product Management Vision framework discussed in their article and how creating and educating others about the vision for a product is a key aspect of the Product Manager's role. *UX vs. Product Management: Responsibility, Focus, and Reliance* Jeff and Chris discuss the following elements that outline the three central differences between the UX professional and Product Manager: a. Responsibility b. Focus c. Reliance *Coach vs. Tyrant* We also discuss the importance of conflict management and how the product manager acts more like a coach in getting the team to move towards the same goal. Understanding both the market and the user are key aspects of the product manager. In essence, the Product manager has to not only "make the Kool-Aid", they have to drink it as well. *All Responsibility, No Power, So Listen!* Jeff and Chris provide a realistic definition of a Product Manager as someone who has all of the responsibility and none of the power. They go onto to discuss the need of the product manager to listen carefully to not only their team, but also how to lead without authority. As well, the importance of knowing where your product can fit with all other products offered by the company. *Let Go of the Details* Chris talks about the importance of realizing that as a Product Manager your role shouldn't be focusing on the UI in creating Wire Frames and Site Maps. As a Product Manager your role is to see the bigger picture and provide the vision and clear direction for your team. *IA Summit Presentation Recap* Jeff and Chris discuss the presentation they gave at the 2007 IA Summit in Las Vegas. *Other notes:* Check out these great blogs on Product Management: Pragmatic Marketing SVPG Blog The Product Management View Tyner Blain Michael on Product Management & Marketing *TRANSCRIPT* [intro music] Jeff Parks: This podcast is brought to you by TechSmith. Right now, millions of people are snagging, are you? And by The IA Summit. This year, your peers and industry experts will speak about how topics such as social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies, and a wide of range IA tools and techniques can help as users experience information. Further events happening all over the world, be sure to check out Events.BoxesAndArrows.com. The other day, I had the chance to speak with Jeff Lash and Chris Baum on their two-part article, "Transitioning from User Experience to Product Manager." We talk about how more and more UX [User Experience] professionals are looking at taking on the role of a product manager and the pros and cons of both professions. In particular, things to be very aware of, if you're going to make that transition, and knowing the differences in the roles and responsibilities, and what, ultimately, you're accountable for as a product manager that you may not be currently accountable for as a UX practitioner. A huge thank you to Jeff and Chris for taking time to join me today, and I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers! [podcast begins] In your article, you mentioned that product management is garnering more interest from interaction designers, information architects, and UX designers looking to increase or influence and ensure user-centered product development. Jeff, the first part of the article talks about defining--"What is a product manager?" Maybe you could talk to our listeners a little bit about that? Jeff Lash: Sure. I think, as we described in the article, traditional product management treats the product manager as kind of president of the product. So, really, there should be one person who's in charge of all aspects of the product, and, obviously, you need to work with people from different areas of the business. So, finance, sales, marketing, development, engineering, production, things like that. But, really is, I think we've seen on lots of projects and products, you need to have that one person who's coordinating all those elements and really taking ownership and overall responsibility for the success of the product. Parks: Exactly. Chris, you go on to talk about the responsibility of product managers. You note that because user experience professionals are often already fluent in understanding customer needs and knowledgeable about the markets for which they're designing, they have the potential to make very good product managers. Maybe you can outline some of the key points and why they make good product managers. Chris Baum: First and foremost, we really understand, as UX professionals, our job is to understand how people approach using a product. Really, at its core, when you start going across all those different elements that Jeff mentioned, the idea is that you can bring that knowledge to the entire product not just the user experience to the interface, but also things like the marketing and the service aspects of the product. Really, having that larger purview, it really leverages the knowledge that we have as user advocates. Parks: Right. In the article as well, I guess, address this question to both of you, you outline a framework for how to monitor a market response. The framework follows a vision strategy, a roadmap, requirements, and features. As UX professionals moving into product management roles, might there be a tendency for them to jump straight to the roadmap without having experience in developing vision strategies before, vision and strategy? Jeff: Yes, this is Jeff. I think it's always a challenge. I think that's not just for user experience professionals. I think it's for anyone as to really be able to step back and say, "What is the purpose of what we're doing?" I think, the tendency, a lot of times, is if you've got a product that was, you know, a single inventor had a great idea. He says, "Oh, we've got this great idea for a product, let's go ahead and start building it." I think a lot of people even skip the roadmap and just get to, "All right, what are the features it should have?" I think that as UX professionals, a lot of times, you know, people are brought in kind of once the requirements or features have been defined. They're used to spending most of their time really saying, "OK, how can we best design this feature or what's the interface that it should work with?" But, I think, really, good product management spends a lot of time on those upfront activities and really establishing what is the vision for this product? What's the market for it? How are we different than our competitors? What are the market needs that we're going to be solving? I think, like Chris mentioned, I think user experience professionals have a lot of the traits and experience that helps, because really we spend a lot of time in usability research, and site visits and things like that, really trying to understand the underlying needs and problems of our users that we're trying to solve. That can flow into that process of creating that vision and strategy. Parks: Exactly. Chris, the other point that was mentioned here was this idea of the roles and responsibility would be something like portfolio management. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and what that involves? Chris: I mean, for example, one of my positions is I worked at eTrade, and eTrade, of course, has several different business lines. There's not only the website aspects of it but the software that--they have a trading software as well. The thing is that you, as a product manager, learn more about the customers that you're serving and bring that knowledge into your product, you can also start to gather knowledge and share your knowledge with people and other products. For example, like when I was at eTrade, I did a lot of things around the customer service aspects, like the content around that, helping people find information, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, customer service, in and of itself, is really more about finding content about the other products on the site. So, I was working very closely with the product managers there to figure out what they were trying communicate with their product and make sure that, not only could the customers find the information they were looking for, but also that we represented those other products in the right light that fit with their vision and their strategy. Then also, influence that vision and strategy through what we were finding out, what customers were having issues with. Parks: Yes. That's interesting, because you also go on to talk, in this article, about the roles of a UX designer versus that of, say, a product manager. You outlined three main areas of responsibility, focus, and reliance. Jeff, maybe you could talk a little bit about those three areas and how they differ? Jeff : Sure. I think, this part of the article came about because, in talking about this and discussing and talking with other people I know, there's kind of, sometimes, a lot of confusion. There's a great article that we referenced on by Jonathan Korman of Cooper who really kind of, I think, hits the nail on the head as far as describing what key areas a user experience professional does. And then having people say, "Well, in my organization, we call that a product manager." So, really, we wanted to try to delineate how that was really different. So, I think, responsibility is probably the biggest area and kind of what we were talking about earlier, in that, a product manager is responsible for the overall product. While each individual contributor to the product should be concerned with its overall success, really they're not responsible for it. So, a user experience person should be, obviously, concerned with the marketing strategy, the pricing, and the engineering work. But really, they're not responsible for those aspects, whereas the product manager is. Focus, kind of, ties in to that, and again, that each contributor, the user experience person is focused on these experience aspects, that software engineers focused on the software development. They're focusing on those individual areas where the product manager is not really focusing on any one area, but needs to understand what's going on in every area. And lastly--reliance, and just that, as a product manager, I rely on the people I'm working with on my product development team to do their work. An information architect usually is not relying too much on anyone else. They're, in general, responsible and accountable and have everything they need to do their own job. But, in my case, as a product manager, I'm relying on all these other people, and obviously, working with them. So it's a different--and that kind of gets into the more of the softer side of product management. You have the leadership, team building and cross-functional teams, and that sort of thing. Parks: Yes. Exactly. Because also, you point in the article, Chris, that how to deal with conflict between product management and user experience. Because ultimately a product management role, at, least from what I gathered, from these two articles is really looking at the bigger picture and not focusing on a niche area as Jeff just described around, say, an information architect. And dealing with conflict is a critical part of a product management role, I would imagine. Chris: Exactly, I mean in part of the article, in the second part, we talk a little about the product manager being more like a coach on a professional sports team. It's someone who is trying to gather all these people that have amazing talents and get them all moving towards the same goal. Using the sports analogy seems a little tired, but it is so true, especially as a product manager. In many cases, you don't have authority over the usability people or the engineers, they're reporting into other structures in the organization, and unless you can communicate your vision in a way that gets them excited to participate in it, you'll end up having them refocusing on what they want to do as technologists or what they think is right as a user experience professional, so the idea behind being able to get all those people going in the same direction is actually, when it works really well, is really powerful. Parks: Yes. Chris: But it can be tricky. Parks: And following up on that point, Chris, in your article you said, "a product manager should not be detached from customers sitting in the office and meetings while user researchers are conducting research, " is there a tendency for product managers to not be involved in the UX process in general from your experience? Chris: Yeah, it's really easy right? Because you have the user experience people and especially at first it can actually be, you can let go more of that, especially if you trust the user experience people you're working with, because you can be worried about, you know, like focusing on the vision or examining the market opportunities, et cetera, et cetera, but the thing that any product manager has to do and it's too easy to let go of, is make sure you're touching the people that you're affecting. But, you know, seeing as you have to touch all these different areas, it's really easy to focus on, you know, managing up-- Parks: Right. Chris: --getting the programmatic aspects of your product in order, you know, getting the resources for it, but unless you continually come back and touch the market yourself-- Parks: Mm-hmm. Chris: --you lose that perspective and so it's something we really wanted to put forth in the article. Jeff: Right. I think just to add onto that I think it's again, you know, if your job, your sole job is to understand the users and create the designs around that then obviously you're going to be focused on spending a lot of time talking with customers. But as a product manager, that's one of your many responsibilities, so it's you know, it's tough to get out of the office sometimes. When you've got meetings and you're talking about pricing and marketing and logistics and operations and things like that, it's a lot tougher but I don't think, I'd be surprised if user experience people who transition into product management have a problem doing that. I think it's kind of in our blood, you know it's something that I don't need to be told to do, I just understand I need, you know, I set goals for myself and I make sure I do it. But I think for people maybe transitioning to product management from other areas who haven't had as much of a background in getting out and talking with customers, you know, face to face, you need to be kind of reminded. Parks: Right. Jeff: And I think, you know, it's probably the central tenet of good product management is really to understand the market, not just what your customer needs, but what's the competitive space, what's the market, you know is it growing? Are there technology changes? Are there society changes that are going to be impacting it? Parks: So ultimately those experiences as UX designer is actually a strength going into a product management role. Would you say so? Chris: Yeah, I think that's one of the biggest things that's helped me into transition is that you know I've been able to really focus on you know what do our customers need? What do our users need? How can we provide that to them? I think that's been the biggest thing that helps me out. There's a lot of other things that I've had to learn along the way that I didn't have as much experience in, but I think if there's one thing that I could say if, you know, you want to be a good product manager it's to really make sure you understand your market, understand your customer needs and create your vision and strategy around solving those customer problems. Parks: Exactly, and that is actually a great transition into the second part of your paper, because you talked about the idea of, you know, making that transition and things you need to understand about that--the product management role. In the first part of the paper you talked about what you do as a product manager that you don't do as a UX professional and a couple of points that I found really interesting were, the first one, which is, "evangelize the product, you must champion, you must be, you must champion both the product internally and externally, " and that's a bit of a difference, a shift in the way UX professionals work. Chris Baum: I mean, it's really true. Jeff: Yeah. Chris: You know, being the product manager, puts you in a position that, as I mentioned before, the whole idea of being the coach, and you know part of that is the motivational aspects of it. And not only do you need to motivate internally with the people that you work with in the various engineering team, the finance team, the marketing team, et cetera, it's really important for you to, as Jeff has said before, and it's really I think kind of brilliant, you have to not only drink the Kool Aid, you have to make it. [laughter] Chris : And get everyone else to drink it too. Parks: Yeah, exactly. And Jeff, the other point that was of interest to me in here was, "provide input on strategies of other products within the organization," so again, I think it speaks to this idea of being able to really communicate effectively and sort of think outside the UX box and look at the bigger picture. Jeff: Yeah, and it gets back to what we were talking about earlier about you know how your, the portfolio management aspect. And that's actually one of the areas that, I think, prompted the most comment on the first part of the article is just about, you know, great, you're managing this product, but no product really stands alone, and I think more and more we're starting to see within organizations, you know really, some, some, more attention being paid to how products fit together. You know the Google example of Gmail, and the Google calendar, and Google documents, is a good one--you know Yahoo has done this for a long time in making their products work all together but I think unless your company has one product, and most companies don't, really you need to start thinking about that. And it's one area I know that can be frustrating sometimes as a user experience professional saying, you know, well this seeing what's going on in one area of the company and saying, "oh geez, I should be able to give some input on that, I have some experience talking with customers and things that I've learned that could help provide input, " and sometimes you're just not, you know, they don't invite you to the table. Parks: Yeah. Jeff: And for better or for worse, whether it's right or wrong, as a product manager, you know, you, just by default, sometimes get invited. I know lots of people who are UX professionals who are involved in those, much, those important, higher level strategy discussions but a lot of times, you're not, so I think that's a big responsibility of not only having ownership for your product but then working with the other products in the system and making sure everything works together well. Parks: Absolutely. The next part of that paper you talk about challenges and forces working against you, which Jeff, you just, which Jeff and Chris, excuse me, you both talked about at the first part, but one of them was, "as a product manager you'll have little to no actual authority, " and you're quoting a guy, Kowaski, I think that's how you pronounce his name. Chris: No, [Greg] Kowasaki. Parks: Kowasaki, thank you, described a product manager as someone who has "all of the responsibility and none of the power, " so I read that and I think, "well, why in the world would you want to get into product management then?" But this is a reality of the role of a product manager. Correct Chris? Chris: That's absolutely true in more ways than we can really express in just the article. Parks: Mm-hmm. Chris: Because you know when you start talking about touching all these different practices within an organization, like they all have their own portfolios, too, so you have the engineering team all talking amongst each other about what the next technologies are, and they're trying to bring those influences into their work as practitioners, same with the user experience folks and the same with the marketing folks and the same with finance folks and so it's really, it's a challenge because you want to listen to all those influences. Parks: Yeah. Chris: but you also don't really have direct control over them and so it's really an interesting, it's really interesting that dynamic to try to take you know, take the input, but make sure that everyone kind of goes for the same goal. And you know, personally it's been a very interesting adjustment to go from making recommendations about what the product should do, and you know sometimes having them honored and sometimes not, to being the one that takes the recommendations and you know, makes a decision for the product, but yet you need to make sure that, that we honor where they're coming from so that you make sure that you give the people the right attention and that they get, you make sure that they get, they feel like they were heard. Parks: Right. Chris: in the right way, and that you really seriously considered it. Parks: Yeah. Exactly. Jeff: I think that's you know probably the biggest misconception that people have a product management is you know, if you've never, if you're a UX person you've been on a project and said, "Oh, you know if they'd just put me in charge of that website," or "if I was in charge of that software, like, I'd fix everything," and this, I think there's this misconception that you know just because you have the title "product manager" you can change all these things. And that's the biggest thing that you have to learn, you know, how do you lead without authority? And I think it goes back to a lot of the concepts we've been talking about, again about, you know, establishing that vision and like Chris said, working with the other teams and really it's also at an executive level of trying to get, you know you need to get funding for your project, why is this product more important than something else? And it's really about, you know, setting the--telling the story of why this product is important, what you're trying to do and getting people on board with it, because, yes, you're competing for resources. Whether you like it or not, you've got to get people excited. It's much easier to make things happen in an organization when you've got a product that people want to be a part of rather than something where you're just telling people what to do. And that's tough. That's really an issue about, like, management and leadership not specific to product management, even. Parks: Yes. And at the heart of a lot of this is the fact that if you have all the responsibility and none of the power, it speaks to the other key points here, is that you'll be at the center of regular disagreements between stakeholders. And managing that conflict is--well, personal-professional relationships, in order to move forward, you need to move through the conflict to get to the other side, sort of step yourself up to keep getting better. But, there aren't very many people that are very good at dealing or managing conflicts. So, obviously, as a product manager, I would imagine, Chris, this would be a key part of the person's job and to be able to be very good at managing. Chris: That's a little bit of an understatement actually. Parks: And a half. Yes, I didn't articulate that as clearly as I should have, maybe. But if this is-- if someone's moving into this role, this is something they have to be aware of, that this is going to be a part of their daily life. Chris: Absolutely. It comes from every direction. Really, being someone who has been interested in the whole, like, kind of aspects of user experience, it's been really an interesting function to, like, step back and watch my own reaction to things. Parks: Right. Chris: Because your reaction actually dictates, in many ways, how other people react to you--and reacts to the problem, reacts to the decisions you make. Because as the product manager, you're the most basic, you represent the product overall. People are constantly looking to you, for how you feel like certain decisions and certain effects are going to change the product, or help or hinder its vision. So it's been interesting for me to, kind of, step back and understand the personality aspects of it. Parks: Right. Chris: Make sure that I'm giving people the right amount of attention. That you take into account all the effects, not only from a business standpoint but from a personality standpoint, and kind of keep those all up in the air at the same. It's very much a juggling act. Jeff: There's really a fine line that you have to walk. If you're too authoritative and too much of a "This is how it goes," then you're going to turn off people that you need to have a good relationship with. If you're not enough of a leader, if you're not forceful--strong enough--then you're essentially going to take a backseat to whoever's the most influential or yelling the loudest. There's a fine line that product managers need to walk, taking responsibility, and showing their authority but at the same time, not steamrolling over everyone else. Parks: Right. In the whole--[inaudible 22:08] Chris: Sorry, Jeff. Parks: No, go ahead, Chris, please. No, that's great. Chris: It doesn't change whether you're working for a big company or a startup, because I have done both. It's heightened in the startup situation because everyone is so close together. Yet, things change so quickly that you can always take time to normalize all those relationships. Whereas, in a large organization, it seems like you have time to do that. Everyone has a lot going on, and they're all kind of facing inward many times. But, when they come back out in the product situation, whether or not just focusing on the marketing aspects of their organization, it seems to me like that was a little easier at the bigger company. The startups are much more concentrated, and I found that very interesting. Parks: Absolutely. Another main section of the article you talked about is what you do as UX professional, that you won't do as a product manager. A couple of key points that I found in the article are product managers do not have the luxury of shooting for perfection in the theoretical ideal. You talked about how the joke is the user experience people always answer the question with, "Well, you know, it depends." So, Jeff, can you talk a little bit about that shift in terms of what they do now as UX professional that they wouldn't do as a product manager? Jeff: Yes. I think that's a good one to start with. As a UX person, you're maybe a bit removed from the overall big picture--the budgets, the timelines, and things like that. So, you kind of say, "Well, look, this is the best decision for the user." Without knowing, really sometimes, all the implications that go into that. Again, I've worked with product managers who aren't as good at striking that balance and still do shoot for that ideal. But, ultimately, it all comes back to having that good solid vision for the product and saying, "Look, you know, is this good enough to get us towards our vision? Do we need it to be perfect?" and since you're ultimately responsible, it's about making a lot of those trade offs, I think. As Chris mentioned, you know, UX people are used to making recommendations and saying, "Well, look, this is what I think the best thing for our users or customers would be." But, the product manager needs to decide, "Well, that's great, but that might take an extra month to develop. Can we go with the simpler thing that might not be as good for our users but would only take a week?" I think, the good UX people are doing that now; I don't mean to say that that's something you'd automatically switch on when you become a product manager because I think as UX folks start getting more awareness of the business context around in which they're working, they're making a lot of those decisions today, even in their user experience role. I think the other, and probably the biggest shift, and this was something that I heard from people when I talked to them before I started my product manager position, is that you're not going to have the luxury of being down in the details. If you really like doing wire frames, and sitemaps, and doing detail design--you might not be a good product manager. I mean I like it, but I also had to accept the fact that I'm not going to be able to do it and I just don't have the time or the luxury to be able to do it. I work with great designers, and people who can do a lot of that detailed work. But that's, I think, a challenge for anyone moving to product manager from any role. If you're a salesperson and you become a product manager, you're going to want to become very involved in the sales process of your product and a lot of the decisions around the how the product is sold. But, you got a whole sales team that can work on that. I might want to spend a lot of time working on the pixel-by-pixel design for the interface. But, I've got a whole team of designers; hopefully, that can be working on that. I've got other things I need to look into, at other aspects of the product that have more strategic level maybe. But that's, I think, probably, one of the hardest things to do--to switch your mind from working as an individual contributor to now being kind of an overseer of everything that goes on. Parks: Right. The other point that you make in this, Chris, is that product managers are not artists or expert practitioners. Can you expand a little bit on that idea? How it relates to what they do now compared to what they would do as a product manager? Chris: Sure. That, actually, goes a little bit towards what Jeff was saying just a second ago, is that everyone comes from somewhere. You're going to be thinking about the place where you came from. User experience people are going to be, especially at first, and I was totally guilty of this myself, like really thinking of the interface a lot when I first became a product manager. But, what I've quickly found out was the time that I did that, the product suffered, because the other aspects of it--engineering, the trade offs, trying to fit the puzzle together in a way that makes sense for that moment. It falls off, and definitely, one of the worst things you can do, is be meddling with other people's works. Somewhat, we need to be able to trust them and be taking their work and fitting that into the larger whole. And then coming back with feedback and new work that actually satisfies what that vision is. That's the whole idea of that cycle between from vision to features and then using the market to monitor the results of that. You want to make sure that no one is coming to you and saying, "We need a new widget for this feature," or whatever. You need to make sure you're pushing the entire product going forward and that the interface part, the engineering part, the marketing part, pricing part, the service part--all that stuff is going the same direction, adding to that moment, instead of taking away from it. Parks: Right. And you follow up with this idea about how to work better with your product manager now. Jeff, you point to the one idea of just start working with them more closely and understanding what they're doing specifically. Jeff: Yeah, I think thinking back to experience I've had in the past about where I had questions about, "Why was this decision made?" You know, "Well, this would have been better for our customers and why we're doing this instead?" I think, sometimes it was really that I didn't understand the bigger picture and the whole context of what's going on. So, working closer with your product manager now, as a designer, to help understand-- "What is the big picture?" And if you're recommending one thing and we're doing something else, what are the other impacts? Because it's not always about what's best for the interface, or what's best for the customer and user. There might be other products that we need this to do things for. There might be strategic priorities that are outside of your product that you need to focus on. There might be engineering, or marketing, or sales, or finance things that you just don't have awareness of. And I think a good product manager will communicate that information as much as possible, but I know I'm guilty of it. You know, there's just so much information. I try and share as much as I can with my team, but there's some times that I just don't know--I don't know what people don't know. So, I think, to work better with product managers now is just to understand the context of what you're working in, rather than having it be a kind of adversarial relationship--in some cases I know it can be. Really, trying to seek ground...and you want to be someone you can--who can--you turn to as what they call the trusted advisor. Not just on the user experience aspects, but potentially other aspects of the product as well. Parks: Yeah. Absolutely, and in the last part of the paper you start talking about studying and preparing for our product management role, and you list a series of links, and... But I also wanted to help you promote your presentation that both of you are doing at the IA Summit coming up this year in Vegas. Maybe talk a little bit about what that's going to be about, Chris? Chris: So, what we're going to try to do, is take some of the ideas that we started to put forward in this article, especially the part about thinking about how to relate to your product manager. And, kind of, take what aspects you can take from UX, bring that into the product management role, and then also start to think about the challenges part. So that, you know, you go through from a workshop aspect and do comparative, and be able to understand how, what information you have to use for a decision at the higher level, so that as you're starting to examine the possibility of moving into product management, that you really understand at a very hands-on level what it means. So you can have some idea of what that experience feels like, and maybe make a more informed decision. Jeff: Yeah, I mean I know I've talked with a lot of people in the past few years who are user experience people, kind of looking for what's next. I don't want to be designing screens ten years from now. There's some people who do and that's great, and they're great at it and I think we need people like that. But there are also people who are looking for what's the next step in their career. And I think our goal with these articles, and our goal especially with the pre-conference session at the IA Summit, is really to help UX people who are interested in maybe moving to product management, just understand a little bit more about whether it's something they want to go into or not. So explaining a little about what you do as a product manager, going into more detail than we can really hit in an article, and then also having it so maybe some people walk out and say, "Look, I understand more about product management, and this isn't for me. Now that I know a little bit more about it, it's something that I don't think I want to go into. But I at least know how I can work better with product managers now." And then for the people who come and say, "Yes, this is something I want to do. I'm definitely interested in it, " giving them some things that they can start doing to better prepare them. Because I know when I started as product manager, and most people I know who started as a product manager, it was kind of, one day you're a product manager--Here you go. Parks: [laughs] Right. Jeff: And there's not a whole lot of preparation and training, and I think it actually, it parallels a lot with the user experience professions in that there's a lot of misunderstanding and mischaracterization. And different organizations treat the roles differently, so there's not a real commonly accepted set of things. And I think that's probably a little bit more mature maybe in product management than in UX, but there's still a lot of people who are product managers who don't really know what a product manager should be doing. And our goal with this is really to help people who are interested in product management understand a little bit more about it, and learn what they can do to prepare themselves for that role. Parks: Absolutely. You mentioned, just one final thought, you mentioned two major organizations for product managers: Product Development and Management Association, as well as the Association of International Product Marketing and Product Management, so people can Google those things, or of course they can look them up on your article. Are these associations sort of like the Information Architecture Institute? They provide a high-level context and information for product managers? Jeff: I think both these are really more--the PDMA is--the more well-known, at least as far as my experience has been. And as an organization that deals with product management, not just technical product management but any kind of product management and development. AIPMM focuses a bit more on the marketing side as well. There really isn't any technical on-line or software type product management organizations. I think both of these are pretty mature and they've got training, and resources, and local groups, and things like that. And there's also, again, a lot of informal groups either that are, around the country and around the world, that are either formally affiliated with one of these two, or informally just you know, groups of people in a city who are getting together to talk about product management. Chris: One thing we haven't really talked about, and it's part of not only if you find that product management is something you really want to look into but, is the aspect of helping a product manager if they aren't getting out in the market enough. Like, talking to them about bringing them along on your research. Or if they're going out to talk to customers, that you go with them. As a user experience person, that would be an amazing way to really get into the mindset of your product manager. Or as the product manager it's to really come together with your attitudes with your user experience people. Because, what that does is it really shows you the kind of things that the other person is looking for in their exploration. And that's not just a practitioner thing, it's not just a product manager versus a user researcher or a user experience person. That is a personal connection. And obviously it would be ideal if you can have that same connection with your technologists and your marketers and your service people as well. But that is one way, as a user experience person going into product management, or vice versa, if you're working with your product manager, to really understand where they're coming from and to get resonating with each other on what you're really thinking. Parks: Right. Well... yeah. I'm sorry, go ahead. Jeff: I was just going to say, the overlap, that's one of the major overlaps between product management and user experience is that you need to be talking to the customers. And so, the more you get on board with each other there, the more that will infuse the product with the idea of serving customers. Parks: Right. Because, ultimately, we all learn best by experiencing the lesson directly. And if product managers don't get into the field, then they can't really understand what the crucial nature is of understanding your end users. It was interesting, I was listening to a podcast by Marissa Mayer, from Google, who's the Vice-President of Usability at Google, and she was talking about the Ten Commandments of user experience, and the ninth one was about how--was users, not money, and how Google has always followed the needs of their end users, and not jumped into the latest fad in technology. And to help create products. And obviously Google Gmail, Google calendar, all of these tools online are some of the most popular tools for people to be using today. So that, I think that speaks to your point. Right. Exactly. Jeff: And just to add to what Chris said, I think pretty much every user experience person I know is told the frustrating story about, we found these things from the users and I have to spend weeks trying to convince the product manager that this is what people actually needed and that this is what we're supposed to do. Parks: Right. Jeff: And it's frustrating and you feel like you're banging your head against a wall. And I know I've been through it before, and I think most people have. Wouldn't it be great if you could not have to spend your time doing that, and instead spend your time actually executing on what you learned? I worked on a product a couple of years ago where we did a bunch of concept testing. We went out into the field and talked with customers and users, and it was just me and the product manager, and we, after those couple days--and then as Chris mentioned, it's not just the research you're doing, it's, well, you go out to dinner and drinks afterwards and you talk about stuff. And when we got back from that trip, we both really had a good understanding of our customers and we agreed and we really understood what we were supposed to be doing. So I didn't have to spend my time writing up a trip report, and putting a presentation together, and trying to convince them what we should do. It was, we knew exactly what we needed to do and let's just start doing it. So that was such a valuable experience for me and I know the product manager benefited a lot as well, because it was something that maybe, if I hadn't asked, or really pulled him out, he might have not done that one his own. So it worked out great for both of us, and ultimately helped the product out a lot. Parks: Brilliant. Well, Jeff Lash and Chris Baum--Thank you very much for joining me today. Jeff: Thank you. Chris: Yeah, thanks for having us. It was great. Parks: Cheers. Again, the article is Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management, and you can find it on boxesandarrows.com.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold

Jeff Parks — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:16:09 GMT

iTunes Download Del.icio.us Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue Jeff Parks had the opportunity to speak with Milissa Tarquini on her article, "Blasting the Myth of the Fold":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/blasting-the-myth-of. They talk about how this long held rule in web design is being de-bunked by web analytics and user testing, as well as how this will impact design and development processes based on screen resolution and browser compatibility. We discuss... *Defining the Fold* Milissa outlines the different terms that people use for the fold. Anything that falls below that point in the screen where the user has to scroll is the fold *Back in the day* In the early 90's at AOL scrolling was prohibited. Milissa talks about the need for balance in designing for the fold while being creative. *A moving target* She goes on to talk about the challenge of designing for the fold with different screen resolutions and browsers and how in her opinion no one should be designing for the fold. *Content is still king* According to Milissa it all comes down to the quality of the content. If content is engaging and the user is interested in the information, they will follow the path to what they are seeking, regardless of the medium. *Interaction Design is everywhere* As Derek Featherstone pointed out in his discussion with Christina about Accessibility, IXDA plays an important role when designing with how users will find content on a page. *Not the last, but a new frontier* Milissa addresses social media tools such as Blogs, Facebook, and MySpace and how these new web services reinforce the notion that users do scroll. As Eric Reiss commented, "...perhaps the new frontier is the bottom of the page."

Foundations of Interaction Design

Jeff Parks — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 05:49:50 GMT

iTunes Download Del.icio.us Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue The other day I had the opportunity to speak with David Malouf on his article, Foundations of Interaction Design. We discuss several foundations of Interaction design including time, metaphor, abstraction, and negative space. David also provides greater detail to comments posted on his article from readers from around the world. We Discuss... *What is Interaction Design?* Interaction Design is about interaction and behavior within a specific context. *Foundations of Interaction Design* Dave talks about how these foundations were developed from his work at Pratt Industrial Design including elements such as line, space, color, and texture. Taking these elements into account creates a better design. *What do you get when you cross a fax machine with a modem?* Another aspect of Interaction Design is how machines interact with each other. Dave uses the iPod and Blue Tooth technologies to describe how Interaction Design plays a key role in making better products. *Four on the floor* Dave goes on to discuss four aspects of the following Foundational elements in Interaction Design: 1. Time 2. Metaphors 3. Abstraction 4. Negative Space *TRANSCRIPT* [music] Announcer: This podcast brought to you by Chex Mix. Right now, millions of people are snacking. Are you? And by Intuitech, tools for building better websites. Looking for inspiration and ideas from colleagues from all over the world? Be sure to check out events.boxesandarrows.com. [music] Interviewer: The other day I had the opportunity to speak with David Malouf on his article "Foundations of Interaction Design". We discussed several foundations of interaction design, including those of time, metaphor, abstraction, and negative space. David also provides greater detail to comments posted on his articles from readers around the world. A big thank you to David for taking time to speak with me, and I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers! David, your article on Boxes and Arrows Foundation of Interaction Design struck me as really interesting, especially as an information architect. I can appreciate the complexity of defining a multi-faceted profession like interaction design. You noted in your article that interaction design is distinct from the other design disciplines. It's not information architecture, industrial design, or even user experience design. It also isn't user interface design, it's more ephemeral, it's about why and when whether than about what and how. So maybe you could elaborate on this definition of interaction design for our listeners? David Malouf: Yeah, sure. Something that I like to do is to make sure our terms are well defined, and I believe in very particulate definitions of things in order to help people understand the total concept. So a word like "user experience" doesn't require that because it's meant to be an umbrella term that's all encompassing, but terms like "interaction design," "UI design, " and "information architecture, " "industrial design", are particulate in their nature. They have relationships with each other in order to bound those relationships with each other, to better understand them, it's important to have a clear understanding. So when I talk about interaction design, I'm trying to not necessarily create a hard wall between other disciplines, because there's a lot of overlap and practice and methods and things, but it's more about being able to understand the core essence of those disciplines and of interaction design. For me, interaction design is really about interaction. If you think about an interaction, an interaction is a form of behavior and behaviors take place within specific contexts. So defining context and defining behavior are at the core of what an interaction designer needs to do. Interviewer: Right, and some of those core elements you illustrated in your article itself. You talk about foundations specifically. Can you elaborate on some of those ideas for our listeners? David: Yeah, sure. I think the concept of foundations itself is something that comes out of the design schools of Europe and early US design schools, and my experience is through Pratt Industrial Design, where we put together a series of foundation classes for industrial designers at Pratt. I'm not going to remember all of them off the top of my head, but line, volume, space, color, texture are all part of those foundations. Basically the way the education system works is to do studio classes where you dive deeply into each one of these foundations and master its language. So that in terms of negative space for a graphic designer, for example, is understanding when something is in close enough proximity or not enough white space so that it is assumed that those elements are somehow related to each other, versus those when do I separate it enough so that I know that they're not related to each other? So a lot of that is done in graphic design and industrial design. When we talk about interaction design, there really hasn't been a sustained conversation about elements like these that we can use to communicate what is good interaction design, what is bad interaction design, or even what is interaction design itself. In thinking about these foundations of interaction design that's sort of at the core of what I'm trying to put together. Interviewer: It's brilliant, and it's also very complicated, of course, because you're talking about behaviors. Of course if we were building things for other machines it'd be simple, but we're building these technologies and tools for other people, so how do they interact with those applications? David: Yeah, and lately actually, I'll just add this in, a lot of what I've been thinking about is actually machines interacting with each other. That is another aspect of interaction design is when you think about ecosystem design and how my iPod needs to connect to my laptop and how that happens and how they can communicate to each other and what are the expectations between those two devices. It's very technical on the one hand, but there's also a place where it affects the human interaction between them, such as how will my Bluetooth headset communicate to my phone? What types of information do they need to pass back and forth to each other so then the human beings on either side are able to clearly understand stakes and other information that's viable as well. Interviewer: Absolutely. And just getting back to the metaphors for a second, you talked about a few in your article that I'd like you to elaborate on. I know you and I were talking before about how we could spend an entire hour talking about just one of these things. Maybe we could start by talking about the element of time and how that relates to interaction design. David: Well, I think time was probably the most complex element. I think in terms of product design, time is probably the clearest foundation for interaction design. There are other types of design such as film and dance that require an understanding of time, and there is a place where interaction design, like dance and film, is the place for narrative, is the storytelling. So if you think about narrative and time and timing, you end up with basically one core aspect of time is pace, which is the feeling of flow through time for the end user's experience. Like going to a movie, how often do you look at your watch, and managing that. There are times when you want the pace to be slow because you want to engage yourself that completely with it and feel that moment, but sometimes that's take a little too far and then the end of "Lord of the Rings" comes by the fifth ending and you're looking at your watch again. The same thing exists within interaction design. Is that transition animation too slow, is it too quick, did I need more time to understand what was going on, do I need less time to realize the change? Things like that are important with interaction design. Do I really need to have a step-through wizard to do this process, or can you put it on one form on a screen and I'll figure it out? To make it more concrete, that's one element of time. Interviewer: It's interesting because you were noting in your article and we were talking right now you were mentioning this idea of choreography and dance and you mentioned one of the elements being metaphors, and in particular you were talking about how all metaphors break down at some point. I'm wondering why that is and what a path forward for the interaction designers would be in helping clients understand these complex ideas once the metaphor breaks down. David: Yeah. I think all metaphors break down just because they're not what you're prescribing to it. Interviewer: Right. [laughter] David: For some reason whenever I think of metaphors, all of a sudden these similes come into my head. But you could say a metaphor is an analogy, right? [laughs] Interviewer: Sure.Yep. David: You could say, "He's as fast as a horse." Well, obviously he's not as fast as a horse because people can't go 40 miles an hour. He's faster than you would think a normal human being would be able to go. So the analogy breaks down at a certain level because he is not the analogy. He is just like a quality of the analogy that you're trying to possess. So you take the trashcan from a desktop or the recycle bin. Well, they're not a trashcan or a recycle bin because of the fact that I can't carry it someplace else. [laughs] I can't move it. I can't... Interviewer: It lacks the physical properties of being literally able to go over, pick it up, and move it somewhere or throw out the trash quite literally. David: Right. I can't play my drums on it. [laughs] Interviewer: And being a drummer myself, that's my biggest frustration with these things for sure. David: [laughs] Exactly. Interviewer: But I understand. All kidding aside, I completely understand your point. You mentioned in your articles working in tandem with metaphor abstraction relates more to the physical and mental activity that is necessary for an interaction to take place. So what is the difference between an abstraction and a metaphor? David: I think for me I wrote this article actually looking for people to help me with this stuff as much as to feed it. And I think abstraction is this thing that I'm trying to get my head around. It makes perfect sense in my head. Every time I talk about it, people sort of get a little bit lost. So I do think though that abstraction is metaphor grounded in physicality in a way. So I think one of the examples I gave is talking about Google Maps. Being the first one to do the whole Ajax Map thing, what they were able to do is create this amazing metaphor of a map on the table. Not using the blurred focus of the reality, but definitely taking that clipping effect and saying, "You know, you're just dragging the map around the lens of your eye basically. We're going to clip it for you more precisely than your eye would do." But that's basically the metaphor and play there. But the abstraction part of it is how you actually use the map itself and how you click down on the mouse. And the distance that you move your arm with the mouse is in exact ratio to how far you're going to move on the screen, right? Interviewer: Exactly. Oh, for sure. David: You compare that to the original, the old version of Maps, where you clicked in north or northwest. And that click had nothing to do with the physical movement of distance or even how long it took to make that motion of the map. So there was a further abstraction or a lack of physical connection between those types of interaction. Interviewer: So would this be similar to the idea of how we're losing our ability to do cursive writing? And how just because we type keys -- like my pinky is ASDF -- you almost get used to this idea of, well, I'm used to writing A with a pen versus just punching a key with a finger, for example? David: I think that there's definitely realities, like the whole spelling is degrading among kids who do S & S too much, right? There are those realities. But I also think it's important to understand that we don't want abstraction or the value of abstraction to be a value of interaction design. There could be points where higher abstraction might be more valuable. So if you look at command line interfaces, typing has nothing to do really with what I'm doing onscreen. But there's an efficiency to that. So people who are interested in command line interfaces, an interesting product is by the folks at Humanized. They have a product called Enso, where you can command line interface your Windows desktop pretty easily. But it still is very abstract, but there's an efficiency involved in using that level of abstraction. So I don't think that there's an absolute value judgment to abstraction itself. Less is a little more. Interviewer: Excellent. One of the questions you asked in your article about the fourth foundation of interaction design is that of negative space. You had put out the question, what is the negative effect on interaction based on negative space" Have you gotten any feedback about that? Or could you describe to our listeners a little bit about how negative space is the fourth foundation of what you look at when you think about interaction design? David: Yeah. For me I think there is no one negative space. I've been thinking about this a little bit in terms of the foundations of other design disciplines. But I think there's a negative in each of the other foundations in a way, especially within time. There probably is a negativity in each foundation. I think that's as far as I've gotten. But what I've worried about here: there's time, so pause is an obvious "something's not happening." There's no reaction, which also relates to inactivity, which is the other one I related it to. But then there's the human element of negative space or negativity, which is just the human cessation of thought. There was a game called BrainBall or something like that where the less you think the better you do kind of thing in controlling your mind. Or think about meditation where you try to stop your language thought. Interviewer: Less is more type thing, right? Because I know Dr. Barry Schwartz wrote a book called "The Paradox of Choice, " why more is less. He went to the Gap one day in inspiration for this article. He had never had more selection of jeans in his entire life. He had never walked out with a better fitting, more comfortable pair of jeans, and he never had a worse experience in his entire life in buying jeans. So he determined the more choices people had, actually the less satisfied they were with their final decision, which I thought was really kind of interesting. So maybe if we start from a negative space perspective, if we looked at the idea of removing choice, we could actually increase the capacity to get people what they need. David: I don't think it's about removing. I've always had a problem with the paradox. I have a paradox with the paradox of choice. Interviewer: OK. David: Losing choices where there isn't always as much choice is what we're used to in the U S, you sort of miss your options. [laughter] David: So I think it's about presentation of choice as much as it is too much choice. Interviewer: Excellent point. I never thought about that, but you're absolutely right. Yeah, for sure. It would have to be. Maybe we could turn a little bit to some of the comments that the readers made on your article? David: Sure. Interviewer: And get a little more clarification from you. Paul Bryan from Musography Corporation in Atlanta commented that, "I agree with the foundations you listed but was left wondering why you didn't include a foundation for goal, that is why I undertook the design and why anyone else would undertake the steps of the interaction. "Fully understanding the context and mechanics of relevant goal seems fundamental to any interaction design and constrains all of the other foundations you describe--unless by 'foundations' you mean the components of the interaction itself or the philosophy of the art apart from the science." So what are your thoughts about the foundation of goal for interaction design as Paul has pointed out? David: For me goal is something that comes from the outside of the design. It constrains the design, but so does technology. What technology I'm doing is going to constrain that design. But to me it is a parameter of which I design within.. But it is not a foundation of the design itself. Quite honestly, it comes outside of the practice of interaction design in, like I was saying, the particular. Goals are defined from design research. They're not defined from interaction design. They're defined from research, so the activity itself is there. And the last thing is that design can exist for good or for bad outside of research. If you look at studio work in the design education environment around foundations, it's very, very much about creativity and language acquisition. There are basically three fundamental elements of any kind of creative endeavor. You need to be able to have muscle memory. If you think about playing music, you need to be able to actually put your fingers on the keys in the right places in the right time. Right? Interviewer: Absolutely. David: You also need to know and be able to create good music, so you need to be able to come up with your own musicality in a way. Then the final thing is you need to be able to recognize what is good and critique and things like that. Those are the three core aspects of it, and you can do that with or without research involved in that. It's a very creative endeavor. So that's probably why I just leave goals out of it. Not to dismiss the importance of design research, but that's the same as all of the other disciplines around doing user experience. They're all important. You can't have interaction design without some kind of formative design working in play, whether that's visual design, UI design, or industrial design. All of those formative elements are just as important as the interaction design, and so is design research. Interviewer: Right. Absolutely. The other question I wanted to talk to you about from a comment was a gentleman, Parek, who stated that: "While not countering what you said, I was left with the impression you believe it's better to reduce abstraction. I'm not sure that should be a goal in itself. I would say it's better to push out the abstraction to the right level of the given interaction." Do you agree with what Parek is saying here? David: Yeah, I think Parek is really just stating what I said earlier in the conversation in terms of there are points where it's about appropriateness -- to bring goals back in [laughs] or about user understanding more than goals, actually. You need to design to the appropriate needs of the users who you're designing for. So I wouldn't say that abstraction is a negative in and of itself. I would say though that there's a tendency for human beings to feel more engaged -- the more the physicality feels like it's related to natural motion or natural interactions, the more that we have to create artificial interactions in order to achieve the tasks of the solutions we're designing, I think the more it encumbers people. So there's not an absolute answer here, but I would tend to want to reduce abstraction, would be my answer. I would to tend to want to. Interviewer: The last comment that I want to point out today was by Jamie Owen, who's a visual information specialist for training at the Department of Veteran Affairs. Jamie had said that much like differing cultures have recognizable characteristics unique to their dance and their music, the "choreography" of orchestration of their interaction should also be designed as to their unique cultural characteristics. In short, the elements of the foundations are different from culture to culture. So in my mind, this begs the question: Should culture be considered as a foundation of interaction design? David: Again, it's like goals in that it's an outside constraint. I would consider it really similar in that regard, but the foundations themselves exist no matter the culture. They may be interpreted differently. Just like you take music. There is such a thing as a scale, or to get it more precisely there is rhythm. There is melody. Right? Interviewer: Absolutely. David: Good rhythm and good melody differ per culture, but rhythm and melody are the foundations. Then you can't tell in other musical elements. But I wouldn't call the culture a foundation of music, and the same thing here with the designs. Maybe I'm going to use a visual design. Maybe I can't use the color red in certain cultures because it may be insulting, but it still is that hue that's there. The value attributed to that is different culturally, but it exists. And its relationship cognitively to other colors, meaning that red and green are always in contrast to each other, will always be there. Right? Interviewer: Exactly. Well, David. Again, the article is "Foundations of Interaction Design," obviously a conversation that is going to be carried on for quite some time outside of this podcast and definitely an important piece of work. So thank you very much for taking time to talk to me today. Is there anything that you'd like to announce to our listeners before we sign off? David: Yeah, sure. [laughs] Well, as attributed to me, I think, in bios I'm the vice-president of the Interaction Design Association, plus my love affair with interaction design. We are having our first annual conference this February in Savannah, Georgia, being hosted by the Savannah College of Art and Design industrial design group. It is going to be great. We have four amazing keynotes from the various parts of the interaction design worlds. Alan Cooper from Cooper and About Face. And Inmates Who Run the Asylum is going to be our opening and primary keynote. Interviewer: Great. David: Then closing is going to be somebody probably new to a lot of people in the user experience community, which is Malcolm McCullough. He's actually professor of architecture at University of Michigan, and he wrote what I would consider one of the best books on interaction design. It's about architecture called "Digital Ground." He will be giving a great talk to send us on our way into the new universe where space, form, and interaction are all sort of converging into one sort of design discipline. In between we have Bill Buxton, principal design researcher from Microsoft - -pretty much a luminary -- and recent author of "Sketching User Experiences," will be talking about designing the ecosystem. Our fourth keynote is Sigi Moeslinger from a design firm called Antenna Design. You probably know her work because you've used it, but you probably don't know the firm as well. But Sigi, a former IDEO person, more on the industrial side of things, will be talking about the intersection, intervention, and interaction. It will be a great talk. We have eight invited speakers from around the world. Then we have 20 lightning-round speakers doing 25-minute talks also, which comes directly from our community. It was really hard to cut those down [laughs] to only 20. So that's going to be a high quality event that we're looking at. Our host, Savannah, is going to be an amazing place to be in February. It's looking like a great show. Interviewer: Sounds fantastic. Well, living in Ottawa, Canada in February, Savannah, Georgia, sounds like a lovely place to be [laughs] in terms of the weather. So hopefully I can make it down there. But again, Dave, thanks very much for taking the time and best of luck in all of your endeavors. David: Thank you. Interviewer: Cheers.

Using Design Visuals To Communicate Ideas

Jeff Parks — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 02:52:50 GMT

iTunes Download Del.icio.us Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue In late January I had the pleasure of attending the VizThink conference in San Francisco. As an Information Architect I wanted to learn how to use different ideas around design to assist me with "big IA" and "little IA" projects. The folks kind enough to join me in this conversation include: Christopher Fuller Griot's Eye Daniel Rose Bell Canada Ken and Rebecca Hope Motive8 Infographics Noah Iliinsky Complex Diagrams We discuss: *Thinking outside the box* Daniel Rose talks about why the process of "thinking outside the box" isn't possible unless you surround yourself with people of different experiences. The following framework is what Daniel sketched during our conversation that describes his idea. *Graphics empowering people* Ken Hope from Motive8 Infographics points out that a lot of the visualization tools empowers people to communicate ideas more clearly, without having to use words. *Global Perspective* Noah Iliinsky and Rebecca Hope talk about the diversity of professionals, both within and outside of the design disciplines in attendance, and how the sharing of different perspectives added even more to the conference itself; backing up Daniel's perspective of thinking outside the box. (In fact, 21% of the participants were from outside North America.) *Common Craft* One of the many presenters at VizThink were the founders of Common Craft, Sachi LeFever and Lee LeFever. Rebecca points out that the end result is brilliant, but not knowing the work that goes into creating these simple, yet elegant videos, is common amongst clients. *To Write or not to Write, that is not the question* Daniel points out the genius behind Common Craft is the writing or scripting of the videos that make Common Craft remarkable. Writing and illustration go hand in hand. *KISS* Taking the time to reduce the noise will help your users understand the core message - whether it's in design or writing to help guide the vision. *Want to see more of VizThink '08?* There were several photographs taken by professional and amature photographers while at the conference. For most of the photos, check out Flickr and search on the key word "vizthink08". *Examples of Design* The following are images were created by Christopher Fuller; Ken and Rebecca Hope; and Noah Iliinsky. For a full size version of this art work, simply click on the image. *Christopher Fuller* This is a recent live illustration record I did of a dialogue on branding (The original is 12.5' X 6.5') that was given to a European banking client by Scott Bedbury - a former Nike and Starbucks marketing executive. Just a little note of clarification on why I drew Lech Walesa in the bottom left corner. Mr Bedbury told a story about Lech Walesa coming to the United States to give a talk at a conference. One of the employees at the hotel saw Lech's name in the register as a featured speaker and decided to google him. They discovered that his birthday fell on the same night as his speech, and so they arranged for the hotel wait staff to learn how to wish him happy birthday in Polish. According to Scott, it brought Lech to tears. It was a great story and one I knew I had to capture. I do have the ability to do a reasonable caricature of Lech Walesa on the fly being a child of the 80s, history buff, and someone who gobbled up pop culture (um, there's a prominent nose, moustache, etc.). But I don't know how to write "happy birthday" in Polish. So while scribing the conservation I whispered to a colleague to google how to write the phrase and slip it to me on a post-it (I took my cue from Scott Bedbury's story and copied the initiative of the hotel worker). By the time the conversation was over I had written "Wsystkiego najlepszego Lech Walesa" on the graphic. Of course, this went over well (though I think it's not 100% right) since the meeting was in Europe and there were a few Polish participants in the audience. *Ken and Rebecca Hope* This infographic is a classic example of a "before" and "after" and shows why we love what we do! The client, Ifor Ffowcs-Williams, CEO, Cluster Navigators Ltd, is an international cluster development consultant. In his workshops Ifor's verbal communication is eager and interesting. However, his key presentation tool detailing the underlying process just didn't do him justice as a typical Powerpoint slide. Although he is a visual thinker and speaks using lots of imagery and analogies, his presentation slides were all plain written text (even though occasionally highlighted for effect!) and didn't capture the excitement or essence of what the process involved and offered. Also, when used with audiences with limited English, the text-based slides were not always understood. Essentially we brought the Cluster Navigators process to life. We visualised the process as a fun and dynamic journey, using simple imagery for each key stage to help audiences quickly understand the concepts and engage in the process. The impact of the the infographic is probably best described by Ifor himself in this feedback he provided, “Why didn’t you show us this before?' was the question from one of their Scandinavian clients on seeing our new infographic. "We've now used it in workshops and conferences on five continents. It's brought out the smiles, made the learning more interactive and led to repeat business." *Noha Iliinsky* This diagram has been arranged to show not only the hierarchy, but also the intended use pattern of a typical, linear, non-fiction book. * Continuity in the book is indicated by contact of the circles. * The gray line, progressing in small and large clockwise arcs from section to section and chapter to chapter, demonstrates the linear progression of the content. * The dashed black arrows show some possible non-linear paths that may be traveled by the reader to view content that is not part of the main linear flow of the book. The goal of displaying the use of the book, and not merely the hierarchy, has led to an atypical diagram that conveys more knowledge than the typical counterpart. I created this diagram in the fall of 2003. It appears in my thesis, and was selected to be supporting material for the book The Practical Guide to Information Design, by Ronnie Lipton. Transcript of Using Design Visuals To Communicate Ideas A Podcast from Vizthink 2008
[music]
Jeff Parks: This podcast is brought to you by TechSmith. Right now, millions of peoples are snagging. Are you? And by, the IA Summit. This year, your peers and industry experts will speak about how topics such as social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies, and a wide range of IA tools and techniques can help, as users experience information. For other events happening all over the world, be sure to check out evensts.boxesandarrows.com.
In late January, I had the opportunity to attend the VizThink Conference in San Francisco, California. VizThink brought together some of the most creative minds in design from around the world. On the last day of the conference I gathered together Daniel Rose from Bell Canada; Ken and Rebecca Holt from the New Zealand based infographics company, Motivate; interaction designer Noah Alinsky, and illustrator and designer Christopher Fuller from Griot's Eye.
We cover a range of topics, including "How to truly think outside the box, " "The power of illustration and design in communicating ideas, " and personal highlights from the conference. Many thanks to everyone for participating in this discussion, and I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers.
Jeff Parks: I didn't really have a theme for today. I thought maybe we could just talk about lessons learned, why people are here, and what they've learned, what they've enjoyed about the VizThink Conference, in general. Maybe we can go around there and everyone can introduce themselves to start, and maybe, the company you're working for, and what you do. Can we start over here?
Christopher Fuller: I'm Christopher Fuller. I'm from Los Angeles. I work for Griot's Eye. It's a huge vast company of one.
[laughter]
I network with friends a lot of times on bigger projects, but I do graphic facilitation, live illustration. My background is cartooning and caricature, which I usually do in Orlando. And I came into this because of MG Taylor Corporation, which was a boutique consulting firm that put an ad that they needed some artists. And I was like: "Why would consultants need artists?" And that began my journey.
Jeff: Cool, excellent. And you've enjoyed the conference?
Christopher: I did. I loved it. I knew that there was a community out there, but I was in a bathtub, sliding around. [laughter] And I came here and I was like, "Wow, there's an ocean!"
[laughter]
So, it was great.
Jeff: Excellent. Rebecca.
Rebecca Holt: I'm Rebecca Holt, and I'm from Wellington, New Zealand, all the way across the Pacific. And my husband and I work in a company called Motivate Infographics, which has been recently launched. After five years of playing around with infographics and the need for them, and clients that we could help communicate with, or for. And we launched Motivate at the end of last year, and most of the work we do is with the New Zealand government, where they have excessive documents, and reports, and processes which aren't understood in your words. We go in and add the concept to our process and make them visual. People can quickly and clearly grasp the main points of anything.
The conference has been great. Same reason. New Zealand's a very small country, a long way away. But it's nice to be able to come and connect with other people who are also converted over.
Ken Holt: Well, I'm Ken Holt, the other side of Motivate Infographics. I too, by coincidence, come from New Zealand.
[laughter]
Noah Alinsky: I'm Noah Alinsky. I'm between projects right now. I've most recently been working as an interaction designer, which is what I went to graduate school for. But, accidentally, in the course of my studies at graduate school, I wrote a 90 page thesis about, how to draw good diagrams. And the basis of that is... the short version is that intentional choices are more powerful than arbitrary choices. So, the process steps you through the choices that you make when designing a diagram, or a visual representation, and how to make those good choices, based in cognitive psychology, and how people perceive things, like shape, and placement, and color.
So, at the end of the day, what you get is a product that is an information product that's useful to your audience. And mostly, I've done work applying that to qualitative things: to pictures of relationships. But the same concepts are completely valid also for any kind of quantitative, numeric representation. So, I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.
Daniel Rose: My name is Daniel Rose. I'm from Toronto, Canada. And I work for a company called Bell Canada, big phone company. You may have heard of it.
[laughter]
You've heard of it in New Zealand. Alright, that's good. I work with large groups, around specific business objectives, to coalesce the energy and passion, and wisdom of those groups and put it together into something that is useful for organizations. What I would call a 'tangible work product', that is created quickly, in real time, with the knowledge and expertise of everyone in the room.
Jeff: I know the one thing I was talking to you guys earlier... one thing that I really got out of this conference as an information architect, is really wanting to understand, how to better design ideas; better design products and services. Like Rebecca, I work with vast, huge volumes of data, trying to structure and label things so people can easily find them and then move their way through a process, whether it's on a website, or otherwise.
There's a lot of tie‑in: interaction design is very much like that. And I just found it really interesting with the different workshops, the way in which people would do things. I attended Daniel's session this afternoon, and Christopher was trying a lot of things brilliantly, and we got to interact with everything from Play Dough to cut and paste of Styrofoam balls.
You don't really think about these things that, I guess I would have used in grade one and grade two as a way of working with large companies, to try and illustrate ideas. He gave a great presentation today, Daniel, and again, it's just thinking outside the box a little bit more, in terms of presenting ideas.
Daniel: I have some thoughts on that box, too.
[laughter]
Jeff: OK, well let's hear them.
Daniel: Sure, alright, we'll make it quick. So, I would suggest that thinking outside the box is not actually possible. The box is what it is. So, when people are asking that; asking to get that, I'll define the box, first. In my humble opinion, the box is defined by: the boundaries of the box are the collection of our knowledge and our experience. That's the box. So, when you're looking for creative or breakthrough ideas, what tends to happen is that people tend to get with like‑minded people. And, they tend to be with small groups of people, as well. They don't want 50 people looking for breakthrough ideas, because that's unmanageable.
So, they get in a room with five people who are just like them. So, the collective box is the sum total of that knowledge and that experience, which is really, ultimately, quite small, because they're all the same. They're all say, "Telecom people." They all went to the same university, and they've all worked at the same telecom for 20 years. So, the potential for breakthrough ideas is limited.
So what you need to do then is you need to...and I'll draw it out. This probably won't help for you podcast listeners.
Jeff: We'll take a picture of it and put it up on the show notes.
Daniel: All right, perfect.
Jeff: No problem.
Daniel: So if you get a bunch of people together who are all kind of similarly minded, there's your box. If you get a bunch of people together who are all very different ‑ artist, sculptors, musicians, different industries, different places on the earth, different ages ‑ that becomes the size of your box. And the potential for creativity and innovation is when these people start to talk, and they start to share mental models, and they start to rebuild mental models based on the unpacking of their assumptions and rebuilding it. So that's where your potential for innovation and creativity can occur. The thing is it takes time.
Jeff: Right.
Daniel: So if you're talking with a nuclear physicist about what they mean by the word "merger", they're going to be talking about the coming together of electrons and atoms or whatever, and it's going to mean something completely different to a business person. And then you start to unpack, OK, well what does it really mean? What does it really mean? What does it really mean? And then you can start to co‑create together. So then you can have the insight and brilliance of a physicist to help you work through your corporate direction with ideas and perspectives that you never would have come up with on your own.
Ken: Might start a completely different change of direction which the businessman's never even contemplated before.
Daniel: Exactly. But this takes time. The act of these different parties coming together to exchange and unpack their models is a time consuming process. So you have to think about, is that a good investment. Is the challenge that I'm currently dealing with significant enough that I need to invite physicists and sculptors in order to really get into it? If you're just looking to redo your something or other, how do you bring people into the company through a website...maybe you don't need that. You just need to think about what your objectives are.
Rebecca: And out of interest are you seeing more and more companies willing to take that step to want to bring in outsiders and such who might not know anything about the business but then are actually, OK, let's go for it. Let's see what can be possible. Let's see what ideas we could come up with.
Daniel: It's getting there. I think that's almost the most extreme manifestation of that. I've worked with some clients who instead of doing that, instead of inviting the sculptor and the physicist in, they take a whole day to rethink their business processes after reading for a couple hours about complex adaptive systems. So we'll have people reading about how coral reefs manage resources and how rainforests do the same. And that's one way to substitute for actually getting a marine biologist in or something like that.
Ken: It's kind of like what Tom was saying that it's almost a poor substitute because you look up on the Web for this sort of information, and you're still using your assumptions and your box view. Whereas if you're actually sitting in a whole room of people, that's like you said, they could have done this all over the Web. But the scope of what we've done and what we've learned and the enthusiasm could not be captured through a single conduit like that.
Daniel: Yeah, it's a continuum and you just have to figure out where the payoff is.
Ken: Time is the cost of getting these ideas but wow, look at the directions you could go in.
Jeff: Even from a human factors perspective, your brain is made up of two hemispheres and we tend to not really exercise the one half very much, in our professional lives in particular. And I think that's the one thing that focusing on design more for solutions can really help with because the more you engage in creative processes, the stronger your logic becomes as well, in very much layman's terms but that's the general idea. And so if we had companies that were more involved to be, looking at Chris' illustrations for example ‑ we've got to get pictures to put up on the podcast. You're an absolutely brilliant artist. When we were here the first night...
Christopher: Go on.
[laughter]
Christopher: That's good, that's good, yeah, yeah.
Daniel: Yes.
Christopher: Griotseye.com.
[laughter]
Jeff: I resemble that remark. But you are. You're absolutely brilliant. And looking at your illustrations the other night you could just tell. I didn't need to say anything. You could just look at the illustration and you could just envision exactly what you were thinking. The whole conference blew me away in terms of the unbelievable talent that's out there. And we're not alone, right?
Christopher: I think that's the real power of when you add the visual modeling element. When people see ideas that they're saying coming to life in front of them it's just such an amazing experience.
Ken: Empowering.
Christopher: It's empowering, people hear their ideas being captured. And like you said they're empowered, but also other people can see a pattern emerging, and it's pretty amazing.
Noah: And that actually leads into something that I was very impressed by is that we're under this umbrella of visual thinkers, but there's cartoonists, and illustrators and mapmakers here, the mind mapping people who are very much about the contents and the relationships and not so much about the visual presentation. And I'm more at that end of the spectrum. People who can do all of it...
Christopher: Photographers.
Noah: Photographers. These groups working together and learning from each other. The illustrator is learning to structure and the logical people learning how to draw. I can do a stick figure now, right?
[laughter]
Noah: But everybody being excited about expanding our collective box really to creep in those directions that we didn't have and having a community to do that in where we to a degree have this common goal of all of us expanding our capability of representing these ideas. Just like you said, being able to turn what's stuck in our heads into something that we can share in a representative way.
Rebecca: And what's cool about that also is how many university‑type teaching professionals are here too.
Ken: Oh, yeah, academics.
Rebecca: Covering a couple of educational people who are here to try and learn how to do this. It's not just professionals in this field. It's actually companies who want to do better and bring it into the organizations or lecture which I think is brilliant.
Ken: Or people who want to actively pass this on to the younger generation. That's the kind of energy which I think everyone's got to take. This is really just a new way of thinking.
Jeff: Because I'm part of a few mailing lists, the Interaction Design Association, the Information Architecture Institute, Taxonomy Community Practice. One thing I keep reading over and over again, which I think is a colossal waste of time, is trying to define the professions, trying to...you know what I mean?
Noah: It's a thread on the IA list for 10 years.
Jeff:: I'm sick of it. It's so irrelevant because let's face it, if I were to draw a picture of what I wanted you to build, and all of the different professions that are sitting around this table, you'd all be able to build it. You'd have a different way of going about building it, but the product or the service or the site or whatever it was, you could build it. So what I really liked about this conference is, here's an opportunity to learn from people in different areas, like you were all just illustrating, and not focusing on trying to define my own profession. But rather, opening up the doors and learning from others, and then incorporating that into my profession and learning accordingly. And stop trying to get into the semantical details of defining what information architecture is, or what interaction design is. I mean, to me, that just seems like such a waste of, I don't know, brain power. You know?
Ken: Define through the big picture. Don't define through the micro‑vision.
Jeff: Right. And Daniel's big picture as, right? Not the little microcosm of like‑minded people, but all the larger box of professionals.
Ken: The ocean.
Rebecca:[indecipherable 15:27]
[laughter]
Jeff: Yeah, exactly. What were some of people's favorite sessions that they attended? And maybe a short description of what they were?
Ken: One which I was super impressed with, wasn't so much the session itself. Because it was about the growth, mind‑mapping. And, you know, he's just a fundamental, flawless presenter, and he's so onto it. But then, he, in the very last five minutes of his session, was all about the second life interactive reading environment. And so, he uses this basically to display these panoramic, huge pictures that they create, that they [indecipherable 16:12] .
Here's a way of, what we normally do, is we draw a two dimensional information graphic. We boil the information we get down to the core message, and display it in a information graphic, that tries to encompass the whole.
Now that's basically the core message, or the surface structure. Here's a way of bringing this 2D image into a 3D environment, still keeping it 2D. But saying: "Look, here's part of it. I want to know more, let's open it up." And suddenly, you get this 3D shelving effect, where you can actually open up part of the graphic and learn more about it. It links to websites, delve more into the structure of that particular part. And then: "OK, I'm getting a basic understanding of how that works. Let's [indecipherable 17:01] together. Move that down, and open up this other part."
So instead of giving just the overview, they're giving the big picture. They're getting the small picture, and putting it more into their framework that we've developed. And, I see that this could be a way of, basically adding much more detail to our end and to graphics.
And adding a fundamental step which allows people with the time and the energy, and the core need, to find out more about it. To allow some [indecipherable 17:31] to do so.
Rebecca: Other than Daniel's session today, which was just a highlight...
[laughter and applause]
Rebecca: And the simplicity, or the cleverness of what they do, people keep saying, "Oh, well it looks so basic. And it looks... Anyone could do it." And, as they pointed out, it's not the look that's simple. Or, maybe the look's simple, but it's the strategy. It's what actually goes into choosing which simple images to put together. It's what makes their...
Noah: The script?
Rebecca: It's the script, yeah. It's the script that really drives it together. And I think that's what, a lot of what we all do, what people see as the end result. What actually has gone into the decisions that create that end result, often don't really get appreciated. And it's the strategy behind what you're showing. And some of the examples you showed us today, Dan, made it all... It's the decisions. It's not just nice looking at diagrams. It's been, you know, dozens, and dozens, and dozens of people work to create this masterpiece. In our case it's just the two of us, but it's nice even when it's something really simple. Like at the Common Craft one today, they recognized just how much work goes into them. Yeah, just really cool people. So, that was a buzz, as was your session.
Daniel: And I was in that session as well, in Lee and Sachi's session, Commoncraft.com. So, someone asked the question around, "It's so simple that anyone can do it?" And I think the thing that's going to them in business for a long time, is actually not the visuals, but the writing. I think people generally are either A, don't like to write, or B, aren't good at it. Or, C, think they're good at it, but they're not.
Noah: Well, they don't take the time to do it. They just dive into the end product without doing the design phase. Of, what is the content we need to convey?
Ken: I've got a Mac, can't do it. So [indecipherable 19:34]
[laughter]
Noah: Yes.
Daniel: But with respect to the actual, the visual component of it, I think that's actually, it's the writing. It's not the visual that's going to keep them in business, it's the ability to write it.
Rebecca: And I think that... sorry, that reinforced, as several other workshops did, the need to keep things simple. That it doesn't need to be complex. The visuals can be so simple, as long as the message is clear.
Ken: Cool message...
Rebecca: If the script is so clear, then the visuals don't need to be more than colored little stick people.
Noah: And that was a very strong thread through two of the sessions I really enjoyed. I went to see Karl Goode, who is a professional information, informational diagrams, I guess. He worked for a music magazine for many years. And John Grimmway, who also has done a lot of map work. Maps of cities, and museums, and whatever. And both of them really were clearly very skilled at reducing the noise, and really focusing on: "What are the key things you're trying to convey with this graphic?"
So, removing a lot of detail, removing a lot of extraneous color, removing a lot of text. Refining and refining and refining until... The core message remains. And it's very clear and there's not a lot of distractions. And, as the reader or the user, you can very easily access the information that it's designed to convey, rather than having to dig through the text or dig through extra illustrations of things that aren't actually relevant.
And so, this goes back to the writing. Having a really clear idea of, what is the message? What are we trying to achieve here? And using that to really guide the vision, which is unfortunately, infrequent, I think.
Rebecca: And that ties into what you and I have been talking about, Jeff, about the need to fully understand what the message is, and what it isn't. The client's actually trying to get across, or what the ultimate outcome is that they're after. Because, unless you can figure that out front and you shouldn't just start playing and throwing things.
Jeff: Yeah. Everyone's really excited to dive in? Right? They want to get the project done, they want to see the end state. I mean, working with Canadian government clients, and I'm sure this is true in a lot of governments, they want to see the pretty picture. And from a graphical perspective, that's great. But, when you're dealing with vast, unbelievable amounts of data where no one can find anything, which is the whole purpose of the website in the first place. Arguing for three or four hours over what shade of blue the banner should be, right? Is kind of a moot point. Right? So, if we... Which is why wire‑frames are popular and why they're effective, right? Because it focuses on the structure of where things are. And that's a very basic, there's another very basic visual tool kit that I know I use often, to get people to move away from looking at the specific colors of things.
Because that helps to put the final touches on it. But, OK, let's focus on where you want things to go. Because very quickly after doing five or six wire‑frames, for example, they can see, "Oh, we've got about 16 different ways we structure content, and we've only got about five different ways we've drawn out so far, and we don't have time to do 16 different structures of the information. And we don't have time to create 16 different looking versions of each section of the site."
So, very quickly it gets pulled back to the importance of the structure and the content, which in turn can drive the final look and feel. The designer I have back home in Ottawa, Bahn Forester, has been doing 15 years. He tells me all the time, design project that are maybe $500 quick projects, quickly turn in to $5000 projects for him. Not because he's, you know... He tells the client up front, if you have the vision in place we can do this quickly, it can be done once.
But if you don't have any of the content written and you have no vision for it, he just has to keep re‑changing everything. All the pixels have to change, the colors have to change. Again, he's happy to take their money, as we all are, but if we focused more on that at the beginning then it wouldn't be such a big issue, right?
Ken: To create a vision, you've to to have an end vision created.
Jeff: Right.
Ken: It's not something that you work through.
Rebecca: It might evolve, but it's a starting point.
Ken: It might evolve, but...
Christopher: Guys, my alarm went off, I've got to go catch my flight.
[crosstalk]
Christopher: I want to just leave quickly by saying I wasn't actually in Scott McCloud's session, but I was in the general session that he did at the end. That was very illuminating for me. It was brilliant, because, he outlined the dilemma that I find myself in sometimes as someone who's come to graphic facilitation but from an illustration background. I've been blessed and cursed with the ability to draw very quickly, and kind of realistically sometimes. But, you know what? I've run into problems trying to find where I am inside his triangle of the real side, the iconic abstract side, and then the abstract beauty.
I remember working with a client and the line illustration went great. We were working towards a poster and I was doing cartoon people but they were kind of representative. Then the emails, edits starting going back and it was like, "You need to, the percentage of women needs. If you're going to go that, we need some blacks." Which is embarrassing because I'm African‑American. It got.
[crosstalk]
Christopher: Like star people, blue star people, would have worried so much.
[laughter]
[cross talk, several people say goodbye]
Christopher: ... nice meeting you.
Jeff: Do people have other things they want to share, or chat about?
Daniel: I felt that the conference was more than just listening, like most conference are. I felt there was a spirit of co‑creation, that people wanted to create something new that hasn't been done before. So, in the very literal sense, I think people really go into the exercise this morning in the general session around creating a plan for a not‑for‑profit organization called Art Train. Going back to my session content, that is a tangible work product. There were 350 people in the room who, in the course of 90 minutes, created work. Things were done.
Rebecca: The feeling that it will actually go on a mean something.
Daniel: Yeah.
Rebecca: The organization will absolutely use those ideas, or a lot of them.
Daniel: I felt that kind of, over the course of the couple days, let's do something here.
Jeff: For those that weren't here, the night before the conference started, what I really thought was interesting, they had massive large white boards they wheeled into the middle of the room, throughout the room. They left markers on them, so people could sketch and draw anything they wanted. And had different signs up about employers who are looking for people and people who are looking for work and they could put their names down. The organizer, Tom?
Daniel: Tom Crawford.
Jeff: Tom Crawford, the organizer of VizThink for this particular event, announced tonight that one person actually found a job. They were looking for someone and they hooked up. They had the interview and they landed the job, which I thought was pretty...
Daniel: That speaks your idea of something unique. You don't hear about these things at every single conference, in terms of it being a priority, in terms of looking for those kinds of things.
Ken: In fact, I'd go so far to say, if you put white boards and markers up at most other conference, they would either be left untouched or what went on them would be just... complete vandalism, basically. You'd get the smart asses who'd do the "Kilroy was here" type stuff without really engaging that side of their brain. They would do a dump, rather an organized dump.
Noah: It was interesting for me the diversity of experience levels and skill sets here. A number of other conference I've been to, like the Information Architecture Summit, for example. Was more or less professions who were more or less doing the same thing. Some academics. This was very diverse here. There was educational administrators, there was graphic designers, and there was sort of information theorists, and illustrators, and cartoonists. In some ways I think it was a little bit challenging, because I think targeting the sessions and who they were for. I went to at least one session where I knew most of what went on, because I had much more experience with interaction design. It was a little bit lower level of that.
But, then, in the collaborative sessions where you had these different people working on a project, and people from all these different backgrounds and different parts of the country. Again, a nice big box. It was kind of interesting having all those different skill sets that, at least for me, mostly I don't get that level of diversity of exposure in my workplace to these different skill sets.
They'll be the customers I'm working with, and I'll get some ideas from them, or some analysts or something, but that's very different from having the diversity of people who were here.
Rebecca: A lot of that probably points to note for the people that weren't here that they might find interesting is that 20% of the 380 people who were here, I think 380?
Ken: About that...
Rebecca: 20% were international and come from more than 3000 miles away. There were people from the UK, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand...
Jeff: South Africa.
Rebecca: South Africa. So there's a pretty diverse bunch that all came together. And also that every meeting table, workshop table, and also the main session tables were covered in paper.
Noah: Yeah.
Rebecca: With a bowl full of crayons and pencils and stickers and sticky labels. I've never been to a conference like that in my life where you're invited to doodle and draw.
Noah: Draw like a five year old, but here you're encouraged to draw on the tables. And on the walls and the white boards. It's almost like, complete reversal of what is expected of a professional, stiff‑backed person to come and doodle on a piece of paper or [indecipherable 29:20] . Just encouraged to lead the test. I feel like I've been at a fun‑park for an entire weekend. It's just been like wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.
Rebecca: I think that the Vizthink website's going to put a lot of the images from the conference up on their website. I'm sure people who are listening can go to that and see some of the cool photos that captured the essence of what it was all about.
Jeff: Guys, thanks very much. I know it's been a great couple of days, but I'm sure everybody's got plans for dinner, drinks, and maybe even heading home as Chris had to fly out. So, thanks very much for joining me on the the Boxes and Arrows podcast. Best of luck and I hope to see you at future conferences all over the world.
[crosstalk of everyone saying thanks]

IA Summit 2008, Day 3

Chris Baum, Jeff Parks — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:06:25 GMT

The IA Summit was held in Miami, FL from April 10-14. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2008/sessioncal.html) starting on April 12. "Day 1, April 12":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-1 | "Day 2, April 13":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-2 | Day 3, April 14 Podcasts will appear on this page as we produce them from the audio files so please check back regularly or subscribe to the iTunes feed below. iTunes Del.icio.us IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™
Audiences & artifacts - Nathan Curtis Nathan Curtis explores both the articles we produce and the audience we produce them for, revealing what works and what doesn't. (published 04/25/08)

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Data driven design research personas - Todd Zaki Warfel Todd Zaki Warfel engages his audience sharing new visualization techniques he has been using that have personas even more effective and valuable to the design process. (published 04/25/08)

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Re-experiencing information: dealing with user-submitted data - Lucas Pettinati In this session, Lucas Pettinati, senior interaction designer at Yahoo! draws from his personal experiences in redesigning the Yahoo! registration and account recovery systems. (published 04/27/08)

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Information Horizons: Proposing an alternate approach to assessing website architecture - Anindita Paul, Sanda Erdelez (Kyungsun Park unable to attend) Anindita and Sanda report the use of Sonnenwald's Information Horizon's (IH) framework for assessing a website architecture based on Morville and Rosenfeld's components of website architecture - organization, labeling, navigation and searching information (published 04/30/08)

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Good News on your Cell Phone: Optimizing the UX - Jorgen Dalen and Tone Terum Jorgen Dalen and Tone Terum talk about the challenges involved when transferring content from one media to another; how to create good user experinces in different media within mobile UI; and the diverse user behavior of cellular phones in Europe, the US, and Asia.(published 04/30/08)

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IA for Tiny Stuff: Exploring Widgets and Gadgets - Martin Belam Martin Belam examines what makes a successful widget from an information delivery point of view. As well Martin looks at how informations professionals can help develop more playful ways of representing and structuring the information presented. (published 05/07/08)

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Designing with Patterns in the Real World - Christian Crumlish and Austin Govella Yahoo!s' Christian Crumlish and Comcasts' Austin Govella share case studies that illustrate ways pattern libraries can both aid and stifle innovation, how they help solve real-world web design problems, and how they support rapid production of common IA Deliverables. (published 04/80/08)

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Checking the feel of your UI with an interaction audit - Peter Stahl and Josh Damon Williams Peter Stahl and Josh Damon Williams show how to evaluate consistency of your site's "feel". Using a recent audit of the interaction design of a major web site as an example they discuss how to collect and catalog the variety of interactions users encounter.(published 06/07/08)

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Embodying IA: Incorporating library 2.0 and experience integration concepts in a small public library renovation - Michael Magoolaghan Michael Magoolaghan describes one IA's volunteer efforts to revitalize a small public library's website and bring a user-centered focus to its building renovation efforts through working with blueprints, photos and architectural renderings and others within and outside of the library. (published 06/07/08)

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Thanks to Jeff Parks, Jackie Wu, and Kit Seeborg of the B&A/V Podcast team for working their hearts out, as well as ASIS&T and the IA Summit organizers for their support.

IA Summit 2008, Day 2

Chris Baum, Jeff Parks — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:06:29 GMT

The IA Summit was held in Miami, FL from April 10-14. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2008/sessioncal.html) starting on April 12. "Day 1, April 12":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-1 | Day 2, April 13 | "Day 3, April 14":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-3
Podcasts will appear on this page as we produce them from the audio files so please check back regularly or subscribe to the iTunes feed below. iTunes     Del.icio.us     IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™
Search patterns - Peter Morville Peter describes a pattern language for search that explains user psychology and information seeking behavior, highlights emerging technologies and interaction models, illustrates repeatable solutions to common problems, and positions us all to design better search interfaces and applications. (published 04/25/08)

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The information Architect and the Fighter Pilot - Matthew Milan Matthew argues that fighter pilot and military strategist John Boyd can teach us a great deal about how to understand, interpret and design for human decision making. (published 04/25/08)

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E-service: What we can learn from the customer-service gurus - Eric Reiss In this passionate and entertaining presentation, Eric Reiss talks about the design and execution of a system of activities - people, processes, and technology - that ultimately build brand, revenues, and customer satisfaction. (published 04/25/08)

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Practical Prototyping - Todd Zaki Warfel, Chris Conley, Anders Ramsay, and Jed Wood The panel discuss various methods for prototyping with a focus on why we don't prototype in software as much as we should and why we should be doing it more. (published 04/25/08)

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The Impact of Social Ethics on IA and Interactive Design - Karl Johan Saeth and Ingrid Tofte Karl Johan Saeth, and Ingrid Tofte illustrate four cases showing that interactive design in one way or another is always based on interpretation of ethical rules, expressed or latent. IA and design are bound by cultural imperatives and this, Karl and Ingrid argue, is a fact we cannot ignore. (published 04/28/08)

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What do Innovative Intranets Look Like? - James Robertson James' presentation provides highlights into the winning entries from the 2007 Intranet Innovation Awards and provides "lessons learnt" for organizations looking to drive innovation via their intranet. (published 04/28/08)

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Panel: Presence, identity, and attention in social web architecutre - Christian Crumlish, Christina Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Gene Smith In this discussion about presence, identity, and attention in social web architecture the panel talks about core IA related issues including: Structure of social sites, tagging and folksonomies, data models for people and their relationships, and navigating in a community site(published 04/28/08)

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UX in the Wind: Finding Experience on a Motorcycle - Joe Sokohl Keane's director of user experience, Joe Sokohl, brings together his passions for motorcycling and user experience design in this talk about the intersection of industrial and interaction design in motorcycling.(published 04/29/08)

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Placemaking and Information Architecture - Dennis Schleicher Dennis Schieicher explores how we as IAs can learn from placemaking in the physical world and investigates markets and public places around the use of mobile technologies and how they add another layer of communication and sense-making on top of physical public places.(published 05/08/08)

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Code blue: How service design can revolutionize patient care in hospitals - Aaron Martlage In this presentation, Aaron Martlage explores techniques for leveraging the varied skill sets of those in the UX design field to provide service design in a complex environment. Aaron argues that experts must balance the social dynamics between different personas; capture and sift vast amounts of data in an attempt to distill pertinent information; and visualize their findings with precision to ensure that the experience is improved.(published 06/07/08)

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Taxonomy is User Experience - Dave Cooksey It appears that taxonomies are becoming more important to the work we do as metadata and ontologies extend their reach further into user experience. Dave Cooksey demonstrates the virtues of thinking of taxonomy in terms of the user experience, ways of talking about taxonomies that communicate it's value, and how to craft a user-centric taxonomy by examining several e-commerce redesign case studies.(published 06/07/08)

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Hotel Yeoville - Jason Hobbs In this presentation entitled, "Hotel Yeoville" South Africa's Jason Hobbs talks about how ethnographic research methods and an empathetic approach to users can form the basis for information architecture solutions that attempt to directly address and improve the lives of people in developing countries.(published 06/07/08)

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Extending the gaming experience to conventional UI’s - John Ferrara The video game industry produces an enormous volume of highly innovative user interface experiences, but this rich source of creative thinking is largely unseen by communities dedicated to conventional software or Web design. Vanguards' John Ferrara argues that as gaming becomes a ubiquitous activity among a vast worldwide customer base, its direction and conventions will become not merely relevant to HCI design, but indeed impossible to ignore.(published 06/08/08)

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Thanks to Jeff Parks, Jackie Wu, and Kit Seeborg of the B&A/V Podcast team for working their hearts out, as well as ASIS&T and the IA Summit organizers for their support.

IA Summit 2008, Day 1

Chris Baum, Jeff Parks — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 04:06:32 GMT

The IA Summit was held in Miami, FL from April 10-14. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2008/sessioncal.html) starting on April 12. Day 1, April 12 | "Day 2, April 13":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-2 | "Day 3, April 14":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-2008-day-3 Podcasts will appear on this page as we produce them from the audio files so please check back regularly or subscribe to the iTunes feed below. iTunes     Del.icio.us     IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™

Journey to the Center of Design - Jared Spool There’s a growing sentiment that spending limited resources on user research takes away from essential design activities. Is it time for user- centered design to evolve into something else? Or is there something else happening in our world of experience design that makes UCD obsolete? Jared Spool gives and entertaining and enlightening key note address at the 2008 IA Summit.(published 05/01/08)(published 04/25/08)

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Tagging: Five Emerging Trends - Gene Smith Tagging has been the subject of much discussion over the last several years. But recent trends show that tagging is evolving quickly, and that today’s conventional wisdom might not be accurate for long. nForms’ Gene Smith explores five counterintuitive tagging trends that provide a glimpse into the next generation of user-generated classification.(published 05/01/08)

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The Business of Experience: The Experience Impact Framework - Jess McMullin nForm's Jess McMullin outlines three dimensions of The Experience Impact Framework including: the elements of business, the fundamentals of user experience practice and the kinds of impact we can have.(published 05/02/08)

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The Long Wow - Brandon Schauer Brandon Schauer lays out an experience centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again.(published 05/05/08)

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Content Page Design Best Practices - Luke Wroblewski Luke Wroblewski discusses a set of best practices for Web content page design that focuses on appropriate presentation of content, context, and calls to action. (published 05/05/08)

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Blind Ambition: How the Accessibility Movement Overlooks Sensory Experiences - Claude Steinberg In this presentation Claude Steinberg argues that you'll have a better grasp of user experience when you can translate it into something even a blind person would recognize. (published 05/05/08)

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Inspiration from the Edge: New Patterns for Interaction Design - Stephen Anderson To increase our own field of vision, Stephen Anderson takes a macro view of interface design, focusing on alternative UIs - and emphasizing patterns that can be leveraged in a business context.(published 05/05/08)

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How to be a User Experience Team of One - Leah Buley Leah teaches techniques that any individual can use to generate and refine ideas, outlining flexible, simple activities that can be used quickly, wherever they're needed.(published 05/06/08)

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A management fable: The little UX that went a long way - Dan Willis UX Management often feels like a mystic art. It can entail moving people and processes within an organization without the enchantment of an official mandate. This presentation by Dan Willis deconstructs an illustrated fable about an intrepid creature who introduces user goals to a development process that would have otherwise been dominated by royal business owners and technological black magic. (published 06/07/08)

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Thanks to Jeff Parks, Jackie Wu, and Kit Seeborg of the B&A/V Podcast team for working their hearts out, as well as ASIS&T and the IA Summit organizers for their support.

Leading Designers to New Frontiers

Jeff Parks — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:03:57 GMT

Adaptive Path's "MX San Francisco":http://www.adaptivepath.com/events/2008/apr/: Managing Experience through Creative Leadership took place in San Francisco between April 20-22. The conference focused on helping managers and designers deal with the complexity, challenges, and opportunities that make every day so entertaining. Jeff Parks and Chris Baum sat down with several of the conference speakers and organizers to further examine the issues that the sessions revealed. You can also follow the Boxes and Arrows podcasts on: iTunes     Del.icio.us     B&A MX podcast theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™
Creating the Next iPod - Cordell Ratzlaff I had the pleasure of speaking with Cordell Ratzlaff about his presentation "Creating the next iPod". Cordell is leading product design for Cisco's voice, video, and web collaboration products. We discuss the necessity of creating a great corporate culture in order to create great products.

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Interactions and Relationships - Richard Anderson Chris Baum, editor-in-chief for Boxes and Arrows sits down with editor-in-chief for Interactions Magazine, Richard Anderson at MX San Francisco to discuss the different techniques, and skill sets it takes to develop and publish to the IA and UX communities.

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New Interactions: Enlightened Trial and Error - Björn Hartmann Björn Hartmann and I discuss his presentation entitled New Interactions: Enlightened Trial And Error. and how he is leading work in design tools for pervasive computing, sensor based interactions, and design by modifications. Björn is a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction at Stanford University and Editor-in-Chief of Ambidextrous magazine, Stanford's Journal of Design.

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Chocolate and User Experience - Michael Recchiuti Michael Recchiuti talks about the experience of making chocolate and how different flavors inspire new creations for the business and his customers. Looking at different professions outside of the web world in which most UX practitioners work can inspire innovation and creativity.

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Round Table Discussion with Adaptive Path and Boxes and Arrows - Chris Baum, Brandon Schauer, Sarah Nelson, Henning Fischer, and Ryan Freitas We start with a mash-up of these brief interviews followed by a round table discussion with editor-in-cheif at Boxes and Arrows Chris Baum, and four members of the Adaptive Path team including Brandon Schauer, Henning Fischer, Sarah Nelson, and Ryan Freitas about these comments and their own impressions of MX.

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Thanks to "Adaptive Path":http://www.adaptivepath.com/ for sponsoring these podcasts.

User Experience Week

Jeff Parks — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:37:14 GMT

User Experience (UX) Week was held in San Francisco, CA from August 12 - 15. Boxes and Arrows, in co-operation with Adaptive Path, interviewed speakers in UX, IA, IxD, and Human Factors. Many thanks to the entire team at Adaptive Path for the opportunity to share these conversations with the communities of practice. Sketches from UX Week T. Scott Stromberg from 404 User Experience Design and Ty Hatch of Ty Hatch Design captured the UX Week presentations with some quick and brilliant sketches. They were kind enough to share their observations with Boxes and Arrows. T. Scott Stromberg Sketch Notes Ty Hatch Sketch Notes Session Slides from UX Week Adaptive Path is adding session slides gradually to their website from presenters and workshop leaders. If available, Boxes and Arrows has linked directly to these presentations below. On with the Show! Subscribe to the Boxes and Arrows Podcast in iTunes or add this page to your Del.icio.us account: iTunes     Del.icio.us     UX Week theme music generously provided by Sonic Blue

UX Week Keynote Discussion - Peter Merholz and Don Norman UX Week 2008 kicked off with an on-stage conversation between the President and founder of Adaptive Path, Peter Merholz, and industry legend Don Norman. Don wrote the founding text on user-centered design, entitied, "The Design of Everyday Things", and also coined the term "user-experience" while at Apple in the early 1990s. They talk about the importance of the semantic differences around common issues in business like ROI from a design perspective, the necessity to look beyond the "all mighty dollar," the importance of being passionate about your ideas, and knowing ultimately all team members want to create great products and services for other people. Don shares his insights about the UX Week presentation given by Microsoft's Jensen Harris around the usability of the Ribbon in the latest version of MS Office as well as the exciting future that lies ahead for all in the UX field.

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Being a UX Team of One - Leah Buley In this conversation, Experience Designer Leah Buley from Adaptive Path shares some of the lightweight techniques that she and her team use to explore a variety of solutions quickly and how to enlist the support of non-team members in the UX process. We talk about the video biographies of other team members at Adaptive Path and how all started out from humble beginnings - some in fields that had little to do with what we think about today as traditional UX projects - and how those experiences have helped in building great products and services. Leah outlines the advice she gives in her conference talk Being a UX Team of One. Videos from On-Stage Presentation Leah was kind enough to share the videos she used in her presentation. Thanks again, Leah!
Watch members of Adaptive Path describe their first job in User Experience

Watch as Pam Daughlin answers the question When did you first discover UX?

Watch various members at Adaptive Path share their thoughts on what's hot in User Experience at the moment.

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Story Telling for User Experience Design - Kevin Brooks and Kim Lenox Senior Interaction Deisgner at Adaptive Path, Kim Lenox chats with Kevin Brooks, the Principle Staff Researcher for Motorola Labs about his workshop entitled "Storytelling for User Experience Design". They discuss various aspects of Kevin's presentation including the importance of structure and patterns to guide creative endeavors. One critical aspect is listening when striving to be a remarkable storyteller within your own organization. Kim shares her art school experience where the criticism of her art helped her gain the confidence necessary to be a successful Interaction Designer. Kevin also discusses his upcoming publication about storytelling with Whitney Quesenberry. Learn more about his book at Rosenfeld Media. Download Kevin's presentation from UX Week.

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Unpacking Stories to Serve People Better - Indi Young Indi Young talks about the importance of continuing to ask "why" enough times to get to the core reasons for any individuals' behavior or actions and how to convert stories into mental models. Her workshop "Unpacking Stories to Server People Better" includes these themes and more. We discuss the elegant way in which mental models can provide a visual representation of these behaviors and support elements that foster the likely repetition of any action. Indi also talks briefly about how her book from Rosenfeld media, "Mental Models - Aligning Design Strategy with Human Behavior," can help others create these visual tools.

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We'll Always Have Paris: What Makes a Memorable Service Experience? - Jennifer Bove and Ben Fullerton Jennifer Bove from Huge and Ben Fullerton from IDEO sat down with me shortly after their presentation to discuss ideas from "We'll Always Have Paris - What Makes a Memorable Service Experience." We explore the six key elements about what it takes to design services that keep people coming back for more. We probe into the dynamics of service design from real-world examples of business that provide unique experiences. One shoe company will actually order a pizza for their clients as well as order products from competitor sites to keep their customers satisfied. Jennifer and Ben outline why people get excited about intangible services in the same way they lust after the latest shiny toy that just came out on the market.

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ben: A Prototype for Democracy in the 21st Century - Dave Wolf Dave Wolf, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Cynergy Systems was kind enough to join me for this conversation about his presentation "ben: A Prototype for Democracy in the 21st Century." We talk about Cynergy's awarding winning application "ben" at the PhizzPop competition - a National Design and Development Challenge sponsored by Microsoft. "ben" is a series of interconnected, cross-platform applications that leverage the power of Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, Live Services, Twitter, VoIP technologies.

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TV With an API! - Current at the Collision of TV and the Internet - Rod Naber and Dan Levine TVs in trouble! It might be terminal, but Rod Naber and Dan Levine from Current TV urge everyone not lose hope just yet. Discussing their presentation "TV with an API! Current at the Collusion of TV and the Internet" Rod and Dan describe how using their cable and satellite TV network along with their social news website, Current is experimenting across both media, looking for a cure. In this conversation we talk about how Current got started, the power of the community in generating content for Current News, and how the Internet is allowing users to create ads for companies. All this could change the way marketing approaches innovative solutions for their customers.

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A User's Guide to Managing Experience Teams - Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin Google's Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin discuss their experience and ideas from their UX Week workshop about managing UX teams. Topics covered in this conversation include:
Prioritization and project tracking

How to gain insight into career development paths within a user experience team

Finding out about performance management

Discovering how to tailor your own management style
Margaret and Graham also tackled other tough issues during their session, such as:
Building a culture of constructive feedback

Developing leadership within a team

Effectively managing team dynamics

Evangelizing user experience practices

Managing stakeholders
Margaret and Graham also had participants of their workshop develop haiku's about the importance of working with and managing UX Teams. They were kind enough to compile this collection of Haiku's from the workshop for you. They also provided an example of the leadership cards. These cards can be printed off and shared with members of your team about which characteristics of a leader they deem to be most essential. Not every leader will be strong in all categories, however. Such information can help leaders understand the expectations of those they are working with on a daily basis.

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New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space - Jake Barton Jake Barton gave an emotionally powerful presentation at UX Week entitled "New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space". As the interaction designers for NPR's StoryCorps and the co-leaad designer for the National September 11th Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center, Local Projects is creating new paradigms for interaction by tackling physical space. Jake talks with me about how the interaction design process bends, accelerates and sometimes completely falls apart, when applied to the global community. You can download Jake's Presentation from UX Week.

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Conversation with Adaptive Path's New CEO - Michael W. Meyer On the last day of UX Week I had the pleasure of chatting with Adaptive Path's new CEO Michael Meyer about his impressions of UX Week and the opportunities that come with this new position. We discuss his past experiences as a nuclear engineer, time spent in the US Navy, as well as working at some of the leading design firms in the world such as frog and IDEO before arriving at Adaptive Path. My heart-felt thanks to Michael and the entire team at Adaptive Path for allowing Boxes and Arrows to share these conversations with the community.

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getting-a-forms138

Jeff Parks — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The Podcast has moved to a "new page":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/getting-a-forms146!

"Getting a Form's Structure Right":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/getting-a-forms146
Designing Usable Online Email Applications

-B&A

IDEA 2008

Jeff Parks — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 05:10:49 GMT

The "IDEA Conference":http://ideaconference.org/index.html took place in Chicago on October 7-9 at the Harold Washington Library Center. The speakers pushed the boundaries of what it means to design complex information spaces of all kinds. We can all expand our practice by absorbing their experiences and ideas. In cooperation with the "IA Institute":http://www.iainstitute.org/, we're happy to bring you recordings of most conference talks. We hope you enjoy listening to nearly the entire conference via these recordings.
This conference addressed issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where "cyberspace" is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes. -- from the "IDEA Vision Statement":http://ideaconference.org/index.html
Subscribe to the Boxes and Arrows Podcast in iTunes or add this page to your Del.icio.us account: iTunes     Del.icio.us     IDEA Conference theme music generously provided by Sonic Blue

Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World - David Armano We live in a world where the little things really do matter. Each encounter no matter how brief is a micro-interaction that makes a deposit or withdrawal from our rational and emotional subconscious. The sum of these interactions and encounters adds up to how we feel about a particular product, brand, or service. Little things. Feelings. They influence our everyday behaviors more than we realize. Vice-President of Interaction Design at Critical Mass, David Armano shares what organizations are doing this and how we'll all need to re-think how brands are built and sustained in an ever-changing 2.0 world.

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Micro-Interactions in a 2.0 World (v2)
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web 2.0)

CmapTools: From Meaningful Learning to a Network of Knowledge Builders - Alberto Cañas Based on theories of meaningful learning and education, Co-Founder and Associate Director at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Alberto Canas presents a software tool that allows users to collaborate in the construction of shared knowledge models based on concept maps, which are used worldwide by users of all disciplines and ages, from elementary school students to NASA scientists.

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Linguistic User Interfaces - Chris Crawford Wouldn't it be nice if, instead of digging through nested menus buried inside subpanes of dialogs, we could just talk to our computers in plain language? Sure it would, but computer scientists have long since proven that such "natural language processing" can't be done. Storyton Author and Inventor Chris Crawford describes a Linguistic User Interface, outlining how it's impossible to create a LUI seperately from the digtial reality it reflects: the language and reality must be built up in a parallel process. Chris illustrates this with Deikto, the LUI system he created for his interactive storytelling technology.

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The Language of Interaction - Bill DeRouchey We are interacting with technology in an exploding number of forms. "Traditional" computers, cell phones, pocket PDAs, game systems, gesture-based input, store kiosks and checkouts, and much more. How do people learn new technology? By subconsciously learning the language of interaction and applying that language when learning something new. Bill DeRouchey, Sr. Interaction Designer at Ziba Design surveys everyday objects out there now to spot patterns and trends in what people are learning from devices and products.

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The Language of Interaction
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: ixd ixda)

Getting Real - Jason Fried Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals' products include Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. 37signals also developed and open-sourced the Ruby on Rails programming framework. 37signals' products do less than the competition -- intentionally. Jason believes there's real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people's desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products.

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Aurora: Envisioning the Future of the Web - Jesse James Garrett Co-founder and President of Adaptive Path Jesse James Garrett provides an inside look at the process of creating Aurora, a concept video depicting one possible future user experience for the Web. Jesse talks about the technology trends that will shape the future Web, outlines the challenges of designing a future product, and takes the audience for a behind the scenes look at the creation of the Aurora concept video.

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Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo
Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Aurora (Part 3) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Aurora (Part 4) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Emerging trends | Design thinking | Service innovation - Aradhana Goel When we look through the lenses of society (how we connect), mobility (how to move) and sustainability (how we consume), we realize that the world has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. Aradhana Goel, the Service Design Strategist at IDEO, discusses connections between these emerging trends, design thinking, and service innovation. Download Aradhana's presentation

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Books and Browsers - Dave Gray The book as a form factor has been around for about 2,000 years, since Julius Caesar first decided to fold up a scroll, accordion-style, and mark the pages for later reference. In 1455, Aldus Manutius was the first to publish the portable paperback, and it has remained relatively unchanged since. In an interactive format, XPLANE Founder and Chairman Dave Gray explores several questions about the future of the book and the web browser.

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You are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space and the Context Problem - Andrew Hinton Context. It's everywhere. No, really, you can't move without bumping into the stuff. But it used to be that we at least had a grasp of what context we were in at any given time. We were either here, or there. But technology has radically changed what it means to be "here" or "there," and has brought some challenging design problems along with it. Andrew Hinton, Lead Information Architect at Vanguard, discusses What does architecture even mean, when the walls are made of vapor? How do we map places that don't behave like places anymore? And if you don't know whether you're here or there, then how do you know which version of yourself to be? Download Andrew's presentation

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Digital Context Clues - Jason Kunesh Experience design is evolving in both discipline and practice as more people communicate and engage with media. In this presentation Independent Design Professional Jason Kunesh examines working with patterns, diagramming and prototyping tools, code frameworks like Rails and Drupal and usability testing 8 year olds. Jason also looks at the lessons learned and where he draws the boundaries between a firm's design principles and the tenets of a particular.

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Jdkunesh Idea2008
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: idea2008 ia)

Information in Space - Elliott Malkin Artists and Information Architect Elliott Malkin discusses his new media projects installed in public space. He covers several projects in this presentation including Eruv, a symbolic boundary erected around Jewish neighborhoods as part of the observation of the Sabbath completed in Lower Manhattan and New York city. Elliott also talks about the research into the life of his great-grandfather, which led to his concept for Cemetery 2.0, an electronic device that connects gravestones to online genealogical databases. Elliot also shares his most recent work, Graffiti for Butterflies, a technique for using ultraviolet light and street art to direct Monarch butterflies to food sources in urban areas. Many thanks to Elliott for adding the audio from his presentation to the videos below. You can find the original source of these videos along with greater detail about each of these projects, on his web site.

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The Eruv Projects, IDEA Talk, Part I from Elliott on Vimeo.
Cemetery 2.0, IDEA Talk, Part II from Elliott on Vimeo.
Graffiti for Butterflies, IDEA Talk, Part III from Elliott on Vimeo.

Mixing Messages - Edwina von Gal The design of a park around a museum of biodiversity in Panama (designed by Frank Gehry) has inspired a number of collaborations and connections throughout Panama and, now the United States. The Park will be a living extension of the museum's exhibits and the first step in an educational trail that will encourage visitors to explore Panama's rich natural resources. In this presentation, author and landscape designer, Edwina von Gal, discusses how this project has inspired her to become involved in other educational and applied projects in Panama, working with scientists, students, and local populations to explore sustainable alternatives in agriculture, architecture, and tourism.

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Getting a Form's Structure Right

Jeff Parks — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:59:49 GMT

iTunes     Download    Del.icio.us     Pod-safe music generously provided by Sonic Blue I had the opportunity to speak with Afshan Kirmani on her article, Getting a Form's Structure Right: Designing Usable Online Email Applications Part 1. We talk about the design of an online web based application. Part 1 of the series focuses on the web based form where the user experience is critical before the user enters the application. The various aspects include a good entry point into a form which determines if users stay or leave. The beginning of every form is most important as details like usability set your apart from your competitors. We further talk about… Affordance Good entry points into a web based form include a clear path for users to move ahead from the path of contact to the actual entry into the form. Afshan goes on to also elaborate on products and services that are compared to create a good lure into the form. Orientation Afshan talks about the various aspects of orientation where an interface should determine where you at a particular point in time. Afshan elaborates on the importance of a progress indicator with respect to its placement and usage. Chunking Talking about cognitive terminologies like Chunking, Afshan goes on to apply her background to the field of interface design. She emphasizes on the need to group information in a context that is perceivable by end users. Trust and Online Safety Trust is a major factor that allows prospects to move ahead and become loyal customers. Talking about elements of trust on a website, Afshan probes into various aspects like security, taking a tour, an overview of what’s to come and language aid. Wayfinding With data being bombarded into our lives, the topic of wayfinding seems to become an important discussion for all. Afshan talks about it by providing examples from her everyday life. User Experience Model (Summary Diagram) Afshan describes a model that involves the working of a user’s mental model, experience and expectations. When mixed well together, this model leads to a positive user experience of a web based form. Part 2 of the Article As mentioned in Part 1, the next part of this article will focus on the designer’s role in the process of creating the form’s structure, layout, segmentation, widgets, color schemes, formatting, alignment, and consistency.

IA Summit 09 - Plenary

Jeff Parks — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:07:39 GMT

Download   Watch the video iTunes     Del.icio.us     IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts
The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2009/program/schedule/).
| "Preview":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/when-life-intervenes | "Keynote":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-keynote | "Day 1":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-1 | "Day 2":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-2 | "Day 3":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-3 | Closing Plenary |

The IA Summit Closing Plenary
Jesse James Garrett is a noted figure in the IA community, not only for his ground breaking book Elements of User Experience, but for the essay that galvanized the community in 2002, "IA Recon":http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/ . In this IA Summit Closing Plenary, given without slides while wandering amidst the audience, Jesse examines what he has learned at the conference, he thoughts on the nature of the discipline and the practitioner, and gives bold, perhaps even shocking advice for the future direction of information architecture. The following is an outline of some of his key points; please download the audio or watch the video for the complete experience.

Looking Back
Jesse revisits the turbulence of the first IA Summit in Boston, lamenting that he does not see this same turbulence in the IA community right now. Warning that "the opposite of turbulence is stagnation," he looks back at the Great Depression and compares our grandparent's feelings of scarcity to the community's continued reliance on categorization in its various guises (e.g. taxonomy, thesauri, etc.) for its identity.

Moving On
Thanking IA leaders and the organizations that have nurtured Information Architecture, he declares that it is time to move on from the past. Leaders in IA, including himself, are notable based upon what they say about their work, not by their actual work and asks, "Do you know good IA when you see it?" He is surprised that we don't have schools of thought around IA. We have many ways to talk about our processes, but not about the "product of our work, a language of critique." Until we can talk about the qualities of IA, we cannot judge the quality of the work.

No Information Architects
One of the desires of the IA community is to command respect. However, the overall value will take time to manifest itself, only reaching critical mass when "someone from this room" ascends to be CEO of an organization and creates a culture that respects the user to decimate the competition. Jesse then puts forth his declaration that Information Architects and Interaction Designers do not exist. "There are, and only ever have been, User Experience Designers." He continues by breaking down UxD, examining how each element implied in the title illuminate his hypothesis - that the ephemeral and insubstantial CAN be designed independent of medium and across media. The web is just clay, he implores, and we can use many materials to create experiences.

Synthesis & Cohesion
Engagement is paramount, within any medium and across mediums. "Designing with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as a specific goal is unique in human history." The varieties of engagement (e.g. the senses, mind, heart, and body) and other elements that influence the experience (e.g. capabilities, context, constraints) create the environment in which we work. UxD produces experiences that cross all of these elements, and mapping these experiences is incredibly challenging. The main goal is to synthesize them and create cohesive experiences that honor them.

Discovery, not Invention
With perception covered by visual designers, sound designers, and industrial designers, cognition and emotion are the manifest destiny of IA. User experience is not about information, rather, it is always about people and how they relate to information. By structuring the information, User Experience Designers structure the tools that humanity uses. And, as a result, we influence how people think and feel. The final result is that those tools, in turn, shape humanity. We should embrace that responsibility. Jesse predicts that UxD will take it's place among fundamental human crafts. He posits that we are discovering the realities of people, their tools, and experiences rather than inventing them. With only ten years under our belts, we've only just begun that discovery, and he hopes that there will always be more.
Transcript of the closing plenary address delivered March 22, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 in Memphis, TN. This address was written to be read aloud. I encourage you to listen to audio or watch video of the address if possible. I recognize that being chosen to deliver the closing plenary is an honor, and I do not intend to repay that kindness by giving you a product demo. I will not be participating in five-minute madness this year. You may consider this my 45-minute madness. This is a different kind of talk for me. First of all, I have no slides! I kind of feel like I'm working without a net here. I can't throw in the occasional visual pun to keep you guys paying attention. Secondly, I have no idea how long this talk is. I just finished it just before this began, so basically when I'm out of things to say, I'll stop talking. Hopefully that will be sooner than you expected, and not later. Third, I've decided not to take questions at the end of this talk. My preference would be that if you have questions, don't pose them to me. Pose them to each other. Publicly, if you can. So if I run short, we'll just go straight into five-minute madness and then we'll all get to the bar that little bit sooner. Okay, now: first-timers, please stand up. [audience applauds] I don't think we do enough to recognize the importance of new voices in this community, and at this event. Those of you who were here last year may recall my comments from five-minute madness last year, where it seemed like maybe I was a little bit too hard on the first-timers for not being more active participants. What I was really trying to do was scold the old-timers for not doing more to make the first-timers feel welcome, and so I hope that those of you who are first-timers this year have been made to feel welcome by this community. Now, before you sit down, I want to apologize to all of you, because there's a great big chunk of this talk that is not going to mean very much to you -- because I'm a ten-timer and I've got some things to say to my fellow ten-timers. So I'll just get that out of the way. I hope you've enjoyed the rest of the conference -- and now you can sit down. So yeah, in case you guys haven't heard, this is the tenth IA Summit. I don't know if word got around about that. This is my tenth IA Summit. Anyone who was at that first Summit will recount for you the strange energy in that room: academics and practitioners eyeing each other warily, skeptical of what the other had to contribute. There was turbulence. (Hi Peter!) But it was productive turbulence. I can't say I've seen much turbulence at these events since then. Which ought to make all of us nervous, because the opposite of turbulence is stagnation. In his opening keynote, Michael Wesch quoted Marshall McLuhan: "We march backward into the future." When I saw this quote, it reminded me of the old quip that generals are always fighting the last war -- which is why I think we've been stagnating. What war is the field of information architecture fighting? The war we still seem to be fighting is the war against information architecture itself as a valid concept, as a meaningful part of design practices. Almost everything you see about the IA community and IA practices -- the mailing lists, the conferences, the professional organizations, the process models, the best practice patterns -- they're all optimized to answer two questions: Is this stuff for real? And is it valuable? And the answer to both questions is always, invariably, an emphatic "yes". IA is real. And IA is good. And that's what we all agree on: some IA is better than no IA. But is there such a thing as "bad IA"? I mean, is it possible for an information architecture professional to do a thorough, responsible job, following all the agreed-upon best practices, and still come up with a bad solution? I don't think anybody knows the answer to this question. Because we're still fighting the last war. We're still trying to defend the answer to that question: is IA good? Is IA valuable? Now, if you are about my age (and most of you seem to be, which I'll come back to in a minute), your grandparents grew up in the Depression. And if your grandparents are like mine, this was an experience that shaped their behavior for the rest of their lives. They save everything: any little bit of leftover food, or a loose scrap of fabric, or a button or a screw. They save everything, because the notion of scarcity was deeply imprinted on them when they were young and became such a fundamental part of their worldview that decades later they're still hoarding all this stuff even though the Depression's been over... well, it took a break anyway. Here are some of the most common terms from past IA Summit programs: taxonomy, thesaurus, controlled vocabulary, metadata, faceted classification, navigation, content management -- and then there was that one year with all the talks about tagging. Like my grandparents, we cling to these things because they are what saved us. They are the tools by which we proved that yes, IA is real, and it is valuable. But that war is over. We won. And now it's time to move on, because those comfortable, familiar things represent only part of what information architecture can be. So it's time to leave the nest. Thank you, Lou and Peter. Thank you, library science. For getting us off to a great start. For giving us the tools and knowledge to win a place for IA in the world. There will still be a place for library science in IA, but it's only a part of our larger destiny. Thank you to ASIST. Thank you to Dick Hill, and Vanessa and Jan and Carlene. This field would not be where it is without your efforts at these events, year after year. But I'm curious -- show of hands: who here has ever been to any ASIST event other than an IA summit? [audience raises hands] Who here is an ASIST member? [audience raises hands] A smattering at best. ASIST has been sort of a benevolent host organism for the incubation of IA, but the relationship between ASIST and IA beyond IA Summit hasn't really gone anywhere. Okay, I'm debating how to do this... Name the five best-known information architects. [audience calls out various names] Now: name a work of information architecture created by one of these people. [silence] Is that a sign of a mature profession? The names you know are notable for what they say about their work, not for the work itself. They're not known for the quality of their work (and I'm including myself in this category). Moreover, do you know good IA when you see it? And can different people have different ideas about the qualities of a good solution or a bad one, based on their philosophical approach to their work? One thing I'm really surprised we don't have yet, that I had expected to see long before now, is the emergence of schools of thought about information architecture. Will there ever be a controversial work of information architecture? Something we argue about the merits of? A work that has admirers and detractors alike? We have lots of ways of talking about our processes. In fact, if you look back at these ten years of the IA Summit, the talks are almost all about process. And to the extent that we've had controversy, it's been over questions of process: Is documentation necessary? If so, how much? Which deliverables are the right ones? Personas, absolutely essential, or big waste of time? What we don't have are ways of talking about the product of our work. We don't have a language of critique. Until we have ways to describe the qualities of an information architecture, we won't be able to tell good IA from bad IA. All we'll ever be able to do is judge processes. Another thing that you'll notice from looking back over ten years of the Summit is that talks are ephemeral. I was at all those summits, and I remember maybe a tenth of what I saw -- and I saw less than half of what was on the program. I'm known for being down on academia a lot of the time, but they do have one thing right: you have to publish in order to create a body of knowledge. I think I'm pretty good at what I do. But you guys are going to have to take my word for it. Because you don't know my work. You only know what I say about my work. I think I'm pretty good at what I do. I hope I'm getting better. I hope that my best work is still ahead of me. But I'm not sure. And I'm not sure how I would know. I've been coming to the Summit for ten years, and I've been doing this work, in some form or another, for close to 15. And as I've watched my professional peers settle down, get married, start families, become managers, I've found myself wondering about creative peaks. In the field of mathematics, they say that if you haven't made a significant contribution by the age of 30, you never will. It's a young person's game. 33 is young to be publishing your first novel, but it's old to be recording your first album. When do information architects hit their creative peaks? Let's assume that I'm at about the median age for this group. Just assume most of you are my age, and there are about as many older than me as younger than me. Now, if I'm at about the median age for an information architect now, when will that change? Will the median age keep going up, as this group of people ages? Presumably, at some point I'll be one of the oldest guys in the room. Alternately, what if information architecture is something that you don't really get good at until you've been doing it for 20 years? Then we really have something to look forward to, don't we? Here's another thing I thought we'd be hearing more about by the time of the tenth IA Summit: You guys heard of this thing called neuromarketing? Man, this stuff is cool. They take people, they hook them up to MRIs -- you know, brainwave scanners -- and then they show them TV commercials. And they look at what parts of their brains light up when they watch these TV commercials. Then they do a little bit of A/B testing, and they can figure out how to craft a TV commercial that will elicit things like a feeling of safety. Or trust. Or desire. So yeah, my first reaction when I saw this stuff was: Wow, I gotta get my hands on some of that! We've only just scratched the surface of what we can do with eyetracking and the marketers have already moved on to braintracking! But then my second reaction was: Wait a minute. What are we talking about here? A process designed to elicit specific patterns of neural activity in users? Back in the 50s, they called that "mind control"! Now in a lot of ways, we're already in the mind control business. Information architecture and interaction design both seek to reward and reinforce certain patterns of thought and behavior. (Just ask anybody who's tried to wrestle any 37signals app into functioning the way they want to work, instead of the way Jason Fried thinks they ought to be working.) So there's always been an ethical dimension to our work. But who's talking about this stuff? Who's taking it seriously? I don't hear anybody talking about these things. Instead, what everybody wants to talk about is power, authority, respect. "Where's our seat at the table?" Well, you know, there are people who make the decisions you want to be making. They're called product managers. You want that authority? Go get that job. Don't ask them to give that authority to you. "When are we going to get the respect we deserve?" I'll tell you how it's going to happen. Somebody in this room, right now, at some point in the future is going to be the CEO of some company other than a design firm. They'll develop all of those right political and managerial skills to rise to that level of power. And they will institute a culture in their organization that respects user experience. And then they're just going to start kicking their competitors' asses. And then gradually it will happen in industry after industry after industry. That's how it will happen. But it will take time. I had the thought at one of these summits a few years ago that we would know we had really arrived as a profession when there were people who wanted to sell us stuff. Because, you see, I grew up in the United States, where you don't exist unless you are a target market. And here at this event this year we have companies like TechSmith and Axure and Access Innovations and Optimal Workshop. And we thank them for their support. But where's Microsoft? Where's Adobe? Where's Omni? We aren't a target market for any but the smallest companies. The big ones still don't understand who we are. We're still a small community, struggling to define itself. In 2002, in the wake of the last bubble burst, I wrote an essay called "ia/recon". In that essay, I tried to chart what I saw as a way forward for the field out of the endless debate over definitions. In the essay, I drew a distinction between the discipline of information architecture and the role of the information architect, and I argued that one need not be defined by the other. Seven years later, I can see that I was wrong. The discipline of information architecture and the role of the information architect will always be defined in conjunction with one another. As long as you have information architects, what they do will always be information architecture. Seems pretty obvious, right? Only took me seven years to figure out. But that's okay, because what is clear to me now is that there is no such thing as an information architect. Information architecture does not exist as a profession. As an area of interest and inquiry? Sure. As your favorite part of your job? Absolutely. But it's not a profession. Now, you IxDA folks should hold off for a moment before Twittering your victory speeches -- because there's no such thing as an interaction designer either. Not as a profession. Anyone who claims to specialize in one or the other is a fool or a liar. The fools are fooling themselves into thinking that one aspect of their work is somehow paramount. And the liars seek to align themselves with a tribe that will convey upon them status and power. There are no information architects. There are no interaction designers. There are only, and only ever have been, user experience designers. I'd like to talk about each of these three words, in reverse order, starting with "design". Now, this is a word that I have personally had a long and difficult history with. I didn't like this word being applied to our work for many years. I thought it placed us in a tradition -- graphic design, industrial design, interface design -- where our work did not belong. I also saw the dogmatism endemic to design education as poisonous and destructive to a field as young as ours. I still find the tendency of "designers" to view all human creative endeavor through the narrow lens of their own training and experience to be contemptible and appallingly short-sighted. But I'm ready to give up fighting against this word, if only because it's easily understood by those outside our field. And anything that enables us to be more easily understood is something we desperately need. Now, let's talk about that word "experience". A lot of people have trouble with this word, especially paired with the word "design". "You can't call it experience design!" they say. "How can you possibly control someone else's experience?" they demand. Well, wait a minute -- who said anything about control? Treating design as synonymous with control, and the designer as the all-powerful controller, says something more about the way these designers think of themselves and their relationship to their work than it does about the notion of experience design. "Experience is too ephemeral," they say, "too insubstantial to be designed." You mean insubstantial the way music is insubstantial? Or a dance routine? Or a football play? Yet all of these things are designed. The entire hypothesis of experience design (and it is a hypothesis at this point) is that the ephemeral and insubstantial can be designed. And that there is a kind of design that can be practiced independent of medium and across media. Now, this part makes a lot of people uncomfortable because they're committed to the design tradition of a particular medium. So they dismiss experience design as simply best practices. "What you call experience design," they say, "is really nothing more than good industrial design." Or good graphic design. Or good interface design. This "mediumism" resists the idea that design can be practiced in a medium-independent or cross-media way. Because that implies that there may be something these mediumist design traditions have been missing all along. If our work simply recapitulates what has been best practice in all these fields all along, why are the experiences they deliver so astonishingly bad? And let's face it, they are really bad. One big reason for it has to do with this last word, one which I think has been unfairly maligned: the word "user". You guys know the joke, right? There are only two industries in the world that refer to their customers as users. One is the technology business and the other is drug dealers. Ha ha, get it? Our work is just as dehumanizing as selling people deadly, addictive chemicals that will destroy their lives and eventually kill them! Get it? It's funny because it's true. No, it's not. I'm here to reclaim "user". Because "user" connotes use, and use matters! We don't make things for those most passive of entities, consumers. We don't even make things for audiences, which at least connotes some level of appreciation. The things we make get used! They become a part of people's lives! That's important work. It touches people in ways most of them could never even identify. But it's real. Okay, time for another show of hands: who here has "information architect" or "information architecture" in your title, on your business card? Raise your hand. [audience raises hands] Almost as many as we had ASIST members. Okay, now let me see those hands again. Keep your hand up if there is also someone in your organization with "interaction design" or "interaction designer" in the title. [hands go down] Almost every hand went down. I see one hand, two hands. Three, four... five. This is what the interaction design community recognizes -- and what the leadership of the IxDA recognizes in particular -- that the IA community does not. In the marketplace, this is a zero-sum game. Every job req created for an "interaction designer" is one less job req for an "information architect" and vice versa. And the more "interaction designers" there are, the more status and authority and influence and power accrues to the IxDA and its leadership. They get this, and you can see it play out in everything they do, including refusing offers of support and cooperation from groups they see as competitors, and throwing temper tantrums about how other groups schedule their conferences. Meanwhile, the IAs are so busy declaring peace that they don't even realize that they've already lost the war. This territorialism cannot go on, and I hope the IxDA leadership sees an opportunity here for positive change. These organizations should be sponsoring each other's events, reaching out to each other's membership, working together to raise the tide for everyone. There is no us and them. We are not information architects. We are not interaction designers. We are user experience designers. This is the identity we must embrace. Any other will only hold back the progress of the field by marginalizing an important dimension of our work and misleading those outside our field about what is most important and valuable about what we do. Because it's not information, and it's not interaction. We're in the experience business. User experience. We create things that people use. To use something is to engage with it. And engagement is what it's all about. Our work exists to be engaged with. In some sense, if no one engages with our work it doesn't exist. It reminds me of an artist named J.S.G. Boggs. He hand-draws these meticulously detailed near-replicas of U.S. currency. It's gotten him in trouble with the Secret Service a couple of times. They're near-replicas -- they're not exact, they're obviously fake. They're fascinating and they're delightful, in and of themselves, as objects. But here's the catch: For Boggs, the work isn't complete until he gets someone to accept the object as currency. The transaction is the artwork, not the object that changes hands. As he sees it, his work is not about creating things that look like currency it's about using art as currency. It's the use -- the human engagement -- that matters. Designing with human experience as an explicit outcome and human engagement as an explicit goal is different from the kinds of design that have gone before. It can be practiced in any medium, and across media. Show of hands: Who here is involved in creating digital experiences? [audience raises hands] Okay, hands down. Now: who's involved in creating non-digital experiences? [audience raises hands] More hands than I thought. Now, do we really believe that this is the boundary of our profession? And if we don't, why are there so many talks about websites at conferences like this one? Don't get me wrong, I love the web. I hope to be working with the web in 10 years, in 20 years. But the web is just a canvas. Or perhaps a better metaphor is clay -- raw material that we shape into experiences for people. But there are lots of materials -- media -- we can use to shape experiences. Saying user experience design is about digital media is rather like saying that sculpture is about the properties of clay. That's not to say that an individual sculptor can't dedicate themselves to really mastering clay. They can, and they do -- just like many of you will always be really great at creating user experiences for the web. But that does not define the boundary of user experience design. Where it really gets interesting is when you start looking at experiences that involve multiple media, multiple channels. Because there's a whole lot more to orchestrating a multi-channel experience than simply making sure that the carpet matches the drapes. We've always said we were in the multimedia business. Let's put some weight behind that. Expanding our horizons in this way does not dilute our influence. It strengthens it. So if we're all user experience designers, and there are no more information architects, but there is still such a thing as information architecture, what does it look like? Well, let's take a closer look at engagement, and think about the ways we can engage people. What are the varieties of human engagement? We can engage people's senses. We can stimulate them through visuals, through sound, through touch and smell and taste. This is the domain of the traditional creative arts: painting, music, fashion, cooking. We can engage their minds, get them thinking, reasoning, analyzing, synthesizing. This is where fields like scholarship and rhetoric have something to teach us. We can engage their hearts, provoke them in feelings of joy and sadness and wonder and rage. (I've seen a lot of rage.) The folks who know about this stuff are the storytellers, the filmmakers, and yes, even the marketers. And we can engage their bodies. We can compel them to act. This is the closest to what we've traditionally done studying and trying to influence human behavior. And that's really about it. Or at least, that's all that I've been able to think of: Perception, engaging the senses. Cognition, engaging the mind. Emotion, engaging the heart. And action, engaging the body. Mapping out the interrelationships between these turns out to be a surprisingly deep problem. Every part influences every other part in unexpected ways. In particular, thinking and feeling are so tangled up together that we practically need a new word for it: "thinkfeel". There are a few other factors, sort of orthogonal to these, that influence experience: There are our capabilities: the properties of our bodies, the acuity of our senses, the sharpness and flexibility of our minds, the size of our hearts. Our capabilities determine what we can do. Then there are our constraints, which define what we can't do. The limits on our abilities, whether permanent -- someone who's having a hard time reading because they have dyslexia -- or temporary -- someone who's having a hard time reading because they've had five bourbons. Finally, we have context. And I have to admit that I'm cheating a bit on this one because I'm packing a lot of different factors up into this one category. There's the context of the moment: babies crying, dogs barking, phones ringing. (Calgon, take me away!) Then there's personal context: the history, associations, beliefs, personality traits of that individual. And there's the broad context: social, cultural, economic, technological. But these three -- capabilities, constraints, and context -- are really just cofactors, shaping and influencing experience in those big four categories: perception, cognition, emotion, and action. Our role, as user experience designers, is to synthesize and orchestrate elements in all of these areas to create a holistic, cohesive, engaging experience. So how do we create user experiences that engage across all of these areas? Where can we look to for expertise? Where's the insight? Where are the areas for further inquiry? Perception is already pretty well covered. We've got visual designers and, sometimes, animators. In some cases we've got sound designers. We've got industrial designers, working on the tactile aspects of the products we create. Action, again, is pretty much what we were doing already. I defined action as engagement of the body, which may sound strange to many of you when I say that we've really been doing this all along. But if you think about our work, when we talk about behavior, we are always talking about some physical manifestation of a user's intention -- even when that manifestation is as small as a click. (And the interaction designers claim to own behavior anyway so I say let them have it.) Because the real action is in these last two areas, cognition and emotion. This, to my mind, is the manifest destiny for information architecture. We may not have fully recognized it before because the phrase "information architecture" puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. It's never been about information. It's always been about people: how they relate to that information, how that information makes them think, how it makes them feel, and how the structure of that information influences both things. This is huge, unexplored territory. We must acknowledge that as user experience designers we have a broader place in the world than simply delivering value to businesses. We must embrace our role as a cultural force. Here's Michael Wesch quoting Marshall McLuhan again: "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." Think about that for a second. "We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us." When McLuhan said "we", and when he said "us", he was talking about the entire human race. But not everybody's a shaper, right? The shapers are the people in this room, the people in this field. We shape those tools and then, the experiences that those tools create shape humanity itself. Think about the responsibility that entails. I believe that when we embrace that role as a cultural force, and we embrace that responsibility, this work -- user experience design -- will take its place among the most fundamental and important human crafts, alongside engineering and architecture and all kinds of creative expression and creative problem solving disciplines. At last year's five-minute madness, I said that the experts who give talks at events like this one were making it up as they went along. But, I said, that's okay, because we all are. I take that back. We aren't making it up as we go along. This is not a process of invention. This is a process of discovery. What we are uncovering about people, about tools and their use, about experiences -- it's always been there. We just didn't know how to see it. This discovery phase is far from over. Ten years isn't nearly enough time. There's more that we can't see than is apparent to us right now. For my part, and for you as well, I hope there's always more for us to discover together. Thank you all very much.
Video by Chris Pallé and "The UX Workshop":http://theuxworkshop.tv/
photo by "Jorge Arango":http://www.flickr.com/photos/jarango/3382137521/ Thanks to Chris and Jorge.

These podcasts are sponsored by:
The "American Society of Information Science & Technology":http://asist.org/: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
The "IA Summit":http://www.iasummit.org: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals. The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.
"Boxes & Arrows":http://www.boxesandarrows.com: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way. Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. "boxesandarrows.com/about/participate":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/participate

IA Summit 09 - Keynote

Jeff Parks — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 23:07:48 GMT

iTunes     Download    Del.icio.us     IA Summit theme music created and provided by BumperTunes™

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts
The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2009/program/schedule/).
| "Preview":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/when-life-intervenes | Keynote | "Day 1":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-1 | "Day 2":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-2 | "Day 3":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-3 | "Closing Plenary":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-plenary |

The IA Summit Opening Keynote
Michael Wesch opened the IA Summit this year with an inspired keynote that provides a fresh and ambitious direction for all designers. He points out that our "audiences" aren't audiences at all, but rather creators, and our job is not to lecture but to enable. With this new approach comes not only design challenges but the joy of reconnecting people to each other, which he illustrated with a series of extraordinary video clips. The following is an outline of some of his key points; please download the audio for the complete experience.

Contrast Reveals Mediation
Wesch tells several stories about his study of cultural anthropology and how those illustrate how Western culture, and in particular US culture, has become completely mediated.

Inspiration Trumps
He then illustrates the process of how his video "The Machine Is Us/ing Us":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fboxesandarrows.com%2Fview%2Fia-summit-09-keynote&feature=player_embedded becomes an internet phenomenon and how its rise represents an alternative to the mass media machine that has developed in the US over the last several decades.

Varieties of Media Bias
Content bias (e.g. liberal or conservative bent) is only one of many types of media bias, and that all of them add up to "metaphysical bias." The effects of this have not changed much over time, that comments made about the printing press can help us reflect on what is happening in the current environment. Wesch wants us, as the creators of the tools, to think about what environment we want to create and work towards it.

Checking Out
Using his classroom as a crucible, Wesch delves into how US culture arrived in its current state, using the assembly line as the starting place, moving through MTV, and onto American Idol. As a part of this journey, he traces the history of "whatever" and comments on the current cultural impotence.

Burgeoning Transformation
Wesch then assembles a multi-faceted picture that there is hope for our culture through the interaction of digital artifacts. He spends a significant portion of the talk showing various example of these conversations. YouTube acts as a meme-spreader and remix environment, and Twitter allows you to see yourself clearly. 4chan, the disputably infamous "imageboard," morphs into Anonymous and plays tricks on over 9000 celebrities and groups that take themselves too seriously. Wesch makes the point that we're in the midst of a "context collapse," examines what that means, and shows what people are trying to do with the tools that are currently available.

Architectures of Participation
In the end, "Architectures of Participation are becoming the architecture of our daily life." Designers will be shaping the tools that shape the culture and hopes that our community of practice can help humanity "do whatever it takes by whatever means necessary."

These podcasts are sponsored by:
The "American Society of Information Science & Technology":http://asist.org/: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
The "IA Summit":http://www.iasummit.org: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals. The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.
"Boxes & Arrows":http://www.boxesandarrows.com: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way. Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. "boxesandarrows.com/about/participate":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/participate

Transcript of the opening keynote address delivered March 20, 2009 at ASIS&T IA Summit 2009 in Memphis, TN.
[music]
Announcer: This podcast brought to you by ASIST, the American Society for Information Science & Technology, the society for information professionals; by the IA Summit, the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals; by Boxes and Arrows, visit boxesandarrows.com/about/participate to be a part of your peer‑written journal. And special thanks to Axure and Morae for sponsoring Boxes and Arrows as well as the many other sponsors of the IA Summit.
[music]
Announcer: Michael Wesch delivered a powerful keynote presentation at the 10th annual Information Architecture Summit in Memphis, Tennessee. Michael has been dubbed "the explainer" by "Wired Magazine, " a cultural anthropologist exploring the impact of new media on society and culture.
After two years studying the impact of writing on a remote, indigenous culture in the rain forest of Papua New Guinea, he has turned his attention to the effects of social media and digital technology on global society.
His videos on technology, education and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over 10 languages and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide.
I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers.
Michael Wesch: I actually got my start looking at mediated culture in the most bizarre places in Papua New Guinea. So I'm going to tell you a quick little story about Papua New Guinea and how I got started there in order to frame everything I'm going to talk about. I'm going to end up talking about YouTube, 4chan, and Twitter and things like that, but we have to start in New Guinea in order to give us some context for that.
So I first went to New Guinea, this is 1999. I've went there off and on for the past 10 years, and ultimately have spent about two full years there in the past 10 years. And so to get to the villages where I work you have to fly into a little airstrip, like this little grass airstrip, and it takes you about two weeks to get that far because you're usually waiting on little Cessnas and things like that. And ultimately you get here and then you walk a couple days and you end up in villages like this.
So you're talking about places that have really nothing that we would call media in our terms. There's no electricity, there's no Internet and so on. Usually there's not even working radios. Very isolated. And there's not even money to speak of so these people are mostly subsistence horticulturists. And here you can see a garden. They grow lots of sweet potatoes and taro, they raise pigs. So this is a major feast that they would have.
They also eat anything that the forest provides them such as spiders. So after a big storm the rainwater will just wash these spiders down to the canopy and then they'll harvest these and they'll eat these spiders. They'll also eat snakes whenever they get a chance. They'll even eat what's inside the snake. So here you can see they've taken out an animal that was recently eaten by the snake, and they then eat that.
And I show you this because this is where my journey really begins. This photo was taken about a week after I arrived, and it's about 100 feet from where I was staying, which is right here. And I barely speak the language at this time. And I'll just take you inside the hut here just to show you what it looks like.
This is what it looks like. These are actually my legs up here and this is my little sleeping bag. This little sleeping bag, I used to call it my little America because at night I would just try to wrap myself up in this thing and hide myself from the world because there were bugs everywhere and rats and all kinds of stuff.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: But of course this is the tropics, it's the equator, so in the middle of the night I'd get really hot and the sleeping bag would be off of me and there I would be exposed.
And that night after we ate the snake, I was looking around and I noticed that there's all these little holes in the floor, holes in the walls, holes everywhere. And I thought, gosh, a snake could just crawl right in here at any time.
And sure enough that night I'm wrapped up in my little America, it gets too hot, the sleeping bag is off of me. And I wake up in the middle of the night with this thing, I can feel this thing across me. It's this big around and it's right across my chest here.
So I freak out, and I manage to get it with my left hand and I throw it off of me. But as I throw it, I roll with it. So now I manage to get it pinned down with my left hand. I have it pinned down on the ground like this and I try to get my right arm free so I can pin it down with my right arm, but I can't move my right arm. And this is when I realize I've actually pinned down my own right arm.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: What had happened was my arm had fallen asleep and it was across me like this.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: So there actually was no snake. And at this time ‑ speaking of media ‑ the only thing that I could understand from anybody, I could barely understand the language, the only word I understood was the word they used for me. And the word they used for me was an English word that they had borrowed, which was "white man." And so they would just say, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, white man," and then I would hear just laughter roaring.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: And this was my primary encouragement to learn the language very quickly and so on.
What I realized was that they had no idea who I was. I was just the white man that they could laugh at and so on. But then I started to realize that that was basically true for everybody in these villages. This is a situation in which your entire identity is made in your face‑to‑face relationships with other people. And we have become such a mediated society that we've completely lost sight of what that even means.
So you come to a conference like this and you are instantly displaying to people in numerous ways who you are by the nametag you're wearing, the institution you're associated with, all of that based on a print technology that wouldn't be possible without those little symbols on your nametag.
Not to mention your identity cards and all that type of stuff that declare you a US citizen or whatever it might be. Even your clothes are sending a certain message. So even when you walk through the airport people will be able to identify certain things about you just by the clothes you're wearing.
You go to a village like this and you lose all of that. And locally, the people themselves also are primarily negotiating their own identities in these face‑to‑face relationships. I'll give you a few examples of this, which has really brought home to me in the following 10 years since after that first event, in a sequence of events that the locals now refer to as "number talk."
What happened about 10 years ago was, just after I arrived, the government got serious about running this very remote series of villages, using bureaucratic paper‑based government. And so they went in and they actually charted every single village in the area with GPS. They actually carried around a GPS unit, marked down each of the villages.
And then they began taking a census in which every house was numbered, every person in the house got their own number as well, and they were able to count the units. And this allowed them to determine how much funding the village would get. So there was a whole formula for how much funding each village gets.
The impact of this was really tremendous in the next 10 years. The first thing that happened was they actually started eliminating their old villages, which looked like this, and are actually based on relationships. If you were really close to somebody you would face your door towards them, and if not, you would face it away from them. And instead you can see they arranged their houses almost by the book, in a linear format. And each of these houses is actually numbered just like the census book.
And if you go there today and you ask them, "Why did you build your village like this?" they'll give you a one word answer: "Census." And then you can see how it maps onto the census here.
And then during the census exercise itself a really interesting thing happened. They were having a really hard time getting people to say their names. They would go around and they would say, "What's your name?" And people would be all confused. They didn't know what their name was.
Now that sounds crazy. How could that be? But if you think about all the names that you have, you probably are referred to by at least 10 names, if not more. Imagine if somebody then came to you, and you had no idea which one was your real name, and said, "What's your real name?"
They actually would go to some of the people there and they'd say, "What's your name?" and they would say the word for mother, or father, or brother, because that's what people called them in the village. And then suddenly they were like, "No, no, what's your name?" And they'd just get totally confused by that whole idea.
So they ended up adopting another English phrase called "census name." And now if you go there and you ask people what your name is, they'll say, "You mean my census name?" So that's where that comes from.
Meanwhile, people refer to this as "number talk" because their idea is that it's numbers that talk to the state. And this becomes a certain kind of mediated reality, and they try to cook the numbers in a way. But this goes on to even more levels in terms of how print and the book were actually mediating their society.
This is what a dispute looked like prior to the incoming of this government bureaucracy. You can see what happens is when there is a dispute, everybody meets in an open area, everybody talks about it, everybody has a chance to talk and so on. But in the new era of print, they have an actual law book in which there's a series of laws. And when people have a conflict, they're taken into the courthouse and they're measured against this static group of laws.
And this turns everything quite dramatically. Suddenly the focus is on the individual and the relation to a piece of paper. And their relation to the letter of the law, as opposed to their relationship with the people that are actually in conflict with.
The whole point of this is to say that media are not just tools. They are just means of communication but in fact they mediate relationships. When media changed, relationships changed. That makes today an especially interesting time. So Marshall McLuhan might say we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.
So today you look around and you see a Flickr here and a Twitter there and you have to recognize that this is a new way of relating emerging. So I'll just give you a quick little tail from the new mediascape and then I'll go into some more stuff about YouTube in particular and then 4chan.
So here's a little story from the new mediascape. This is like the million‑dollar story. OK, so the reason why it's a million dollar story is a million dollars is what it costs to make a 30 second commercial spot for the Super Bowl, which is a big event obviously. And so Doritos had an idea of how they could leverage the new mediascape to make it a lot cheaper.
So they just created a contest they allowed people to upload videos of their own little 30‑second spot and this ended up being the winning commercial. When they interviewed these guys about how they made it and what was involved, they found out that it cost them $12.79 to create their commercial, which is roughly the cost of three bags of Doritos that they had to break during the filming of it.
It was very successful. It was rated fourth by USA Today on their ad meter. So in terms of affecting the audience it was fourth. It did very well, despite it's low price. But it turns out it's $2.7 million to air the commercial, which brings the total cost to...
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: So the interesting thing about this though is that they asked these advertisers why do you spend so much money on this 30‑second spot and they say basically it's water cooler talk. We want to be the thing that people are talking about the next day after Super Bowl. Well, the next day after the Super Bowl, if you check the blogosphere, the number one video in blogosphere actually costs zero dollars to produce.
I know that because that was the video that I made that was mentioned here in the interim. Those of you who haven't seen it, this is just... I'll just show you a quick 30‑seconds of it here. It's this one where it's sort of a history... Thanks. It's like a history of digital text. Starting with written texts and what it look like in terms of written text. And then the changes that are brought about as digital text comes onto the scene.
I'm just speeding up here. You don't have to watch the film but the basic idea here is that there's some things I'll cover a little bit later in this talk. We're talking about blogs, YouTube, tagging, Wikipedia, and so on. All changing things in such a way that the Web is no longer linking information but it's about linking people.
[music]
Michael Wesch: That means that we're going to have to rethink a whole lot of things in our culture. This is all actually inspired by my work in New Guinea, which I think surprises people but that's what this is really all about. That's why I thought that you'd have to re‑think things, no just like governance and privacy and commerce, I think everybody thinks of, but also love, family and ourselves.
[Indistinct voice]
Michael Wesch: We'll get to that later.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: So the interesting story behind this so is not just this sort of move the video itself but what happens afterwards. So the interesting thing about this is it was made in the basement of this house in the middle of Kansas. So here you have a video that competed with $2.6 million massive productions and it was created in the basement of this house in Kansas.
It was done in collaboration with a guy in Cote d'Ivore ‑‑ in the Ivory Coast ‑‑ because he had uploaded the music that you heard there with creative commons license. We're collaborating across time and space. And this was then taken on Friday. I uploaded it on a Wednesday and you see by Friday I had 253 views and the reason why there's a screen shot of this is because I was just blown away that more than 200 people had seen this.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: And in anthropology that's a really big deal when more than 200 read your work.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: So, I sent this to my department head and she was thrilled. We had a party that night and she was telling everybody. She was like you won't believe...
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: Then this is by the next day. This is Saturday and you can see we had over a 1,000 views. We normally think about user‑generated content and that's what this is. But what's really interesting is what happened next. This showed me that there was a lot more going on here.
And that was, the reason why it was growing exponentially was that it had been "dugg" ‑ you know, Digg is a site where people can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down ‑ the good stuff kind of rises to the top. It literally gets dugg up to the top. And here you can see it was rising right to the front page of Digg. Digg is just one example of what you might call user‑generated filtering.
So there you can see it on the front page. The list is of course... It was also floating around Del.ici.ous and you can see the top two links there for the most popular Web 2.0 links that day were from Del.ici.ous. So this is a situation where people are just going to the video, tagging it with Web 2.0, anthropology, whatever it might be and organizing the Web as they do it.
So this is what you might call user‑generated organization for what's great about this. I mean, that's nifty in itself but what's interesting about that is that Tazz is being tagged, a lot of you in this room are probably following tags yourself on the Del.ici.ous. You might be following the tag Web 2.0, like a lot of people are and then that will instantly come to your home page the instant that somebody tags it.
So this then you might call user‑generated distribution. So what we see emerging here is basically an alternative to the massive, mass media machine that we have existed with for decades here in the US. It now has like a valid competitor, valid alternative in the user‑generated landscape here.
So then it goes through out the blogosphere and this is where humans and machines are interacting without knowing it because every time somebody links it in the blogosphere it's getting counted by Technorati.
That's what creates the top 20 lists that you see on viralvideochart.com as well as on Technorati. Here you can see it was, this was number four and this is Super Bowl Sunday morning. I woke up and it was number four and I was just blown away by that. My wife and I just sat down and we started hitting refresh, refresh, refresh.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: We were really worried about the viral videos from the Super Bowl coming in that night. So we thought, if we can only get the number one before the Super Bowl and here you can see this is about noon that day it was number one.
This is then the next day after the Super Bowl and you can see not only was it number one, but it was well about the others. In fact, two through 20 almost entirely are Super Bowl commercials. So this is what you might call user‑generated ratings and this also works with Google, of course. Because every time you make a link on Google, it's just sort of accidental collaboration with machines that's going on all around us right now.
And this is what's driving something that can be made in a basement in Kansas to have millions of views because commented on thousands of times and creating then this alternative mediascape.
So the question then is: do you look at this interconnected mediascape that creates all this collaboration in multiple ways. So this is just like a month after it was created. You can see it was translated into 12 languages. That spread it worldwide.
The interesting thing about this is that at the center of this user‑generated landscape is us, which means that this is not just a technological revolution. This is a cultural revolution. So that's why I say that we had to rethink all the things.
Now, there's a certain thought bias to media. People talk about media bias in terms of Fox News and that kind of stuff, but I'm not talking about content, I'm talking about the medium itself. There's a long history of studies of this now going back four and five decades of very serious study. But even going back much further than that we've come to realize that the biases are things like this.
So there's an intellectual bias to different media. So for example just for a real basic example take the example of like communicating with smoke signals versus communicating with a book. Obviously, there's going to be an intellectual bias. You can't recount Plato using smoke signals. Right?
So that's a very basic bias of media. There's emotional biases. You can't convey the same emotions in different media. That's why when you have something really important to tell somebody you'll often think very carefully about what medium you're going to use. There's special and temporal biases.
We saw that in New Guinea, just in a sense of face to face communication is spatially biased towards how far your voice can reach, and temporally biased towards the now, because it doesn't last, other than how people remember it and carry it on. Whereas print has a long temporal bias, because it stays static over a long time, and spatially, it can travel over long distances.
These create certain biases of the media. Then, there's sensory biases. Some media are visual. Others are auditory, and so on. There's political biases, in the sense that some media are accessible to some, and not accessible to others. There's social biases, in that every medium creates a social scene around it, in terms of how you engage it, how you receive it, how you create it.
Ultimately, this is where it gets interesting. When you add all that up, there's actually metaphysical biases to media. They actually make you think about space, and time, and the world differently, especially as they start to seep into our institutions. That then leads to different understandings of what information is, what knowledge is, and so on. These are epistemological biases.
Here's a nice summary of this: Lee Rainie was talking about the effects of new media, and this is the basic summary of what he had to say. He said, just for example, you have the role of experts challenged by new voices, enabled by more open platforms for the dissemination of ideas. You have new institutions emerge to deal with the social, cultural, and political changes. There's a struggle to revise social and legal norms, especially around the changing environment of intellectual property.
We all have seen this happening. It's happening all around us. Concepts of identity and community multiply and transform. New forms of language arise. We've seen all of this recently, but, of course, he was actually talking about the printing press. This is just one example, going back 500 years, and here we are in this situation.
The question is, what are the biases of this media environment? How is it changing us? And the great question for you guys, because you guys right on the front lines of actually creating this environment is how can we create an environment that creates the types of community that we want to create, and the types of people we want to create, and so on.
And so, I started studying this new media environment here, by just watching my own students. I had this great sort of research lab, and it's just in my classroom. You sort of get off this sideways. You can't just come directly at them and start asking them questions about how they use media and all that stuff. That's interesting stuff, but it doesn't get at the real changes that are happening, and the bigger picture stuff. If any of you do ethnography, you know how you have to go at it sideways.
Here's a series of questions that was very revealing to me, that aren't going at it directly, but are still very interesting. Here's question one: How many of you do not actually like school? Over half of them raised their hands to that question.
Then I say, how many do not like learning, and of course you get no hands. So then, we have this problem, because we've created this institution that's actually designed for learning, and yet the people who like learning don't like the institution. It's actually true with professors, as well.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: Then there's other problems, right? The students are Facebooking through their classes. They bring their laptop to class. They're not working on class stuff. This is actually a spur of the moment thing. Just as we were taking this picture, her IM popped up, so obviously this is a common practice for her. They buy $100 textbooks they never open. They pay for class, but often don't show up.
We did a survey, and found that they complete about 49% of the readings assigned to them, and they find that only 26% are relevant to their lives. So, there's this huge disconnect in our schools, and the question is, what is this all about?
Here's the interesting thing: You look at this room here, everybody's tuned out, and dazed, and so on. The same group of people that we might say are having this problem of significance show up in this context like this.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: We have a camera on them, and there's the contrast.
I was looking for an answer as to why this would be, and I found a perfect quote for this, and here it is: "What we are encountering is a panicky, and almost hysterical attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life. The prime cause is not vanity, but the craving of people that feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the world, indistinguishable atoms to be lost in the mass of civilization."
I don't know if anybody recognizes that. That's actually from 1926. There's a long history of this sort of disconnect, this feeling of insignificance in the world. He was actually talking about city life. Adding to that, you might say that there's sort of... We can do a history of insignificance here. It's not just about city life, but the assembly line, in which people started to feel like automatons, sort of anonymous functionaries in this big machine.
This allowed us to expand and build these massive suburbia areas here, and we're so disconnected, we're only connected by roads, and of course TVs and radios. And then, the TV actually becomes the home of our culture. All significant conversations about our culture occur right here, on the TV. And so, therefore, it's not just the conversations of the culture, but conversations of significance that happen here, and it's a one‑way conversation.
You have to be on TV to have a voice. You have to be on TV to be significant. And so, obviously, you're ready. You're like, "Just let me on TV. Remind me that I'm real."
Something like that.
By the 1990s, we were just bombarded with imagery like this. 1980s, actually. This is the MTV world, right? Every one of these images is posted from MTV, the barrage of logos. This is actually my journal from when I was 17, in 1992. You can see, I was very much part of the MTV generation.
If you guys remember, everybody was talking about the MTV generation back then. It was things like, they have short attention spans, because they can't last through a four‑minute video. They're very materialistic, and we were. We spent so much money as an age group. We're narcissistic, and one of the theories about why we're narcissistic is because all that stuff that was being thrown at us from the TV was designed for us. That's a very flattering thing. When you're bombarded with million dollar images.
It costs $3.6 million to produce 30 seconds of TV, and it's all for me? It's very flattering, and so this kind of narcissism emerges.
But on the other hand, we're also not easily impressed, because we're just bombarded with all of this stuff all of the time. There's this great line about this. "In the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind‑boggling stimuli, whatever."
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: That's from Thomas de Zengotita. That's a really great book called "Mediated." I highly recommend it to anybody.
In the midst of trying to figure out where we're going, I decided to do a brief history of "Whatever." So I started mining the literature, doing Google searches to find out when the word whatever was used, and how it's changed over time, and things like that. Basically what I found is that pre‑1960, whatever is generally ‑‑ it just generally means, "That's what I meant."
It's sort of like you say something, and then somebody repeats it back to you, but in different words, and you just say, "Whatever. That's what I meant." That's all it meant.
By the late '60s, though, it started to become the "Whatever, man," sequence. It's like, "I don't care. Whatever," and an indifference started to emerge. Of course, this is at the beginning of TV, and especially the beginnings of color TV.
By the 1990s, though, this total bombardment of imagery, and you end up with this MTV generation, and you have not only whatever, but also the indifferent "meh" emerges. This is where The "Simpsons" clips come in. This is 1992. Some people claim this is the first use of the word "meh."
[clips begins]
Bart Simpson: Nothing you say can upset us. We're the MTV generation!
Lisa Simpson: We feel neither highs nor lows.
Homer Simpson: Really? What's it like?
Lisa Simpson: Eh.
[clip ends]
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: You can tell it wasn't quite a meh, right? It was more like, "Eh."
This is 2001. They really spell it out.
[clip plays]
Homer Simpson: [excited] Would you like to go to Block‑o‑land?!! Bart and…
Lisa Simpson: Meh.
Homer Simpson: You leave me the impression that...
Bart Simpson: We said meh.
Lisa Simpson: M‑E‑H. Meh.
[clip ends]
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: It's after that that on forums all over the Internet meh starts to appear. It started to appear in 1992, 1993, but it really started going in 2001. In fact, Harper Collins, just last year, admitted meh into their dictionary, so it's now official.
1992, back to the MTV generation, this was the real anthem of the day. Kurt Cobain, "And I find it hard, it's hard to find, oh well, whatever, nevermind." It's the perfect anthem of our generation.
Neil Postman in '84 said something really appropriate here. He said, "The public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference."
And, again, from Kurt Cobain: "I feel stupid and contagious. Here we are now, entertain us." And, a lot of faculty actually repeat this line when they see this. They get a sense like ‑‑ they think what the students are waiting for.
So I mentioned earlier that this barrage of imagery is actually very flattering, right, and it creates a sense of narcissism. And so even as we're sort of bombarded into passivity ‑ there's no way to act on the images that are being thrown at us ‑ we're definitely ready to get out there.
So in 1992, the real world starts to emerge and reality TV starts to take off, and that's the ground for what you see in the "American Idol" frenzy today: People just desperate and ready to get on screen, to have some sort of significance.
And they really think that they deserve to be there. And so, by the late '90s to the present, there's a new transition in "whatever," and it's become much more sort of self focused and, "I am the most important person on the planet. Whatever! You don't matter, I matter," kind of thing. And you see that, not in the "Simpsons," but on "South Park." So here's like a famous one.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: So you might have missed it. He said, "Whatever, I will be what I want." And then this was, I think, a song that's really gotten popular on YouTube lately, but actually started on MTV.
[song plays]
Michael Wesch: You see the self‑righteousness, right? There's a new self‑righteousness there. All right. So you get the added narcissism to it all.
And then, Jean Twenge recently published a book called, "Generation Me," which sort of tried to capture all of this. You can see the title up there: "Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable Than Ever Before." Because as they have rushed on the stage, they think that they deserve to be there, and then when there are not, they're all like shocked ‑ you know, like, "Are you serious?"
Do you guys watch "American Idol?" It's crazy. Like just all these people who think they totally deserve to be in a spotlight, and then they're shocked when they're not, and they're in tears, and so on.
Now, this is actually very serious, though. Here's a whole series of questions that will really bring it home. It's not just about sort of the play on "American Idol" and so on ‑ but ask yourself these questions. Imagine asking yourself these questions now versus in the mid‑'80s. What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East, or the rate of inflation, crime or unemployment? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, etcetera?
And, this is from Neil Postman. He says, "I shall take the liberty of answering for you. You plan to do nothing." And so we live in a world in which we're sort of impotent. We want to be engaged and we're sort of following the news with all this rigor, and yet, ultimately, we're impotent in our actions. We have nothing to do.
Meanwhile, there's something in the air that maybe is transforming what you're seeing. And that something in the air is actually the digital artifacts of roughly of 1.4 billion people communicating. It's literally in the air. It's floating in the air all around you, for instance. At least you can sort of grab it with your cell phone or your laptop or whatever.
And when you add it all up, there are big numbers I can throw at you: 70 exabytes will be produced this year. That's 70 billion gigabytes. It's more than the entire collection of Library of Congress. A lot more. In fact, it's 518,000 libraries worth.
Meanwhile, we're testing our students like this when there's all this information floating around. It's the equivalent of 12,000 gigabytes per person. It's equivalent to a stack of books 350 feet total. And, yet, less than 0.01% of it will be on paper.
So that was just all a metaphor, when I'm talking about how many books it would be. And it's important to recognize it as a metaphor, because digital information is different. You guys are all trying to come to terms with that, and what it means, and what you can create out of these differences.
So, Marshall McLuhan once said: "We look at the present through a rear‑view mirror. We march backwards into the future." There's lots of great examples we can bring up with this, and one of them is just this idea that here we are in the information superhighway. We have to use metaphor constantly to understand what's going on, because it's a new thing.
So here we are in the information superhighway, looking into the rear‑view mirror, and we translate all the data that's coming in through our screens into something we call a desktop, which is a metaphor. We put folders on that desktop ‑ again, a metaphor. We put documents inside the folders and so on.
And it's only recently that we've realized that folder even was a metaphor. I think most people didn't really get it, but it was a metaphor until they saw tagging. And then, they thought, "Oh, you can do this differently."
And it's not that we are going give up folders, because folders are actually a great technology. They're actually an invention, too. They are not that old themselves, even in the physical space. But, when we get sorted of blinded by the rear‑view mirror, we don't see the new possibilities.
In terms of the Web, of course, there was the Web pages era. So, in the early days of the Web ‑‑I think probably most of the people in this room remember a certain frustration with the creation of Web pages, or even like working for somebody who wanted you to create a web page and like really had the image of a page, a paper, and you were to create something like that.
The response to this was to create more things that were more dynamic. Does anybody remember the DHTML days? Yeah, when it was like really big deal. I will just zoom in a little bit here. Now, look at the new metaphor that was being brought in. It was said with the advent of DHTML, Web pages are one step closer to its cousin, TV, in terms of special effects.
So the new metaphor was like "let's copy TV." First, it was, "Let's copy print, now let's copy TV." And you can see down here at the bottom. These things would make your images fly, light up, turn static, slow down loading time.
So this is what people were after. But the problem with this code, it was really complex and it often went into one document. It wasn't like separate into multiple documents. And so form and content became inseparable, and it was basically almost impossible to upload content without knowing a whole lot. And, just even updating the content was really difficult, because you have to go into the code to actually update anything.
So Tim Berners Lee was really upset by this. And, by the late '90s, he had a series of talks, not just one. The first one was December '97. He said, "Look, it's not supposed to be a glorified television channel," because he had actually set it up so that people could share information and this kind of thing. He thought that people had really missed it.
If you click on one of these, you could really get a sense of the problems, because here ‑ I'll just go into special document effects. And you can see it has like "IE" on the sides. What that means is that it only works with IE. And then you had to put this other script in there that would actually tell it, like, "If it's not IE, then do this." You're basically building like two and something even three different websites all in one document ‑ really complex.
So these browser wars ultimately led to a new dedication in standards. And the reason I use the Firefox emblem is because towards the end of the nineties, Netscape and IE were like in this race basically to adapt themselves to DHTML, to have more effects and all this type of stuff, at the expense of all standards. So CSS wasn't even really adopted. Even though it was created many years earlier, it wasn't truly adopted, because there were racing to accept more and more DHTML.
So Netscape actually scrapped everything, rebuilt from scratch, and that become the base of what is now Firefox. And what happened then is that with form separated from content, you no longer needed to know complicated code to create content for the Web.
In that, once the standards were in place, CSS was alive; XML was able to grow at that point, and suddenly you had this very simple form. And this from Blogger, of course. Anybody can fill out this form and hit the publish button.
And, I've timed this before, it takes like 19 seconds to set up a blog these days. It's just that easy to create your own website now. So, of course, it's no surprise that there's 184 million blogs today, and that's almost 184 million more than there were in 2003 ‑ we are keeping track. And, I suppose it's because we're ready. We are just like desperate to come on and participate in the culture that we are a part of.
So, here we are in this new mediascape. I want to make a big point here. And that is that the medium shapes the message. So as we look back at this, each one of these is a different type of community with different ways of relating to each other and so on.
The reason why I've put this in the blogger format, is because blogger itself, was a big aha moment on the Web. It had just a signal box. The early blogs... first off you had to know HTML, if you were doing really early blogging.
And then there was a few platforms that emerged. Those early platforms, usually had a title space and then a link space, and then a comment space. The early blogs, were actually commenting on material that was already out on the Web. Because you're sort of required to put this little link in the link space.
But Blogger did something different, they just said, "We're just going to give you an empty box." So you can do whatever you want with it. That led to the proliferation of all these different types of communications on blogs.
So the medium shapes the message, it shapes the conversation, it shapes the possibilities then, for community, for identity construction, and ultimately for self‑awareness, so that the medium, the media that you guys create, those sort of platforms, that you guys create for people to connect on, are actually shaping really profound things in people's lives.
So this is where things will get interesting. We're going to jump in here, and just look around in this new mediascape to see how different media shape the way we connect with each other today.
So first we'll jump in to YouTube. Some of you may have seen some of these clips before. First off, we'll start off...
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: This is just a quick tour of what's on YouTube. So first off, it's not just young people right? Here's 92‑year‑old, Erving Fields, signing about YouTube.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: But the most common videos on YouTube, are actually home videos. About 33% of video's are just people uploading stuff from their family and just sharing these videos.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: So this is where it gets fun right? People start remixing this stuff.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: What's really interesting, sounds sophisticated. It's actually a bit more sophisticated, so this is obviously like a hip‑hop remix of the thing. These are done by amateurs because it's that easy to do.
Even a better example, this is a free demo version of this Fuity Loop loop software that you can get online. And this is De Andre Cortez Way, April 2007, creates this little riff along with this dance stand. You guys may have heard this before. Post this to YouTube under MySpace, and within months, everybody around the country is doing this dance same.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: These are prisoners in the Philippines. This is an MIT Professor and some graduate students, who studied for his historical theory. These are high school teachers, and then there's all these remixes too. This is the "Harry Potter" version. This is the "Lion King" version. Vincent, Winnie the Pooh, Spongebob, and this goes on and on.
So obviously, the major sort of record labels are on to this, and they decide to buy "Soldier Boy" and make this video.
In the video, you sort of mocks their own kind of cluelessness, in the new mediascape right? You'll see the imagery here, showing how the video spreads, and ultimately, finally found its way to these record executives.
You'll see the use of cell phones and so on. But what really gets me excited about YouTube, is another aspect of it, and that's that about 10,000 video's a day are actually addressed to the YouTube community.
These are people that are getting on the webcam and talking to each other. It's a unique form of community. Me and about 15 students have been getting involved in the YouTube community. There's Rebecca Roth, from 2007. She immediately started coming up with insights into the YouTube community. Here's what Rebecca was displaying and this is really cool.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: We started really thinking carefully about what it means to create a community through a webcam, and then through a screen. Everything is literally screened in this community, right? We started thinking about what that means and came up with a series of insights about what it means for identity and self‑awareness, and so on.
Here's one.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: This is Marshal McLuhan, talking about recognition, and it applies well to YouTube, even though he's not talking about YouTube.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: So you can see new types of self‑awareness emerging. I'll talk a little more about that in a second. There's also, not just while you're creating the videos, then there's this other side where you're watching the videos, and there's a certain anonymity in watching because the people you're watching can't see you, and this leads to some interesting effects.
First off, Lev Grossman once said that, "Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity, just for the spelling alone. Never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred."
I'll show you an example of this. It's just a random example here. The comment comes like: "Douchebags, you suck." This is responded by Wingman8788, "You guys are so gay, it sucks." Qwertyu121 says: "What the fuck are you talking about?"
Frickyougirl114 says, "YouTube comments make me angry. Grr." Then Qwertyu121 responds: "Then don't comment on YouTube." It's interesting.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: So there's this anonymity and physical distance, and the rare and ephemeral femoral dialogue. It creates hatred as a public performance, but it also creates a space, where people have the freedom to experience humanity, their co‑humanity without fear, or anxiety, as you'll see here.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: So it's almost like this state of aesthetic arrest where you really connect with people and you know in our society we kind of have this cultural inversion or cultural tension, you might say.
On the one hand, we really have a lot of individualism, independence and commercialization all around us, and yet we seek then the opposites, right, so we're just saturated with individualism and independence and commercialization.
Therefore we want community, relationships and authenticity. And this becomes a certain tension and in reality it turns out we want sort of both of these or some balance of these. And these are constantly in tension.
Now, what you see in new media a lot is that people want to find connections, bridging their isolated lives, but they also see these connections as constraints on their individualism, on their independence. So, ultimately, they want connection without constraint. That's like the ultimate. YouTube actually offers this possibility, as you'll see here.
[YouTube clip plays]
Michael Wesch: All right, so that's like a little brief version of how the medium of YouTube effects our self‑awareness, our ways that we negotiate identity and community and so on. And then you think about something like Twitter, just as a counter‑example, and think about what you're doing in those 140 characters.
So one version of what you're doing is life casting, and the nice thing about Twitter is it's always with you. You can text to it from your cell phone, and that means it's very different than what we see in YouTube. It's very different than a lot of other media that we are familiar with throughout our lives. So you can actually sort of lifecast your life out there.
Jay Rosen likes to think of it instead as mindcasting. Actually, he hates lifecasting in which you tell people about brushing your teeth. Instead, suggests that we actually sort of have quality content out there. That's what he calls mindcasting.
Lisa Reichelt has this great idea that in fact what we're doing is creating ambient intimacy, that these little details of our lives are sort of connecting us. So even while you're sitting here, you might get buzzed with a little Twitter update and you can check it and it'll say, "Just woke the kids up," or something like that. You're kind of ambiently connected with your family, even while you're sitting here in this room.
But what's really interesting is when all of these updates start to line up. Laura Fitten has this great quote about this. She says, "In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself," because you end up having this record.
If you just go to your own Twitter page, you have your own little record, all written in little 140 character little blips, about your life and you see yourself back to yourself, as you present yourself to other people because this is a very public space.
So it's a very interesting mode of self‑awareness. And there's one other idea floating around out there from Theresa Sindt that you're actually becoming a microcelebrity. You're managing your microcelebrity‑ness, whatever you might want to say.
And this is actually true for everybody. This isn't just people who have thousands of followers and follow very few people. This is really true for everybody in that most people who are on Twitter end up having several people following them. Maybe it's only five, maybe it's 10, whatever.
But you'll have people following you who you don't know, or you just barely know. And in a sense then, when you use Twitter, you're sort of releasing press releases of yourself out to these people. Everybody in a sense is famous, has that weird relationship with others where they know you and you don't know them. So that's kind of what Twitter can do.
Now here's where things get really interesting is in this world called 4chan. How many people go to 4chan? Ok, there's a couple. So this is a really great, interesting place. We're actually going to zoom here on a random board.
What 4chan is is just an image‑based bulletin board, or image board. And the field where you upload your image looks like this. And you can see there's name, email, subject, comment and then you upload a file. And it ends up looking like this. Now, one interesting thing about this is on the "/b/" Forum, this is where the medium becomes interesting.
They actually have basically no rules for posting, including you don't have to use a name at all. You don't have to use your name. You can change your name each time you post. You don't stay signed in and registered. So this is a very different type of thing than on Twitter, where you have a fixed identity. It's also very different than on YouTube where your identity is basically designated by your face and so on.
So here you have the basic comment field. You end up with a little dancer like this. So the forum is called "/b/." So here somebody has shown up and they say "Is this /b/?" and then somebody responds, "No, this is Patrick." "Wait, is this /b/?" It says, "No, this is Patrick." And it keeps going and going. This is actually from Spongebob. And it keeps going. It just keeps going and going and going.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: This is the type of banter you get. And so /b/ and 4chan itself sort of becomes this interesting world where everybody is anonymous. And so they actually become sort of a collective known as Anonymous. And also, each individual is also known as Anonymous. And this becomes like the primordial ooze from which so much of Internet culture is born, because it's this very creative space.
Think about when you're at your most creative is usually when you sort of let go of your identity, right? Usually you're drunk. And you sort of like forget it. You know to forget who you are and then this enormous creativity comes out, great jokes, funny stuff. 4chan is almost always like that.
And so they started posting pictures of cats with funny sayings on them. And this would tend to happen on Saturdays, so they started calling this Caturday, and Caturdays were born. And a lot of you have probably heard of this because they're the LOLcats that you see all over the place . There's now a whole website dedicated to them at icanhascheezburger.com.
But here, it's Caturday. They have a whole series. I tried to select ones that kind of represent the type of humor that you would see on this site. Now think about this, this is really interesting. I'm glad you guys all know what that is. I didn't want to show it. But if you don't know what it is, just look it up. Or not. Or not.
[laughter]
What's interesting is this is totally anonymous. When people post, you don't even know who they are. And so they have this whole language that's emerged to determine in‑group and out‑group. And it looks a little bit like this. And when it gets really deep, it looks like this. And it's the same thing that I just put up.
So there's all these new languages emerging. I think this would d be a good time to show this. They have all these shared memes and things that go around. So one of them is they have this great book from Dragonball Z, which you guys may have heard before. You get a sense of who's visiting the forum by the memes that they write.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: Ok. Now, what's interesting about that then is whenever people ask them like who are you and how many people are in anonymous, they always say "over 9,000." Again whenever anybody asks for a quantity of anything they say over 9,000.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: And then they go out to another people's forums and other people's blogs and they troll there, right, so they call it trolling. Where they go out and they basically say these obscure little things, or really outrageous things, to basically get a rise out of people. So in one of the most famous examples recently, they went to a forum on child predators on Oprah and they left a comment there and Oprah responded here.
[clip plays]
Oprah: Let me read you something, which was posted on our message boards from someone who claims to be a member of a known pedophile network. It said this, "It doesn't forgive, it does not forget. His group has over 9000 penises and they are all raping children."
[clip ends]
Michael Wesch: She is like very serious about this. Right?
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: And of course, the people at 4chan, they call themselves /b/tards because the place is called /b/. They call themselves /b/tards. They just go crazy.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: And this goes on and on. There's hundreds of those online if you want to look at those. So they come up with these great lines. You know they are actually in that sort of primordial ooze. There's all sorts of insights there about the nature of Internet culture itself.
So here they say, "We are anonymous, we cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances, we deliver your mail, we are everyone, we are no one." And then they go on, "United as one, divided by zero, we are legion. We do not forgive, we do not forget."
But there is a certain sort of insight there about, in a way we are all anonymous online. It's a really weird experience in the sense that these digital artifacts from 1.4 billion people are sort of floating in through our screens and stuff.
We connect with them generally not knowing where they came from. So we are all connecting anonymously in many ways, and not always, but often. So it's an interesting insight there and you know leads to that.
Now, maybe they might be most famous for the past year for their protest of Scientology and there's this great, great image that you see floating around about this. "Oh! Fuck, the Internet is here."
[laughs]
And you can see there actually all their sort of playfulness comes out in real life as well when we have these real life meetings. So here is actually a LOLcat spelled out on a banner. And Fox News picked up on this recently and just to the great amusement of 4chan‑ers said that they were hackers on steroids. But they are not really, I mean they are great hackers and in fact if you are thinking about visiting 4chan, do it on somebody else's computer.
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: The first time I went there, I just went onto 4chan and within two seconds all of my windows just collapsed, my computer turned off and then restarted and informed me that I had a virus and that I should download Microsoft Antivirus 2009, which actually doesn't exist. That was the virus itself. So it basically shut down my computer and then scared me into thinking I have a virus, so I would download it. So they do all sort of interesting things like that.
[laughs]
But, what's really interesting is they clearly like this really interesting culture but ultimately they are not a they because everybody is anonymous. So you can't really identify who is part of it and who is not.
Chris Landers did a story on them. He found out they are only a group in the sense that a flock of birds is a group, that are traveling in the same direction. At any given moment more birds can join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely. Again think of the way that sort of reveals so much about the Internet everywhere, right?
I mean most internet groups are actually like this in the sense that they are very rare that there are like these fixed groups that you really belong to and in the sense of that sort of tight community and instead we are almost like flocking to different things throughout the web.
What's really interesting is where they're going with this. They say, "We will stop at nothing until we have achieved our goal: permanent destruction of the identification role." Meaning that they've actually grabbed on to this idea of anonymity as a virtue.
It goes all the way back to the 1920s poets like T.S. Eliot, who were also into anonymity as an aesthetic ideal. They felt like we were becoming too much of a cult of celebrity, and even T.S. Eliot felt like too much of a celebrity. People would flock to him and read his work only because it's T.S. Eliot, not to actually see the work. T.S. Eliot hated this, and actually wanted to be more anonymous.
Here we see, 80 years later, the same thing. People battling against this cult of celebrity. They do this in a number of ways. One of the most famous, or visually interesting ones is what they do on Second Life. They have a whole group of people that attack Second Life at various times.
For example, this is an event for Anshe Chung, who was the millionaire Second Lifer. She's sort of a real estate mogul inside Second Life. CNET set up this very official looking press conference to talk to her about this, and some people on 4chan got together and decided to attack with flying penises. This totally disrupted the whole thing, of course.
[laughter]
["Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" plays]
Michael Wesch: Now, there's also a famous attack on John Edwards. I don't know if you guys remember this. John Edwards had a Second Life presence, and they attacked that. You can see, down at the bottom, they have a little conversation going on. They said, "Vegeta, what does the scouter say about his power level?" and he says, "It's over 9000!" They just keep doing this kind of thing.
Now, here's the interesting thing. You don't have to read this whole thing, but just note the impetus behind this. The reason why they're doing it. This was posted to the John Edwards blog after they had blogged about this.
It says, "As the Internet has grown in popularity, a disturbing phenomena has occurred. Everyone thinks they are special. We have news for you: You aren't special. You aren't unique. You are a mindless horde, traversing the universe on a small ball of dirt."
It goes on to say, "We are here to remind you of this." Down here at the bottom, it says, "Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, we will be there. Wherever someone has an inflated ego, we will be there. We will do it through madness. We will remove you from the high place you have built for yourself." So again, this sort of attacking, the Internet sort of celebrity narcissism that appears there.
One of the most famous examples here is Tay Zonday. I don't know if you guys have seen this. I'll just play a brief thing to remind you guys.
["Chocolate Rain" plays]
Michael Wesch: I don't know if you guys would think that this could be a video that could get 33 million views, and up, and make him a millionaire, but in fact, it's happened. The reason why is because 4chan, the people on /b/, sort of make a mockery of our cult of celebrity. They will sometimes actually pick somebody out and launch them to stardom. This is one of those examples.
Here you can see, it got so popular that YouTube had Tay Zonday Day, in which the whole front page was nothing but Tay Zonday, and if you look it up now... I forget what it is. I think it's in the thousands of remixes of this, the Tay Zonday thing.
I think what 4chan is most famous for in the last year, though, is this thing here. Wherever someone takes themselves too seriously, they will place a link, and this has become a very common thing to do. You click on that link thinking that it's going to be part of this serious discussion, and you get what is called "Duck Rolled." This has transitioned into the "Rick Roll." You guys might remember this.
["Never Gonna Give You Up" plays]
Michael Wesch: You can imagine why they would choose this, based on their sense of humor, but here's where it gets interesting. There's all these remixes of it, right? This is Hugh Atkins.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: This points to something even bigger and more important, in the way that this was created. He was actually using a search system on Google that actually indexes every word in every video ever stated by any politician, which allowed him to put this thing together.
This means that the capacity for making videos has now gone up tremendously. He's John McCain with a blue screen behind him, and of course, this is just too good to pass up.
[clip plays]
[laughter]
Michael Wesch: All right. I like to think of this as a seriously playful participatory media culture. It's not just like that people are playing around. It's not just like what you see on 4chan, where it looks like it's just all a bunch of play. There's also a serious element to this. There's a constant commentary on our culture appearing there. It's like finally people have a way to talk back, and they're using it.
It's not just in terms of how easy it is to make video, and create these things that they're doing, but also in the ubiquity of video, so for example, here's John McCain not knowing that he's on camera.
[clip plays]
John McCain: ...an old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran? Bomb, bomb, bomb... Anyway...
Michael Wesch: This is then three days later on YouTube. This gets picked up and made into several remixes.
[clip plays]
Newscaster: No apologies, though, for a musical parody that many around the world took as a true sign of his thinking.
John McCain: When veterans get together, veterans joke. I was with veterans, and we were joking.
[clip ends]
Michael Wesch: This is what you might call a context collapse, which is happening all over in our environment, now, in a sense that you never know where you are, who you're talking to, and where you really are, because it can be picked up at any time.
Here's another example from the advertising world. This is from GM. You'll see here, in a second. GM thought they could leverage this participatory media environment by allowing people to make their own commercials for the GM Tahoe. It's real easy. Steps one, two, three, four, and then there you are. This is what was made. Stuff like this.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: Just to show you how sophisticated this can get, this is a remix, obviously using a lot of Hollywood films and repurposing them. It's set to Regina Spektor music. You listen to the lyrics, it's a very powerful message. Talking about slightly used parts.
There she says, "We're living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers." The reason why she's discussing this is because, in fact, the things that she has done should not be illegal, but they are, in the sense that if she ripped the DVD, it's illegal. There are these sort of constraints on our participation, even today.
Here's Lawrence Lessig talking about this.
[clip plays]
Lawrence Lessig: We need to recognize you can't kill the instinct that technology produces. We can only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them quote "pirates." And, is that good?
We live in this weird time, and age of prohibitions, when many areas of our life, we live life constantly against the law. Ordinary people live life against the law. That's what they are doing to our kids. They live life knowing they live it against the law. That realization is extraordinary to us, extraordinarily corruptive, and in a democracy, we ought to be able to do better.
[clip ends]
Michael Wesch: One of my favorite things about this is actually not the video itself, which is amazing, and very artistic, and a beautiful work, but at the end, you'll see that there's some people's comments. There's all these comments on YouTube. If you read the comments under there, it says, "My God, are you doing that for a living? I've never seen anything like this. You're an artist."
To which she responds, "No, I'm a housewife."
That's the beauty of YouTube today, sort of the environment we have today, is that so many people are able to create for a broader public, create these beautiful things.
There's also the possibility of creating together. We see it on Wikipedia, but we also see it, even in the video space. Here you see somebody donning the anonymous mask, Matt V. here. He actually invites people to collaborate with him.
I think by being anonymous, he actually becomes sort of a platform for this collaboration. All he asks is that people put a message on their hand, and then upload the video. Well over 2, 000 people did this, and then he was able to take all of these videos and create this final little bit.
This is kind of an interesting moment here, to think about what people will reach out to their webcams with, right? You have one message to put on your hand, and you reach up to the webcam.
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: You'll see, generally in this age, people are thrilled that they can finally connect with each other across these great distances, right? At some level, that's just amazing in itself. And then, of course, there's the self‑reflection that you saw earlier. Sort of love yourself, and that kind of thing.
Also, I think whenever you see messages like this, people deliver messages like this because they don't feel like they have truly come to fruition. These aren't just saying, "This is the way things are." They're saying, "This is the way things should be. This is what we should strive for, and so on." We're not there yet. These are not messages of celebration, as much as, "Let's do this."
[clip plays]
Michael Wesch: So in that context then, look at where you guys come in. So, here we are in this landscape. We have this possibility for a seriously playful participatory culture, but it's enabled by very specific architectures of participation. Every single architecture actually elicits a different type of participation, and you guys are the ones who are creating these things.
I only want to spend two minutes on the future. Make it 20 seconds. I'll do this really fast. Instead of telling you details, where things are going, I'll just point out the futurists all agree on one trend, toward ubiquitous networks, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous information, and unlimited speed. Everything, everywhere, from anywhere, on all kinds of devices.
Nobody disagrees with that. I think everybody in here would agree that that's the general trend that we're headed for. That means that these architectures of participation are increasingly becoming the architectures of our everyday life. It's like information architecture is blending with the architecture of the real world, and in fact blending with the architecture of society itself.
And so, when you think about information architect, it's not just an architect of information, but an architect of human relations. That means that you then have this capacity to build architectures for a new future of whatever.
If we go back to where we started here, in the '60s, it was, "I don't care, whatever you think." In the '90s, it became, "Whatever. I don't care what you think." In the future, we can hope that we can create architectures of participation that will allow people to feel a sense caring, and they'll be able to say, "I care. Let's do whatever it takes, by whatever means necessary."
Thanks.
[applause]
[music]
Announcer: To hear even more presentations from the 2009 IA Summit, point your browser to boxesandarrows.com, and click on the podcast link. There you'll find access to the iTunes feed, and more information about each presentation.
Our heartfelt thanks to the organizers and sponsors of the 10th annual IA Summit, the presenters, and of course to the global community. We look forward to feedback about future episodes that will be of greatest value to you, our listeners.
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IA Summit 09 - Day 1

Jeff Parks — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 07:28:44 GMT

IA Summit 2009 Podcasts
The IA Summit was held in Memphis, TN from March 20-22. Boxes and Arrows captured many of the main conference sessions ("see schedule":http://iasummit.org/2009/program/schedule/).
| "Preview":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/when-life-intervenes | "Keynote":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-keynote | Day 1 | "Day 2":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-2 | "Day 3":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-3 | "Closing Plenary":http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-plenary |
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Main Conference Sessions, Day 1 - Friday, March 20
These sessions were recorded on the first day of the conference. Download them individually here, or get them all with the Boxes and Arrows "iTunes feed":http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=275459507. Links to the presentations and "slidecasts":http://www.slideshare.net/faqs/slidecast will be updated continuously. See the Slideshare "IA Summit 2009":http://www.slideshare.net/event/ia-summit-2009/slideshows page for up-to-the-minute lists of available presentations. Thanks to the speakers for their hard work and for sharing their knowledge with the community.
You are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space and The Context Problem - Andrew Hinton
Lead Information Architect in Vanguard’s User Experience Group, Andrew Hinton provides engaging examples (including Mr. Spock, a speeding trolley, and a Dada urinal), illustrating how language powerfully affects context, and vice-versa.

Andrew connects this understanding with real-life IA design issues such as Twitter's syntax or Facebook's Beacon and challenges us to think more carefully about how we shape context in the digital dimension.

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Transcript of You are (Mostly) Here: Digital Space and The Context Problem - Andrew Hinton. Main Conference Session, Day 1 – Friday, March 20
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Announcer: This podcast brought to you by ASIST, the American Society of Information Science and Technology, the society for information professionals, by the IA Summit, the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals, by Boxes and Arrows, visit Boxesandarrows.com/about/participate to be a part of your peer written journal. And special thanks to Axsure and Morae for sponsoring Boxes and Arrows, as well as the many other sponsors of the IA Summit.
Lead information architect at Vanguard's User Experience Group, Andrew Hinton, provides engaging examples including Mr. Spock, a speeding trolley and a data urinal, illustrating how language powerfully affects context and vice versa.
Andrew connects this understanding with real life IA design issues such as twitter syntax and Facebook speak end and challenges us to think more carefully about how we shape context in the digital dimension. I hope everyone enjoys the podcast, cheers.
Andrew Hinton: So thank you for coming, this talk is about context, it's about how context has been disrupted, about what I'm calling here, digital space. I don't, we need a word for this stuff, this digital space thing, digital space doesn't quite seem to do it, cyberspace is sort of old hat, I've been toying with metaspace but it's already being used in some other areas, so anyway, I'm tossing it out there, work on that.
But first I want to tell you about this amazing fake news that's coming out of Vegas, out of Las Vegas, which has a thematic connection to Elvis' home town, right? So, OK, yeah. Actually, it has nothing to do with, but as you know, Las Vegas is America's playground for grownups.
It turns out that Las Vegas has had a dip in tourism and they want to enhance their service model. So some brilliant people from, I won't name the department, have come up with a way to surprise its visitors with a whole new, fun, sort of social program.
First, they're going to watch you as you spend money in Vegas. They're going to watch everything you spend money on in Vegas, by the security cameras that are already in Vegas all over the place. But they're just adding this new layer of functionality. Wow factor if you will.
And they'll also be transcribing everything that you spend money on. They're going to keep a nice, line by line record of everything you do in the city; probably the equipment will be a little bit more updated than what you see here.
The products you buy, the shows that you see, the services that you may acquire; everything that you spend money on, cash, credit, check or money order or barter will be captured and transcribed.
Oh but it gets better, you're really going to love this. Then what they do is they go into your hotel room and they find your address book, which I'm sure looks exactly like that.
And everybody that's in it, who are obviously all your friends, your very close friends, right, who are all, everybody in your address book is; they're going to grab that thing and they're going to copy all the contact information for everybody you know.
And then what they're going to do is, they're going to send a notice to everybody you know any time you buy anything in Vegas. Right? Isn't that cool? What? Who, tell me, who would love to have that service when they go to Vegas? Nobody?
You guys, God you're so, no, it's not, nobody wants that and obviously as I said, the story is not real, but it is, because this is what happened on Facebook.
How many of you have heard of Beacon, the Facebook service? OK, so Beacon was a service Facebook launched with very little warning. Basically everything you bought at a connected partner venue site, store, would show up in your news feed and the news feeds of your friends.
So everything you bought, right, at Amazon, Zappos, I don't know, what else was on there, but all these other stores. They assumed that this was something that everybody was just going to love. And essentially it was a recommendation engine, right, that was going to give people the idea that, "Well, if my friends bought that, maybe I should buy one too."
But this was an awfully convenient thing for them to assume, because really, it fit into their whole marketing model.
But unlike Vegas, where it would have taken a major expense, a lot of physical work to create the infrastructure, not to mention a radical overhaul of Nevada privacy laws, right, there would have been news everywhere about this.
Everybody would have seen it coming, it would have cost a lot of money, a lot of time, at Facebook this feature just meant somebody had to write some code and flip the switch, that's all it took.
And suddenly you were in a very different place than you thought you were in.
So what was the outcome? It caused a giant user revolt, a lot of controversy, why? Because the nice people at Facebook did not comprehend a lot of things about their user base. They made a lot of assumptions about their users' context.
For one thing, Facebook took great liberties with what the word "friend" means. "Friend," right?
[laughter]
And people recoiled in horror because this lumbering creature had invaded their privacy; it had connected things that many users did not want connected. If you've seen "Frankenstein," this scene does not end up well.
Now here's another story and I really love this story. This is a urinal. Does anybody recognize this urinal? OK, this is also, according to most historians and experts, the most influential work of art of the twentieth century.
Influential, not prettiest, right, not most inspiring, most influential, and why is that? Well to be exact, it's a urinal that Marcel Duchamp submitted to an art show in 1917.
He didn't just submit it though, he scrawled R. Mutt, 1917, which you can see there and, like an artist's signature, and he called it "Fountain," he put it on a pedestal and then he submitted it to the art show.
It was a splendid act of Dada or Dadaism, which Professor Wexler's talk earlier, showed us a lot, sort of like, twenty first century things in the spirit, like the dancing male members in "Second Life." So it was, it ended up being more than just a joke.
I mean this was sort of early twentieth century participatory playful culture hacking, right.
This is what Duchamp was doing, he was hacking the culture, he was disrupting people's expectations about western art and western culture, because, World War I had just happened and the Dadaists were like, screw all your values and all your morals, and all your priorities because they obviously don't work so we're here to upend them.
So it was like, what was that site for, I know what it is, anyway, it was like that site but in the nineteen teens. OK, you know what I mean; you know where I'm going. So he labeled it and he put it in a different context, on a pedestal and submitted it to an art show.
Duchamp changed the frame of reference for the object and it was a challenge against everything that had come before, every cultural assumption or taboo. It eventually affected how people thought about high art, low art, culture, everything.
So these histories of language and context can have really history changing effects. Here's a graphic that was on boingboing.net, not long ago, notice the sort of grainy, satellite photo, the labels say that there's a decontamination vehicle, a security post and a large chemical munitions bunker.
So immediately I'm thinking, "Well let's bomb that. Let's get rid of that thing. I don't like that. Nobody should have that." Well, that's enough to convince anybody that there's trouble afoot, right?
The real trouble is that what's afoot is the language because this can just as easily be a delivery truck, an SUV and an IHOP. Now, whether you like IHOP or not, if you think their food is really terrible, it's not toxic chemical munitions, it's not that bad. Maybe later it gets that bad, but not in the actual restaurant.
Here's another fun thing about context. This is the trolley conundrum. And by the way, everything you see here, I basically learned in podcasts, so I'm not an expert on any of this stuff.
Imagine there's a trolley, and it's going really fast, but its brakes are out. And it is racing down the tracks.
And you, lucky you, you happen to be standing right by the tracks, and you can see that the trolley is hurdling toward a fork in the track.
And on one side of the fork is someone lying on the track unconscious. And on the other side of the fork there are five people lying on the track unconscious.
OK. Why they are unconscious, we don't know. Maybe there was a rave there last night by the train yard.
Regardless, not only are you witness to this impending catastrophe, you also happen to be the only person within reach of a lever which you see next to you right there that happens to control which fork the trolley will take.
Right now it's set to go down the side that's surely going to kill five innocent adorably passed out ravers. And on the other side, there is only one of them.
So if you pull it, you are going to save a net of four lives. Do you pull the lever?
Well, in experiments where huge samples of people were asked this question, and this is a very common psychology situational ethics question, nine out of 10 people say, yeah, I guess would have to pull the lever. Not like joyfully. But they are like, yeah, guess I would do it.
Well that's fascinating. But that's not all. Because if you ask a bunch of other people, a very similar question which is this: There is a similar problem with just a few differences. So here's the trolley hurling down the track, only there is just one track this time, and the five unconscious people are lying on it.
And this time you are not on the side of the lever. You are standing on an overpass above the track. And there is a huge bodybuilder, like 375, standing on the overpass. He is like Andre the Giant size. And he is teetering over. He's looking. He's teetering over.
You just know... You are a tiny wimpy person. If you threw your own life in front of the trolley you would never stop it.
But you know that this guy, if he fell down there, he would definitely stop it.
And if you did this: "Oh, excuse me." He would fall. And he would stop the trolley and save five people.
Well, would you do that?
Nine out of 10 people say no, I could not push this person to his death. Well that's strange. It's the same effect, right?
Only recently are scientists really starting to figure out what's going on when we are making these sorts of decisions. And it has to do with brains.
Some scientists have been working on why we do this. They think they have some answers. And it turns out when you ask the trolley conundrum of people who are in an FMRI scan... these things are the favorite toy now of science. They are throwing everything in them.
It's like when you were a kid and you first discovered xerox copiers. And you were like, "Well let's see what this looks like."
That's what they are doing. Oh, let's put a rat in there! Let's put somebody in there and make them do a jig.
But they are doing things like this. So they are putting people in there, and they are asking them these sorts of questions.
Each of the sides of the trolley conundrum is affecting the brain differently. Our frontal lobes are the most recently evolved part. They house our more rational, logical processes. This tends to engage the version involving the lever. Because it's a cost benefit analysis. And we are more physically removed from the results of our action.
Pulling a lever is not a visceral or intimate act like pushing bodily another human being. So let's say this is sort of the Spock side.
Why yes, I would pull the lever. That sounded totally not like Spock. Did it?
I think I was doing Eddie Izzard doing Sean Connery.
Anyway. Then there is the limbic system which is quite ancient. It's back in there from back when we use to swim in the ocean. Or eat flies off the ground and stuff. It handles a lot of stuff like breathing, bodily functions, but it also handles instinctive things like fear, revulsion, and pleasure.
Now this is important, an awful lot of our behavior, what we are discovering in brain science, me and all the other fake brain scientists.
You listen to podcasts about this. What we are discovering is that maybe the vast majority of the stuff that we do on a day to day basis is really coming out of these deep sort of roiling, weird, ancient, jungly, recesses in our brains.
And then this little flap, this frontal lobey thing, that we have evolved in a very recent human future, or human history, is catching it and making sense of it for us. So we'll say, I am going to drink this water.
[drinks water and swallows]
OK. But I didn't do a cost benefit analysis just now to do that.
But I can easily explain to you all the reasons what I did while I was thirsty. I picked it up. I was careful. But none of that stuff was actually happening because my frontal lobe was telling me to do it. Anyway.
Just to keep the metaphor clear, let's say that this is the Captain Kirk side of things. So what these scientists contend is that when we encounter a problem like this we'd like to think that we are very rational. But in fact both of these parts of the brain are heavily engaged. They have to fight it out to see which side is going to win as illustrated here.
Or better yet.
[music plays]
Can you hear that? There you go. This is human morality in action. Of course you have to see Kirk's nipples at some point in the fight. All right. So let's move on to something more civilized. That's just the most awesome clip ever.
So one thing this tells us is that language actually shapes the way we perceive reality in a very deep biological neurological way.
Another study using the same FMRI scans ‑ those are so fun ‑ tested how people would respond to wine. They had subjects take two tastes of wine while being scanned. And they told them that one was this really inexpensive cheapo wine. And the other was a very high priced, fine, expensive wine that won a lot of awards.
Actually, I think all they told them was the price. People not only said that they thought the expensive wine was more delicious, but according to the FMRI scans they're brains reacted in very different ways. The cheap wine was OK.
Oops. Oh, have to start over now. OK.
The cheap wine was OK. But it didn't really cause that much activity. You can see if we are saying, "Which apparently was coined sometime in the '90s. According to professor Wesch. And the expensive wine lit up more of the brain's pleasure center. Literally. The funny thing is, it's the same wine. Same wine.
So the next time you think, I am going to spend $50.00 on this bottle. I bet it's really good. There are two problems with that. One is well, it might be chemically substantially the same as the $6.00 bottle of wine. The problem is, something about it being $50.00, literally in reality does make it taste better even though the physical reality of it is no different.
OK. My word, isn't that strange? How deeply our experience, and meaning, can change just because a label on something.
Well, you are all information architects. You label stuff for a living. I am simplifying things. So this is important. This is an important thing to think about. These studies are teaching us a lot about the power of context and language. And the fact is that context to some degree is biological for us.
And our brains can respond very differently to just a few changes in context. So, these things that people were hearing for the trolley conundrum, and the things that people were hearing for the wine tasting, were just language. That's all it was.
You weren't putting somebody on a train track. You weren't making them have to pull a lever. You weren't actually even changing the wine. All you were doing was labeling it with something.
So context and language are highly symbiotic. They affect each other very, very deeply in ways that we don't really intuitively understand.
This is Boylan Heights, it's a historic neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina. And on the left is the map snapped from Google Maps. Maps are a very specialized form of language that we use to form our understanding of geographic contexts.
And on the right is the satellite view with the Boylan Heights area highlighted. Now, in a physical world, map and landscape are not the same thing. At least not literally but in every way except literally, the more you look at all this, the more they start to blur.
When you look at this photograph of Boylan Heights and you layer it with these streets, you realize you already had a filter when you were looking at the satellite picture. You are already thinking of it as a map.
When you are looking at satellite pictures, we have been trained culturally to look at these streets and say OK, we view it as a map of streets, basically. Everything else is undifferentiated mass of houses and people and trees and stuff.
Well, there is something special about Boylan Heights. It was a subject of obsession of a writer, artist, and professor of geography named Dennis Wood.
And it was where he lived when he was teaching at North Carolina State University, and some of you may have heard about this on This American Life. They played it a couple of times, it is really good, another podcast.
So, Wood is something of an artist philosopher and for a while he had a project going where he mapped his neighborhood in some really unconventional interesting ways.
There is the map of the overhead lines. So if you were electricity, this is how you would understand Boylan Heights. The street signs, there is an underground map showing sewer and water lines and cisterns if you were water. This is how you would experience Boylan Heights.
There is a street light maps where light divides darkness after sundown. There is a car spaces map.
Now, this is interesting. This is the mentions in the newsletter map that track mentions of certain addresses in a neighborhood newsletter over the years. Interestingly, no matter who lives in the homes, that are being mentioned a lot. It didn't matter who live there, they were the same homes being mentioned a lot in the newsletter, right?
So does this mean that a certain home just command more attention? Does it mean particular homes attract certain kind of owners?
Interesting question. All the conceptual mapping by the way that we do in our work is trying to get similar kinds of answers, right? Well, this is my favorite. It's the porches in the neighborhood where you find one or more jack‑o‑lanterns.
And interestingly, it corresponds highly to the mentions in the newsletter map. Interesting. So when you correlate this two things, you realize people who like being participatory, who like to be front and center in the neighborhood, maybe they are attracted to these corner lots, etc., interesting.
Taken together, these maps are really, really enlightening because after all a neighborhood isn't just streets. A neighborhood is made of neighbors, and the streets are just one very thin slice of what that place means to human beings.
What these maps remind us of is that we often received messages about context without really thinking. And without questioning what other experience or wisdom might be hidden from us because we haven't looked or we haven't asked.
It's not the maps fault. The map is just doing its job. It is doing the work the maker assumes they needed to do. The map can't do everything, it can't show you everything because if it did it would be the landscape and it wouldn't be a map anymore.
So, the territory was there first and the map came later, but the map has a lot of power over how we understand the territory, which is really basically the same thing as saying what Michael Wesch was saying earlier which is the context or the places or the...
Actually I can't remember exactly what he said, but basically these things that we make shape us and then we shape them. It goes like that.
Dennis once says the map's effectiveness is the consequence of the selectivity or interest with which it brings the past to bear on the present. Maps written by serving interests. There is always interests behind the creation of them.
So that is not bad. It just makes a map a map. And every time we shape language and context it is serving some interest whether consciously explicitly or not. I suspect that more often than not when we describe context with language, we don't consider the options because they have not occurred to us.
So, now you may be wondering when we are going to get into the digital part of this talk. Well, online we have a lot of maps that shape how we understand the things that they describe but online, it gets weirder. Sort of MUD, a multi‑user domain or a multi‑user dungeon.
OK good, not alone, OK. I have not logged into one of these things in years and so in my room, I logged into this just so I could get a screen grab.
So basically, these are the great grand daddies of World of Warcraft and Second Life but it's all text. And you navigate and play by a command line. You type North, South, whatever. It's all text. I bring them up because they illustrate something very important about digital space to make a modern mush or moo of the various flavors of these things.
You start by making rooms. A room is basically just a space, OK. It's a particular context. And what you do is you use a command such a dig, dig and then you scraped out all the things about the context, about the room like it is going to have an exit here that is going to go to this, it's going to link to this, it's going to look like this and then it's all just text.
And then when somebody is playing the grid or the place... When they enter it then experience it, right?
MUDs and their kin have their own script language for their creation. And what you create ends up being experienced like a series of connected spaces, contexts, sub‑contexts. All making up the larger context of the MUD.
This is a map of just part of a long time MUD based on the Discworld novels which is still out there. It's the one where I get the screen gram from.
So even though I am showing you a map here which is just another language artifact. The visual is just meant to evoke the fact that there is a context being created with this language.
But unlike Boylan Heights, there is no physical context with which to compare this map. This map is a map of another map, right? They are just experienced a little differently.
In digital space, map creates the territory literally. So, I know most of you. Actually, more than I realized are familiar with MUDs and [mumble] but the web is not really that different.
So, on the web we make the territories, the context by mapping them and the map becomes its own territory and vice versa. So, at Google there is a site map and the site map represents the space you are in but unlike regular maps, when you click this, when you actually go to the place that you are... That is being described.
So, there are this weird fuzzy boundary that is happening in the digital space between the real and the virtual. So let's say you are interested in how saddles are made and so you search leather working on Google, and I don't know if you can see that but what it brings up is leather working and World of War Craft.
Now, you got to wonder what's up with this. These are all about how to make leather goods in the land of Azeroth. Why?
Well, because there is eight million or more at last count people playing this game and a lot of them frankly want to know how to make a detrimental chest guard. So, remember as Dennis Wood told us earlier. Maps serve map's world by serving interest. So online, wherever the central gravity of interest is, that's how the maps are going to behave.
Early on in Wikipedia's history, there were ten times more pages for a while there on the wars in the Star Trek universe than there were in the Peloponnesian wars just because there are a lot of geeks on there.
So if this makes you a little bit dizzy? It should because there is this vertigo that you get when you realize that we are living in more than one place at the same time. It is less and less exclusively physical this world that we are in.
And just as I was speaking a lot of you may probably have been text messaging, or twittering or chatting or whatever. Increasingly, we are walking around in many contexts at once that are all blurring together and Michael Wesch was talking about this as being context collapse.
For me it is not exactly collapse because it sounds apocalyptic although it is basically a collapse, but it is a readjustment. Radical readjustment of context that we still really don't have our heads around.
This dimension, this information dimension is really screwing up what we mean when we say the word "here". Because if you are in Twitter right now and you got friends who are not in this room, they think of you as being here on Twitter.
I am assuming not all of you are on Twitter and recommend you stay away from it, because it will just destroy hours of your day. But even on Twitter you will see people go away and say, "I am leaving for a little while, I am going offline" and will come back to say, "I'm back."
Back where? Because it is not even like IRC or a chat room where there is one room. It is all these different multi‑variant versions of rooms that people have that they are looking at. We'll talk about twitter again in a little bit.
We're in this weird situation where we have this fuzzy human stuff that we're trying to make into data but the data, these machines that we make screen out a lot of human ambiguities. It loses a lot of meaning along the way. You take something like love and then you go to Facebook and you say, well I'm in a love relationship.
You get six mutually‑exclusive choices here. The computer is saying you have to be one of these. Even though in public we might always describe ourselves as one of these, in reality, we might be some mixture of them, right?
Or we might not really be ready to actually instantiate the fact that I'm engaged just yet like in Facebook. It'll bring up some conversations you have to have for your partner.
[audience laughter]
Andrew: Digital space tends to be very narrow in its definitions and it takes words that have a lot of richness and it truncates their meanings into these logical obsoletes. Again, language shapes context, shapes language but in this world of pure context and pure language, it can get crazy. Digital space is pretty ruthless about interpreting our ambiguities and that can be a problem, because our lives and language are full of ambiguities.
There's the classic example from the book, "Eat Shoots and Leaves," all about grammar and syntax. This phrase can be understood in a couple of different ways. There's the cute panda, eating bamboo shoots and bamboo leaves.
Or if you just add a comma, suddenly you're dealing with something surreal and violent, right? Now, just one little typo in a letter or email to one of you where I made this typo isn't really going to confuse you because there's more context around it, where you're going to say: "Oh, it's just a typo."
The computers don't understand that context unless we tell them to and that's extremely hard to do. It's still very rudimentary even with the advances that we made.
I say "we," as if I'm one of these scientists doing this and I'm not. "We," as methodical people.
What I'm getting at here is where something as small as a comma can radically change the meaning of language on a page in digital space. Something that small can radically change the meaning of the space.
For example, on physical space, there's an obvious difference between a little nook in the corner of the room where I can whisper to someone, a private interchange and compare that to a stage in front of thousands of people where a microphone announces to all of them everything that you're going to say. There's a pretty obvious difference there.
It would be really hard to confuse these two places. It would be really, really hard to suddenly change from one to the other, right? You would have to tear down the alcove, build a stadium, invite a bunch of people and then suddenly they're there. Well, you can't actually physically do that.
But on Twitter, you have both options. You have the hidden nook, which is the "D" for direct message to someone, or you can just do a reply which everyone going to see. OK? In the physical world, it's hard to mistake one for the other and do one over the other in haste, but on Twitter, it's incredibly easy to make this mistake.
It's just not so obvious. You are literally changing; remember what I said about the wine labels and the brains. Our experience of reality is so bound up with these things, but we're literally shaping the reality of human beings when we are creating these digitally‑linked, labeled, shaped context.
I just don't think we've been taking it seriously enough, really. We tend to think, "Well it's just the web. It's just this medium." I'm sure everybody here has hit "reply all" at some time so even if you're not on twitter, you know what I'm talking about, you actually did the "reply all" thing. It can be very disorienting.
Context really tends to shape identity as well. That's why we get these weird, buzzy feeling in our head when we're stuck in these confused situations. If you think of the Garden [?] office building, an office typically has a particular architecture. It has specific design choices that afford certain kinds of things.
At a night club, it affords completely different things because the layout is different, the equipment is different, the lighting is different, the bathrooms are situated differently. There's a bar. All these things, of course if you started up ten years ago, maybe you're at a bar, but that all went away.
Now when you're at the office, you're wearing your office hat, right? You're playing that role, it's not fake, you're not pretending, it's just the side of you turn on there. If you go to the nightclub or wherever you like to spend your evenings, you might have a completely different side of yourself, right? You go bowling with your friends.
How many of you have had the weird feeling of: I'm in this other place and someone from my workplace is suddenly there in front of me saying, "hi." It's as if, "I'm not sure if I recognize this person," and then you realize, "I work with them," but you don't realize them right away because you know them from a different context.
Their identity in your head is very bound up in that context and yours is too. It would be awkward and it gives you this weird sense of vertigo, because these are parts of yourself rubbing up against each other in ways that you're not used to.
Well, now online we're offered this plethora of choices for extending and refining the facets of our identity and each has its own architecture that shapes who you are when you're there. At LinkedIn, you have really different choices than at Chemistry. LinkedIn will ask you about your job history, not about what you like to do on a date. Chemistry is the other way around.
All of these architectures are for certain sorts of identity and facets of ourselves. That brings us a lot of challenges when it comes to cross‑overs of context.
We might not want our office mates to know what nightclubs we frequent or who we're dating or what we like to do on a date. Unlike an office, or a nightclub or a church, or Vegas, these are not the physical places we're used to. These can cross over or change in a moment's notice.
Lots of people who started out using Facebook while they were in school and the strong implication was that nobody is going to be here except your classmates. Even now there are core pieces of the way Facebook functions structurally, architecturally, that still has that legacy assumption.
Now they're trying to layer on all this other stuff. Almost overnight, Facebook changed into, "Oh, we're really just an everybody and everything space." Right? All the people who were students on there, we had people in our office who are members going, "Oh, I've got pictures on there that I should really take down, because all my co‑workers now are trying to link to me."
My thirteen year old daughter was trying to link to me recently. I didn't have anything embarrassing up there but I did do a double take.
[audience laughter]
What do I have up there? Who am I linked to because I couldn't tell her, "No honey, I'm not your friend on Facebook."
[audience laughter]
Andrew: You can't do that. Again, you get this weird identity vertigo. People I knew from twenty years ago are putting pictures of me as a fourteen year old, because I happened to be standing at group a photo of some kind.
All these people that didn't give a damn about me twenty years ago are putting pictures of me up and carefully labeling them and linking them to my profile and I'm like, I worked damned hard for twenty years to get separated from the me that was seventeen years old.
I deserve to have that in the past. All those people, all those things, I would have kept up with you if I cared, but I don't. Yet, here it comes. Again, we get this weird sense of vertigo.
We like to think that our identities are not so dependent on the context we're in or the people we're around but as we found out that, with the whole FMRI scanning thing, it's more complicated than that. The way we perceive reality is very much driven by a lot of fluid things.
Science and philosophy have been telling us, especially the philosophers, have been telling us for a generation or more now that objectively speaking, we're just not all that solid in terms of identity. We're constructed from the interactions, memories, and stories around us.
The self is a useful illusion, a reification that we depend upon for getting along in the world, right? We have to think of ourselves as a reified self in order just to get along, but it's actually multi‑layered, multi‑faceted.
There's another Marcel Duchamp creation, nude descending the staircase and it also prefigured this weird time space to displace dimension that we've created for ourselves where our identities are sliced and frozen in time and spread across space.
Our identities are inextricably bound up in the spaces and systems that we make for ourselves. Because most of the planet now, is living in environments that human beings made, rather than emerged from nature.
Sherry Turkle, a professor and writer in my Tees has been exploring this issue for a long time. Back in 1995, she wrote a book called "Life on the Screen" and she explained how the Internet have brought to a literal combination, of what people like Lacan, Fuko, and Levi Strauss have been saying about us all along.
She described herself, as a multiple distributed system, a de‑centered self that exists in many worlds, and plays many roles at the same time.
A world in which so‑called real life, is just one more window, and the ethnographic research, she did was in multi‑user domains, MUDs the text thing I showed you earlier. It really prefigured so much of this indigenous user content, contextual weirdness that we find ourselves in now.
Our esteemed guest, Professor Wesch, talks about context collapse, and he mentioned it in his presentation today. Basically he says thing about how on the other side of this glassed lens, is almost everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, even ones you've never heard of, billions of potential viewers.
The seemingly innocuous and insignificant glass dot is the eyes of the world in the future, and the problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse. Basically, the sort of black hole that sucks everything in, and squishes it all up.
I don't think that it's collapsing into nothingness. I think it's just collapsing into something radically different. But it's already happened basically, and yet we don't have the language, we don't have the brain wiring. We don't have the cultural structures to deal with it yet. We need to maybe intentionally start working on that.
I'm going to hurry though this. This is an interesting thing to get across, because I think it's a lesson we all need to learn as designers. Even understanding all of this, even if we got it all just right, if we design context, and connected contexts, so that they're just exquisitely like they are to be. We still don't really have much control over it.
On Twitter, it was originally made to go on your phone, on a very narrow aperture experience, a very atomic, one thing at a time, piecemeal experience, write one message at a time.
Let's prone the web, too, because there's the web, and they'd be nice people who would love to be able to do some stuff, and do their profile and all that there. But it's a linear feed, right? But it's still a fairly narrow aperture.
Once people were there, they started using it differently. They started replying with an ad symbol, because they figured that other people were seeing this, too. It caused this whole way people were using Twitter to emerge. And now there's this abomination called TweetDeck. How many of you use TweetDeck? OK, stop!
No, I'm not going to tell you to stop using TweetDeck. But TweetDeck causes people to use Twitter in ways that are completely different than the inherent architecture of Twitter.
The inherent architecture of Twitter for example is: If I follow you, then you're going to be in my feed right? If I follow you, you're going to show up, whether I skip your message or not, you're there, and it's a gentlemen's bargain if you will, going on with that...
TweetDeck, breaks it, because you can filter people out, you can put them in groups, so only read some people, and sometimes when you read these other people. TweetDeck, turns Twitter into this gaming platform, where people are trying to create trends and do all this other crazy stuff. It completely changes the way that people behave in the space, right?
We're all in here, and we're all in the same room. But if one of you started dancing a jig and screaming at the top of your lungs, we'd all look at you like, dude, you really don't seem to understand the space you're in.
[audience laughter]
Andrew: Have you ever heard of people say, use your inside voice, right?
[audience laughter]
Andrew: On Twitter. If I'm in TweetDeck it is a space, where I can basically be dancing a jig and being an idiot, right? Because that's what it's encouraging me to do so. It's encouraging me to do all the other kinds of things. Whereas if you're the unlucky SOB that's got a phone, where you're getting that persons messages, right? It's like [noise], every two seconds, you have to turn it off.
So it's crazy. Anyway, I don't totally mean to pick on TweetDeck, use it if you want to.
But I have like this thing about it. So the implications are everywhere, I've really focused a lot on identity and privacy here, but that's mostly not of any interest of time, but I want to be sure to mention that the context problem is a lot bigger than that.
It affects everything we do, it affects the way we earn, the way we spend money, the way we learn things, and read things. The thing about money is that, the mortgage crisis is a great example of this.
But basically, you had a situation in the mortgage crisis where people were no longer doing mortgages, in a way where it was intimate and visceral. It was so disconnected and attenuated across space and time that you basically had people pulling levers very far away from the people that were getting the actual houses, right?
So, it was very easy to completely misunderstand that context when you really are selling your packaged up mortgage things.
So the context problem exists everywhere we, or anything about us can be online, and that's important to distinction. Because there are millions of people who were not online, on our planet. But the information about them still is.
How many of you saw this thing about Darfur that Google put up? Are you familiar with this? It's a map that Google partnered with some nonprofits, like the holocaust museum, I think, to show the destruction of villages in Darfur, in basically real time or practically real time.
Well, this is an astonishing powerful example of how radically context has been disrupted for our species. Implicitly, raises the question of what the human limits are to comprehending context. At what point, no matter how much information we receive, is another context only abstraction. If we can't reach into it, and affect it the way it affects us.
You can look at this, but you can't do anything about it in this context. There's no link to click, to get money. There's no plane ticket to buy to go and help out. There's nothing there that really tells you what to do about it, and yet it's putting this thing in your face.
You just want to be able to wet your thumb in some water, and put the fire out right there on it, because it's not it right? So it's strange. I understand why they didn't links to these, because that's not really it.
So it's strange. I understand why they didn't put links to things because apparently it was like, we can't endorse particular organizations. We can't endorse particular methods.
But then it's like, yeah, but, maybe just one? Because imagine all the people that looked at this, and maybe could have done something in the moment. I don't know.
So as we've established, language and context, shape one another, they're especially online, where everything is made of language, and more and more in physical space, where all that language space, that digital space is getting inter leaved, and intro‑woven, and inter‑twinkled with our physical lives.
So you've got a language, which is basically information and the context that was formed from this information, and then you've got context, which is basically the architecture, right? What I'm talking about here, is a very big picture of information architecture.
Information architecture is great at find‑ability. But I think even Peter Morville, who coined the term, has been saying for awhile find-ability is just part of the value proposition of information architecture. It's part of what where we're about, but it's not like the whole story.
What I'm getting at, is that, I think that the shape of the act of shaping digital space, with links, and language, is an architectural act. It's an act of designing context itself. That's our medium.
When I say our, I mean, people who do information architect. This is not a turf war, right? This is just me trying to expand what the label means enough to see what it's been doing all along. Like every taxonomy you've ever made, every control of vocabulary you've ever made, has been basically been a machine for shaping human context.
It's just that we need to understand, that in a bigger frame, it has a lot more implications than we may have thought of before. We lack a suitable language for all this, this dimension of contextual systems. As a result, we really lack suitable tools, methods, patterns, and heuristics for thinking about it in this way.
Now people are getting started. There's been some progress. There's a book that I love is called "Contextual Design." It doesn't talk about this in a philosophical way, but it gives some really great tools for designing with context sort of at the forefront of what you're doing.
There are some diagrams and things that my colleagues and I at Vanguard have been working on. Richard Dalton actually has an updated version of this one on the top right as a poster at the conference today.
There's some very fine academic work going on that's dealing with context both in the realm of ubiquitous computing and in the growing academic side of information architecture itself. This is on SlideShare. Luca Rosati and Andrea Resmini worked on this, and they're working on some great stuff.
So it's happening, right? But I'm just wanting to shout to the four winds that, "Hey everybody! Let's all talk about this. Let's work on this. I know we have lots of stuff to build for our jobs, but let's also work on this thing."
I think that as a community it's a great thing to do. So who's going to figure this out? And I just think it's a huge challenge, so it's going to take all of us and let's get to work. Thanks. Hopefully, we have a couple minutes for questions.
[applause]
Andrew: Anybody? It's not a very questiony audience this year, is it? Oh! Yeah, go ahead.
Announcer: Speaking to the issue of context can you address, for instance, this idea of post once, ping many? So all these services are coming out like Ping.fm, where I post something and then it goes on Facebook. And instead of saying my status is "going to dinner," it says "at so‑and‑so. Be there in a second." And it's totally out of context. I wonder if you could address how these services are coming out as found with ads, but really they're taking away the value of other services because the context is [off‑mike speech].
Andrew: So yeah, yeah. So I think the question is that what about this post‑once‑ping‑many thing where you post something in one place and it ends up going all over the place? But then the things that are going all over the place are ending up in contexts where the original context isn't there anymore? And it's like, well, what does that mean? Well, as you were asking the question, I was thinking about the fact that even in newspapers, for a long time you had all kinds of stories and postings and classified ads and things.
Even now in a lot of news weeklies there's this thing where people can post these things like, "Hey, I was the guy in the blue fedora, and you were the girl in the high heels with the jester hat on. We saw each other across the room, and send me an email here." Right?
[laughs]
That has nothing to do with me. That had to do with some context that I was not in., but it's sort of this S. O. S. in a bottle out into the world to say, "Hey, maybe you're going to see this."
Well, now on Twitter I see people getting really pissed off at Comcast or Apple or Vanguard where I work or whatever. And they're like, "Hey, ad [?] or whatever. This really screwed up. I hate you." It's similar. I'm not that person. I'm not in their situation. So in some ways it's some stuff that published media has allowed us to do already. It's just cranked up to 1, 000.
Personally I think what's going on is we can't stop that stuff. It's just going to happen. It's a byproduct of all this wonderful friction‑free linking that we can do. We're all learning a new literacy, though. We're learning ways to filter some things out for ourselves and to tell right away, "Oh, OK. That doesn't have anything to do with me."
And we're even learning ways to put the little S. O. S. bottles out there with maybe a little bit of metadata on it that says, "OK. This really doesn't have that much to do with you maybe." Like even the hash tags people are putting on Summit stuff to some degree are signal not only to look at this if you're interested in the Summit but, well, skim by it if you're not.
So I think that we'll see things emerge because I do think that our attention spans are really limited. Mine's incredibly limited. So we collectively come up with these ways of handling that stuff. Anybody else? Yes.
Man 1: I was wondering how exactly you felt about it, if you were kind of positive about it. On these Facebook [off‑mike speech] we're seeing people have pictures put up that they didn't want people seeing and taken out of context or shown to a different group. All of a sudden it's awful. Someone [off‑mike speech] Hillary Clinton [off‑mike speech] on something they don't want people to see. And I think it's maybe this more realistic society. We're more honest with each other, saying people make mistakes. People are, I don't know, messy. We say things we shouldn't in situations, and that's OK. Are you optimistic about that as opposed to [off‑mike speech] be too safe?
Andrew: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the question is ‑ and again I'm saying this so the little recording can get it ‑ that like on Facebook and places like that there's this tension between the fact that stuff's getting taken that's seen out of context. Stuff that maybe should be private or whatever is now anybody can see it. Like an employer might be able to see your drinking pictures from your fraternity days. I wasn't in a fraternity, so I don't have any of those. I just have sitting around and arguing over Risk games pictures.
[laughter]
Andrew: ... which is not nearly so, I don't know, [laughs] dangerous. Anyway, but what was the question? No, I'm kidding. What we're hearing is that in some ways maybe it can make us all more forgiving over time. People get used to the fact that, "Oh, yeah. Well, that happens. Big deal." But then on the other hand maybe it's going to make us all more afraid. Maybe we're going to see that and we're like, "I'm not going to post anything." Which is it? And am I positive or negative on it? I think I'm neutral on it. Like I was saying about the context collapsing, I'm not negative on it.
If you take an evolutionary framework perspective, it's more like things are just changing. And we're changing reality with these artificial environments. Where am I going with this? I think that in some ways it can be positive, and in some ways it can be negative.
I think for a lot of people it makes them shrink back. It makes me shrink back. It makes me be a lot more careful.
I don't even go on Facebook, probably because my attention span can't handle all the inputs of Facebook. Even though I deal with many more inputs on the web, on the web they're more differentiated for me. There's [inaudible 50:39] like I do this on Twitter. I do this here, and I do this here. For my head that just works. On Facebook, I'm getting zombies thrown at me, and...
[laughter]
Andrew: ... on my website, like on my blog, Inkblurt.com, I can post a post and it can be there. On Facebook I don't even know really where to do that. So it's just strange. For a lot of people it's just perfect for them. So I think that for some people they're going to start being OK with it. For other people they're going to be more careful. That too, though, is a new literacy in a way. It's understanding, "Oh, OK. This thing that I'm seeing didn't happen in any context that really is affecting me or my relationship with this person." Right?
It's like when you're dating somebody and all of a sudden you find out all the other people they dated. And you get weird out. You're like, "Well, you dated those people? Well, that guy was a linebacker. I'm not a linebacker." It's this other context.
And then after a while you realize, "You know what? That actually doesn't have anything to do with me" and you have to be cool with it. So I think that's an adjustment that people will probably have to make. I do think that we're going to have to come up with a language around privacy boundaries. Well, does this place have that kind of privacy or that kind of privacy?
It's like Creative Plamins has three or four different permutations of ownership. It would be interesting to see if we could come up with this sort of standardized way of talking about patterns of privacy. Just made that up, but that'd be cool.
[laughter]
Andrew: Anyway. Wrap it up? OK. Going to wrap it up. Thanks, everybody.

Portable Research: Observing Users on the Go - Nate Bolt
As technology becomes increasingly portable, mobile, and ubiquitous, new challenges to traditional ethnographic user research arise. Bolt|Peters CEO Nate Bolt discusses these challenges and how to use new technologies pragmatically to document, broadcast, and involve stakeholders in mobile research process.

Additionally, Nate identifies the key considerations when designing a mobile ethnographic study, indicating how technological developments in the future might be used to improve upon current methods.

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Transcript of Portable Research: Observing Users on the Go - Nate Bolt. Main Conference Session, Day 1 – Friday, March 20
[music]
Announcer: This podcast brought to you by ASIS&T, the American Society for Information Science and Technology, the society for information professionals; by the IA Summit, the premiere gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals; by Boxes and Arrows. Visit boxesandarrows.com/about/participate to be a part of our peer written journal. And special thanks to Axure and Murray for sponsoring Boxes and Arrows as well as the many other sponsors out at the IA Summit.
As technology becomes increasingly portable, mobile and ubiquitous, new challenges to traditional ethnographic user research arise. CEO Nate Bolt from Bolt Peters, discusses the challenges and pragmatics of using new technologies and web services to document, broadcast and involve stakeholders in mobile research as it's ongoing. I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers.
Nate Bolt: Hi everybody. Thanks for coming out for the 10:30 session. There is no way that I'm standing up on this big ass stage for this. So I'm just going to hang out down here. I was thinking it was a little claustrophobic so I think everybody should move back six rows, just to have, no, I'm just kidding. So the session that we're in today is called "Portable Research: Observing Users on the Go, and why it Matters." I really appreciate everybody coming up for the first block, especially those of you on West Coast time, what is it? Seven thirty, so and thanks for coming to IA Summit too, I'm looking forward to hanging out here.
So, okay, we'll start off with a little bit of background about myself, our company Bolt Peters, and then we'll jump into the talk. So my background is in the social impact of digital technology, which was one of those make up your own major deals at UC San Diego. It was kind of a mix of cognitive science, social sciences, computing in the arts, and stuff like that. It was really just a way for me to kind of get interested in the social and cultural impact of technology in people's lives.
I took one class there called the Cognitive Consequences of Technology, which, you know, was my first exposure to the idea that there were people out there that cared about the way technology impacts people's lives, other than engineers. I didn't even know that existed, so then I just totally fell in love with the idea and kind of have been working on those kinds of things ever since. Co‑founded Bolt Peters User Experience about seven years ago and I'm, we're in the middle of writing a book for the Rosenfeld folks on remote research, which is kind of our shtick at Bolt Peters. We do a lot of that kind of research and some other stuff too. I'm also number one on Google for remote robotic dog treats, so that's something.
So, just about today's session, I would love it if you guys tweeted your questions, you can use this hash tag. You can also get up to the mike and ask the questions, that's totally legit and this is going to be completely open discussion so, you know we've got a half hour, ask questions any time, all the time, comments, heckling, fruit throwing, all that is totally cool, it's going to be real casual. If you feel like tweeting, the only benefit is that I can look at the end and see if there's like more than one of the same kind of stuff, I can address those. If I'm feeling super slick I'll try to check it while I'm talking but probably not. And if you haven't used twitter to ask questions before, feel free to ignore me and sign up for an account while I'm talking, so…
So Bolt Peters, we're located in San Francisco, we do primarily remote research, as I've been saying which is just observing people's screen and talking over the phone. We also do some video game research and automotive stuff, field research and stuff like that. Been around for seven years. Oh, thanks, Peter. Does that sound like an auction?
[laughter]
Thanks, Peter.
Peter Sweeney: It's the ducks.
Nate Bolt: It's the ducks?
Peter Sweeney: They're announcing the Peabody Ducks.
Nate Bolt: Oh, God, I thought it was an auction.
Peter Sweeney: Nope.
Nate Bolt: [laughter] Also we have a magic door, that is sweet. So, awesome, alright, woo hoo. Peter Mels, thank you. So, okay, so, this is the number of user research studies that we've done over the last seven years. I've kind of been, you know, either indirectly or directly involved in almost every single one of them. That's the number of one on one qualitative participants that we've done, which, I don't know if that's depressing or good, but that's how many. You know for all sorts of folks, all across the map what, you know, different kinds of industries, all that jazz. Okay, this number's important. So, this is the number of simultaneous projects we have going on right now. This is the single busiest quarter in Bolt Peters' history, and the only reason I'm saying that is because I'm so sick of sitting in sessions, there were six at Southwest Southwest last week which were "How to Survive Because Things are All Crappy and it's the Apocalypse and everything's going to die." So for the session for today, things are awesome. Can we just choose to do that? Just for today?
So, alright, so I think this might be the first question that you guys have. I think it's a really good one and so to address it we'll just, we'll start off with what it's not. So for the purpose of this talk, we're defining portable research as any research that involves mobile or location dependent interfaces. So things like GPS, mobile devices, sidekicks, PDAs, whatever, anything that's out with you out and about. This was user number seven's dog, the participants in the case study we'll be referencing today had a lot of pets and kids and it ended up being a big part of it, but it's not about the dogs.
So what? Who cares about portable research? Why does it even matter? Well I think anybody doing research on interfaces sort of touches portable research. Like whether or not we like to think of ourselves as working in the mobile space, it seems like just all of a sudden overnight, we all do. Just because people access stuff, you know, all over the place now. And that could be, right now it's obviously on a mobile device, but it could be from their cars directly, I mean it's happening so fast.
So how many people here do design research? Awesome, so everybody, pretty much. Killer. And how many people do that in the lab? Okay, a little less than half. And how many people do it out in the field? Oh,okay, a little bit more than half, sweet. Awesome. And can, for the people that are doing not in the lab type research, can you guys shout out like different, what types of stuff you're doing? Just out of curiosity. If anybody feels like shouting.
Man1: Homes and offices, store observation.
Nate Bolt: Store observation, home and offices. Okay.
Man1: Hospitals.
Nate Bolt: Hospitals, great.
Man2: Dental offices.
Nate Bolt: Dental offices. Say, that counts. And...?
Man3: Funerals.
Nate Bolt: What's that?
Man3: Funerals.
Nate Bolt: Funerals. Wow, holy cow. And is it kind of like follow‑alongs, like crazy ethnography? Okay. Okay, okay, awesome. So this, the method that we're going to be going over today, is pretty similar probably to what you guys are already doing. There's just a couple of small differences. And one of the reasons why I think it matters is because it's so easy. The first part of the talk, the sort of case study or how to, is really basic. We're going to learn in probably like seven minutes the entire breadth of what we did differently in our portable research study. And then I kind of want to talk about why it matters. So we're going to split it right in half. We'll start with the how to. OK, so, more raising hands and then we'll be done with raising hands forever for this talk. So, while you're driving, have you ever, used an MP3 player? Awesome. Talked on the phone? Sent a text message? Looked up directions? Tweeted? Wow, really? Awesome. Facebooked? This is, I think it's mostly embarrassing for me because because my hand's up like the whole time.
Used your laptop?
[laughter]
I'm so glad it's not just me, last time I was the only one. Used GPS? Typed out GPS voice commands? OK, I get to lower my hand. Oh good. And then made flash cards with the voice commands [laughter] for your wife? OK, no more hands, finally.
What, I mean, so this really isn't working out. It's like we all know this implicitly, but this is crazy. I mean the amount of technology we're dealing with literally while we're piloting a three thousand pound piece of metal is over the top. You know, and manufacturers are aware of this, you know and so, the major auto manufacturer that we worked with was particularly aware of this and was interested in designing some technology solutions that didn't just pretend that the only thing you have to look at and do in your car is the dashboard of the car that we all bring multiple devices into the cockpit with us. And they wanted to understand how they could sort of look at that fact and design prototypes and future generations of the in car experience for, you know, ten years out, something like that.
So the idea we had is like you know how do we really study, effectively these crazy new interfaces? And on one level you could say, "Well you just sit in people's car and watch them use a bunch of different devices and report about it." But we felt that the big challenge for this study was getting the design team, which was located in one country and engineering team which was located in another country, to both be inspired to get on the same page.
That a car manufacturer had already identified that one of the reasons that we have ended up with the state we have is because the engineers and the designers aren't necessarily working together. And I think, you know, it doesn't have to be a car company to see that happen, we probably all see that happen all the time, so. You know the idea we had was, if we're going to study this crazy stuff, let's use more technology to actually study it. Which may seem like a really bad idea, but here's what we did.
So, the basic part, just to start off, we did sit in people's cars. So we did, we chose fourteen participants in San Francisco and L.A., seven in each. We did about three hour sessions with each person, so nothing crazy, pretty standard. We gave them a two hundred and fifty dollar incentive for their time. We had one researcher and one camera person. Our researcher sat in the back seat and our camera person sat in the front seat. And we also got permission from all these participants to use their images publicly, in case you were wondering, so they, they're signed off.
And then the only thing we did differently was we decided to broadcast the whole thing live. So we wanted to involve people, everybody live in the field research. So to do that, we just got a 3G card. How many of you guys have some kind of Evdo or, you know, Sprint type of 3G card for your laptop? OK, so a few. It's like, what is it like 50 bucks with the plan? It wasn't a big deal and then we also got an additional, an extra webcam. And the webcam clipped on the laptop facing outward so that the researcher was sort of pointing at the subject, and then we just used stick cam to live stream the entire thing.
That's pretty much it. The only other thing we did was we used IM, the researcher used IM during the whole session to communicate with everybody on the team. So there was, you know, our direct clients, but there are also stakeholders just chiming in telling the researcher, ,em>"Ask them more about what they just did." You know, in the front seat they're like, "What happened?" So that, along with spare batteries is really that's it, that's the whole how to. I mean that is the whole methodology behind the portable research.
You know I think the main reason why it became important is because we wanted to look at the points in the study where people's use of the technology involved their environment. And us as researchers, even if we like get good at understanding the study, we don't know nearly as much as the client, like they're the experts on this stuff. So having them IM‑ing with us the whole time was totally awesome. And you know, we're used to doing that stuff with our remote research so we're used to, you know, kind of IM‑ing and talking with people at the same time which, everybody's used to that, but in the field it was a totally different experience.
And having this sort of page where people could go, just a URL where people could go to and tune into the, you know during the days of testing, tune into the research and see like, "Oh they're going down Highway Five right now," you know, "What are they talking about? What are they doing?" It added a sort of excitement I think inside the organization around the study that was totally different than any other of these kind of studies that we've done. You know, people were so happy to tune in live and almost everybody involved with the project, at some point, was sort of watching and listening live and piping in with questions and stuff like that.
So, the other specific goals that we were looking at was, you know, how did they modify devices or use devices in combination during the study, how did their, sort of home and work life get reflected in their use of the devices.
And this user was really interesting. She split her purse up into business and pleasure. [laughter] So, I don't know which side is which in this photograph, I can't remember, but her whole life was really, she was self‑employed and it was really important to her that everything be divided that way so her use of the devices also reflected that. So it was just, you know it was the kind of thing, I think when it happened, you know, somebody on the client side said, "Wait, can you ask her about that? You know, like why does she do that?" And we, as researchers, might not have even known to bring that up, but it was just this huge thing.
So I'm going to play you some clips now of what it looks like side by side now of the live streaming and the sort of in person view. What they're saying and doing isn't that important in this clip, it's just to give you an idea of the difference and what it looks like, nothing that exciting happens but here we go.

[Start Audio Segment]
Woman: That's right. Come on. I've got it. Grab her by the legs. Get her little arms in. Child: Go, go, go. Man: Now it's in your... [inaudible] Woman: Alright, you know that is. Man: How do you know where to go, it's just goes with experience? Woman: There's usually a guy sitting right there. Man: Yeah. Woman: Or somebody sitting right there. They're not now. What do I do when I want to see Aurora? If I can't. Man: Yeah, if you want to keep tabs on her. Woman: Only if I wonder, I'm on the freeway, I'm wondering if she's asleep, or I'm like, 'You're too quiet back there, what's going on.' Yeah. Man: So it's... [inaudible] Woman: She has some pictures. Man: Okay. Woman: That I've taken down off Flickr. Man: Okay. Woman: And they're two little tabs up there and we stick the pictures underneath the tabs so she can look at them. Man: Those come with the car or it's a... Woman: Yeah, I mean it's an improvised, improvised thing. Child: Me.
[End Audio Segment]

Nate Bolt: So, you kind of get the idea. It's pretty choppy but, the audio comes through perfectly. So where 3G is as it stands in our country, it's at least good enough to stream the audio with no problems. The other thing that was really important for us, just kind of mentioning, was having an easy, single URL that people could go to. Stick cam gives you an embed code that you can plop down in any website. It takes roughly twelve seconds. And then you have, you know, the whole thing, there's no big setup or blog in or conference call to join or any of that hassle, it's just easy for the observers to get involved. The only other thing that was sort of required for this method, and I don't know if it's really regarding the live streaming, is that we just had crazy forms for them to fill out, my favorite of which was the "Please drive carefully" form. Which just says that, "Just because we're observing you, doesn't means it's our fault if you hit something." So this is kind of, this is the how to, you know, just the mobile broadband, the webcam, stick cam, couple of spare batteries and being able to IM with people live, and you know, a bunch of long legal forms. That's really the whole, that's the whole deal.
You know, obviously with any sort of hack of existing technology like this, there's going to be a bunch of stuff that's off, one of which is that, you know, it's not reliable at all. So we never set the expectation with the clients and the designers and engineers that like it was going to be some perfect live streaming event that was like it never went down. Because you know the stream dropped all the time. Go through a tunnel, whatever. So we sort of set up the expectation of like, "Hey, pipe in, listen, if it works out great, if not then just hang out for awhile."
The way that most people did it, and this was interesting for me, is they just opened it up in a tab in their browser, put a pair of headphones on and all day long they just kind of listened for something that sounded interesting then they would switch over, IM us, if something came up.
Obviously it's, it's time consuming, you know you already have a bunch of stuff that you're doing as a researcher, question?
Woman2: [inaudible]
Nate Bolt: Good question, yeah we also were recording locally. So both, and in two places, the laptop was recording locally and there was a camera person recording. Yeah. And the question was, did we also record locally? It's super awkward handling the laptop, you know, I think the primary researcher also felt they were kind of like a camera person. So you know, you're kind of like walking around with a laptop, one handed trying to type even with like a netbook. And it's kind of awkward. But I feel like we're at the beginning of this sort of livecasting type of technology and that's only going to get easier. I'm sure you guys have seen the Ted videos with all the small, little livecasting stuff. So I feel like as a researcher this is sort of a practice that will get easier over time.
And you know, the other downside is that you still have to do all the other crap that a researcher has to does, and you're like running this livecasting thing. So it's, like so many of the research studies that we do, kind of stressful or chaotic. Another question?
Woman3: [inaudible]
Nate Bolt: Really another good question, so how do we recruit? We used a company called Davis Recruiting, that's in the Bay Area, they're our favorite recruiting agency. We just, you know, standard, we gave them the screener and they found folks on that one. Actually, we didn't, this is probably like the only study we didn't run into any challenges on recruiting. The biggest thing that we did a little bit differently from normal was, we required that people had destinations that were part of their real lives that we could go along with them with. So we kind of had Davis, we gave Davis a set of questions to sort of suss out if they were giving us fake destinations or not. So we ended up with a lot of like, kids' birthday parties, school events, things that we could verify were like real and people weren't just making up that they had to go somewhere just because they were excited about participating and getting the money. You know, because we wanted it to be some place real. That was the only challenge in this one.
So, also you know, obviously it's not feasible to use the laptop while you're walking around all the time and you know, we tried, oh sweet, nice, wow. That's, so I just switched to a Mac like three weeks ago. One of the primary reasons that I switched is because I heard they crash less. But apparently. That's hilarious. Does that happen a lot on the Mac?
Man2: [inaudible]
Nate Bolt: Oh, so I haven't yet switched fully into keynote, OK, I see. I'm holding on, I'm holding on by a thread. That is hilarious. Any other questions while I'm fiddling? Man3: When keynote crashes, it crashes gloriously.
Nate Bolt: Oh really? That's awesome.
Man3: Oh no, it's brilliant. So Nate, did you do a full day study so it's like you woke up with them in the morning and followed them throughout the entire course of the day and then signed off and went home?
Nate Bolt: Another good question. So did we do a full day study? We just did three hours per participant, one to two participants per day. So, only three hours. Okay, sweet so who cares? What does it even matter? Use a webcam and a 3G card. Wow. I mean it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. But, I actually think it is important and it is important because I believe after ten years of delivering information to clients that giving information to people is one of the most useless forms of getting anything done.
I feel like inspiring people is way more important than giving them information. So we've done research until our ears turn blue on all sorts of different stuff and people were like, "This is great, we're never going to do any of this stuff." Because we have this giant list of reasons coming into this research and list of tasks about why we should do what we are going to do anyway. And that doesn't go away when you give somebody a bunch of detailed information.
So we asked the Bolt Peter's clients like what does this type of research accomplish? We did a little survey. So, this was one answer. [laughs]
Burn! This was another. And then this kind of stuff happens. Any of us doing research are thinking on incremental improvement. And then, what was interesting for this one is this actual car study resulted in the whole team being super excited.
Now, if you are working on concept car dashboard prototypes I feel like that's already exciting to begin with. So, I'm not saying because we did proto research it got the team excited. But, in any research study that we've ever done, I've never seen more people be involved on the client side. I don't remember how many, but it was a lot. Because, we got emails from people, "The stream is down. I IM'd you and you didn't respond." All that stuff.
So, we also looked at the industry to see what are people saying, what is the general consensus. There is of course, the mantra of screw user research. Just build it for yourself. There is also the...
[laughter]
We don't really believe in research at all. Just ask Steve. But, for our friends that work at Apple they say that this is actually total BS because they do user research. They just do it with the same user over and over and over again. [laughs]
[laughter]
And then, just a few days ago, I don't know if any of you were there, I at South By Southwest, Kathy Sierra of blogging and other Internet fame, had this whole talk, and the main point of her talk that was twitted a billion times was for incremental changes ask your users, but for the really big stuff, for the breakthroughs, ignore everybody. Be brave.
And I love the 'be brave' part, but I feel like it's kind of looking over the inspiration that can happen, the empathy that can happen in some user research. And I also asked the FACE which is this interface list in San Francisco run by the esteemed Jeff Veen. And people on there said, "Hey, you know what, there's been tons of bold, transformative, amazing interfaces that have come from research, not from one person, one man, or woman's vision. Windowing UI's, the whole foundation for our desktop computers came from research."
If you expand the notion of this research to include things that are going on in the real world then Flicker and Twitter are great examples of amazing interfaces that evolved from research. And the Palm V, Ivio all about research.
So I guess what I am trying to say is I feel this kind of research, and research in general, can inspire transformative interfaces, and anything that we can do as researchers to make it more exciting or more engaging for our audience. I think it makes a big difference that helps things be successful.
I remember the keynote from two years ago, I think it was Mr. Merholtz that said one thing that unites all of us, IA's, is that we care. We're idealists. We work on these things not just to make a buck or be successful. Those might be factors, but ultimately we want to make a hit, we want to make something that's really cool. So, I think the question is how does portable research help? I think all it does is inspire, just maybe a little bit more than other forms of research. And what this is that came out specifically because the client viewing live was a photo that one of the moms had stuck in the headliner of her car. And the client really was interested in that. They wanted us to probe deeper. So we said, "Okay." And it turned out that she used Flickr tags to jot down her daughter's interests. Not interesting things like calmed her, soothed her, and then she would print out those photos from Flickr that her daughter liked and stuck them on the headliner.
The mom said that this is a huge thing that she did. She had a stack of photos that she rotated in the headliner because for whatever reason her daughter would just stare up and be a little bit more mellow of a passenger with that stuff in the headliner.
Now, it doesn't take a genius technology leap to figure out that the auto manufacture could think about other ways to incorporate technology in future interfaces that would help parents with that exact situation on the backseat. So I feel that was one really specific example the way that a little bit more inspiring than other kinds of research. And that said I think it also unites. As you guys have known when you get a ton of people working on a project, one of the biggest challenges is that stakeholders kill ideas. Not intentionally... [laughs]
[laughter]
There is nothing wrong with them. We are all stakeholders too. It is not that stakeholders are bad. Individually, they are wonderful people. But, there is something about large teams, especially at giant organizations that has this process of eliminating risks and stomping ideas into the ground. And I feel like any other inspiration that we can offer helps with that, and also it is exciting. Live streaming. "Really? You are streaming from a car? I am totally going to listen." So, it gets people engaged.
So, that's it. Thank you.
[applause]
[music]

Designing For, With, and Around Advertising - Karen McGrane
User experience designers often express a desire to play more of a strategic role in guiding business decisions. Yet UX designers don’t always seek to understand the advertising business model so they can maximize revenue. Instead, they often treat advertising as “clutter” — to be ignored at best and actively disliked at worst.

Senior partner at Bond Art & Science, and former VP and National Lead for User Experience at Avenue A/Razorfish, Karen McGrane teaches us ways to help advertising-supported sites be more successful. She presents case studies of several publishing sites from her body of work and explores the business decisions behind them.

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Transcript for Designing For, With, and Around Advertising - Karen McGrane
[music]
Announcer:User experience designers often express a desire to play more of a strategic role in guiding business decisions. Yet UX designers don't always seek to understand the advertising business model so they can maximize revenue. Instead they often treat advertising as clutter. To be ignored at best and actively disliked at worst. Senior partner at Bond Art and Science Karen McGrane teaches ways to help advertising supported sites be more successful, presenting case studies of several publishing sites she has worked on and the business decisions behind them. I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers!
Karen McGrane: Okay. Just a couple of housekeeping notes. I am Karen McGrane on Twitter and also here in real life. And if you don't get quite enough of this, I'm going to be hosting a lunchtime round‑table today. So please feel free to come to that and ask questions. So, Okay, let's have true confessions time to get this kicked off here. How many of you by virtue of having a TiVo or a DVR or just a really small bladder, somehow manage to avoid seeing TV commercials? Okay, come on, raise your hand. Okay, pretty much everybody. You know there's medication for that, right?
How many of you have an ad blocker? Not just a pop‑up blocker, but some kind of ad blocker on your browser that lets you avoid seeing online advertising? OK, all right. I do, too. How many of you find yourself thinking, "You know, I just really hate advertising?" Okay.
So I'm aware that all of you think this. And so over the course of the presentation today I want to do a few things. I want to persuade you to think a little bit differently about online advertising. I'm going to come down here and do this.
I want to persuade you to think a little bit differently about online advertising. I want to open up your mind, maybe make you‑‑explain why you should care more about it. I want to tell you some of the basics that I've learned about how online advertising works. There are some things that I've learned over the years that you might want to know. And then finally, I want to speculate a little bit about what the future of the revenue model online might be. For those of you who continue to be uncomfortable with advertising, there might be other business models that we can discuss.
This is a huge topic and there are a lot of things that I am not going to be able to cover today. I'm not going to be able to talk about designing creative for actual banner ads themselves or for micro sites. So if you're an IA and you're working at an advertising agency and you're making micro sites and banner ads for Starburst, I'm not actually going to talk about how to make that creative better.
I'm also not going to talk very much about search ads, like the ads that appear next to Google search results. Choosing keywords for that is an entirely different ball of wax and I'm not going to talk about it here. I'm really focused on how you design pages that advertising is going to sit on. Or how you design experiences or structures that advertising will live in.
And finally, I'm not going to get too much into the details of things like targeting and measurement and optimization. That's a huge subject and it's probably one that's really interesting for IAs. But it's one that I just can't begin to cover here today.
While I'm at it I saw the delightful Heather Champ of Flickr when I was speaking at a Google conference this fall. And she had a slide like this. And I was like, "Oh my God, I have to steal that for my next presentation!" So she said, "You know when you go to a play sometimes and they put a little warning sign on the door that's like, 'a strobe light is going to go off' or 'a gun might be fired in this Chekhov play'?" So I just want to warn you right now that it is incredibly likely that I'm going to use bad words during this presentation. And I just feel so much better getting that off of my chest.
So if any of you feel like you want to get up and leave and maybe go see what Andrew Hinton's talking about in the next room, I'm going to feel better knowing it's because I've offended you and not because I've bored you, so.
Okay. With that said, I do want to be a little bit serious here for a minute and talk to you about what my qualifications are. How did I come to be standing here in front of you today talking about advertising? And I want to make it clear. I am not a shill for the advertising industry, Okay?
I am a longtime advocate for information architecture. I spoke at the first one of these conferences. I have hired dozens of IAs over the course of my life. I'm really passionate about IA. And I'm incredibly unlikely to be standing up here saying, "Hey. I think advertising is a really great thing."
So I just want to talk a little bit about how I came to be here. And in giving you this sort of obligatory about me slide. I thought it would be kind of fun if maybe I mapped it, mapped some of my career highlights against the performance of the S&P 500. So let's get this started here. I was hired as the first information architect or the first person with any sort of usability or IA background at Razorfish in 1997.
And at that time when the Internet was very new and online advertising didn't really exist, that was when you got put to work designing banks. And it wasn't like you got put to work designing a little section of a bank. It was like they said to you, "Hey. We need a bank and we need it right now. So please go design it because we don't have a bank on the Internet." So I did that for a couple of years.
After that then I did a couple of projects that I think really taught me a lot about information architecture. But also were kind of my first taste of how the world of IA intersects with the world of the advertising business model. So I did one project for Encyclopedia Britannica, which was‑‑I learned everything I know about taxonomy from that project because they have the largest taxonomy in the English language. I learned a little bit about an advertising supported business model versus a subscription revenue business model. And I learned absolutely nothing about user generated content.
I also did another project for Disney on their ill‑fated portal go.com. And that was a really interesting project in that I learned a lot there about‑‑they were really kind of pushing the envelope in terms of advertising supported content. We did some experiments with ways to target search ads, your target ads against search results, which I think were really interesting. And while they failed for Go, I'm convinced that this model of search ads has legs. And some company is probably going to do really well with it.
So then, as you can see, the market kind of tanks and whenever the market tanks advertising collapses. So advertising is one of the first things that goes whenever the market goes down. So at that point, that's when you retreat to the safety of working for financial services.
[laughter]
Karen McGrane: So I did a number of projects with the 401 companies. I worked with the Federal Reserve Bank. And right about where the market hits its absolute low point there in 2002 or 2003, that was when Razorfish got sold to a roll up for eight million dollars. So we all kind of huddled together for warmth for a while and eventually got sold to aQuantive. Which some of you may know has an ad serving technology called Atlas. And they had a services arm called Avenue A. And so we all kind of got merged together. And that was a really strange point in my life. Because it was like one day I woke up and I worked for an advertising agency. And up until this point, one of the things I was really lucky about was that the values of the company and my values around user experience were really well aligned.
They had a conference every year and I remember talking to somebody I worked with in the hallway. He came up to me and he said, "Karen, Karen they're really serious about this whole advertising thing aren't they," and I'm like, "I know, it's crazy!"
As a result I started to feel like, I care about user experience and these people want to put ads all over the pages and it just made me feel bad inside. But based on the strength of those relationships I had the opportunity to do a number of projects in the publishing industry.
I worked for many years with Condé Nast which is the world's largest magazine publisher. I led a redesign of The New York Times which launched in 2005 and I did a little bit of work right before I left with CNN.
So I kind of got a good sense of mainstream media and what their challenges were, in taking content that they monetize off line and trying to do it on line. But in 2006 or so I left Razorfish for many, many reasons. But in large part it was because I really felt that my values and the values of the company were so divergent and I was having a really hard time reconciling my ethos of user experience to a world in which everything was going to be monetized by ads.
So I left to start a company called Bond Art + Science and I probably wouldn't be here talking to you about this particular subject today if I had not done that and frankly I probably would be a shill for the advertising industry if I was having that conversation and I still worked for Razorfish.
But over my years with Bond I have worked with literally dozens of publishers. I have worked with publishers that are big, that are small, that are on line only, that are focused on subscription revenue, that are focused on advertising revenue. Over the time of working with all of these different publishers I have really gained perspective on what it means to try to monetize the site through advertising.
In addition to that Bond also has its own publication called Cool Hunting. many UX organizations have a blog, we have a blog that we actually sell advertising on and so I have the experience not just of being a designer, but now I have the experience of being a publisher. Trying to figure out how do you deliver content, tools and services that users want, but also meet the needs of advertisers.
So that's why I'm here today to talk about you, as IAs, can design for the ads, design with the ads or design around the ads. But also its a little bit about how I learned to stop worrying about the ads with the politics of Dr. Strangelove.
I want to say, everybody here today, you're not here because you see yourself as just drawing boxes. You're an advocate for the user and you want to make sure that user needs get taken into account. But you're also focused on understanding the business. You want to know what is going to drive revenue and you understand that those two things sometimes have to be a trade‑off.
So imagine that you heard people complaining about the placement of the buy now button on the commerce site. I have heard people say all of these things when talking about advertising on the site. I have said them my self and had my ass handed to me by publishers who were basically saying, "You know? The advertisers are the customers, the advertisers are the people who make all of this possible."
When I told a friend of mine who works for Huge that I was going to come speak here he said, "You're talking about advertising. Please, Please tell you're Information Architects, User Experience Designers or Interaction Designers or whatever the hell you people are calling yourselves these days, please tell them they can't take the ads off the page."
So a lot of this for me is coming from a place where I have heard people say this stuff so much and I kind have come around to saying, "Let's poke at this a little bit and understand how we can make trade‑offs between what makes the user experience good and what makes a good experience for advertisers or what makes advertisers want to pay for things."
Now, I know how you think about this. One of the things that you think is that users hate ads so therefore ads must be bad and we shouldn't have them. You can try all kinds of commentary from people online about how much they hate advertising. How they wish it wasn't there.
I hope to get across this presentation that ads are necessary evil and they're better than most potential alternatives and that our job is not to hate, is not to say there should be no ads because users don't like them but rather to try to make a corporate trade‑offs so that the ads are well integrated to be experienced. Some of you probably site well know studies. This is Jakob Nielsen's Banner Blindness Study and it suggests that this entire business model is a failure. The emperor has no clothes and no one ever actually looks at the advertising at all or sees it. So, there is no point really having it.
And to this I say, if you are saying the emperor has no clothes, everybody already knows that he is naked. You're not really giving anybody great insights here. The people who work in this kind of online advertising in publishing field have way more data than you would ever believe about what people see, what people click on, how much recognition they get, what people's behavior is after they see an ad and they go search for something and then they go buy something.
This is not news to anybody and it doesn't mean‑‑you might look at this and say, "Oh, this is a failure." But I think for most people in the advertising industry, this does not represent failure. This just represent status quo.
And finally, I think some of you probably still have this lingering, hackerish ethos that says every Internet should be free. And to this I have to say the money from advertising is what pays our salaries. It's what pays editor salaries. It's what pays for servers and features and new technology and if you have ever said, "God, I wish I had more money so that I could do more research or spend more time on this."
The only way we're going to get that money are into our field is through advertising. So, let's talk about how much money that is. U.S. advertising spending, and this is just in the U.S.‑‑let's go through. Kicking of the field is every IA's favorite category, the other category at $17.9 billion. This is kind of a hodge podge of things, but the main thing that it includes is movie advertising, so like movie trailers and things you see before movies.
Outdoor comes in at $8.8 billion radio at $15.7, magazines at $26.6 billion a year. Cable TV is $25.4 and broadcast is $35.5. So, another way to look at that is that the television industry as a whole is a $70 billion business a year.
Direct mail or original spam is $14.6 billion. Directories‑this is things like the Yellow Pages or restaurant guides is $17.2 billion. Newspapers $39.7 billion. This was interesting to me because I didn't actually realize that newspapers were a bigger business than broadcast television, but they are.
And a point that was really interesting to me: You can't swing a cat right now with reading some story about how the newspaper industry is dying and we killed it. So, if you look at the newspapers in the industry revenue today at $39.7 billion, it is down from its peak. The peak year in which the newspaper industry made the most money that it ever made in the entire history of advertising at which it made $41.1 billion. So they've lost more than a billion dollars which is not nothing, but it hardly to me represents like the complete and total collapse of an industry. And then finally, coming in, at the top is the Internet at $18.5 billion dollars.
So, we bid out others. You can see that the Internet has grown. Certainly, it is made huge uptick since 2003 ‑ 2004. But one thing I would like to point out is that it's only maybe 78% of $220 billion business. And for everybody who thinks about the Internet as like stealing all these revenue away from traditional media, over the period of time that the Internet has been growing, say over the last five years, the entire industry has grown.
So, it isn't that the Internet as taken $20 billion away. The entire industry is bigger, and the Internet is just sitting on top of it. Now that is in contrast to the fact that user engagement‑‑the Internet has taken time away from traditional media. People are spending less time watching TV, their spending less time reading newspapers, and they're spending more time online. So, let's put these two things together.
This slide should really piss you off. Okay? That's our money! What this means is that even though people are spending more time online, that time is not being monetized. Another way to look at it is that people's time spent watching TV is worth comparatively more than their time online. So, when someone is sitting there watching TV, the advertisers are paying more for it. Even though everyone acknowledges that their engagement is less, their interest is less, that all the young kids that advertisers want to reach are now on the Internet.
So, one way to talk about this is a quote from Times CEO Anne Moore, who referred to it as "Print Dollars, Internet Nickels." What that means is that traditional media has a long‑established business model, and so when they try to transition it online what they used to make dollars for they're now making nickels for.
One media pundit that I read estimated that online CPM‑‑which is cost per thousand, which is how they measure things‑‑is worth 1/7th to 1/10th of a print CPM. So, what that means, to put it in simple terms, your time when you're online is worth 1/10th of the time that it's worth when you're doing something in traditional media.
And maybe you're thinking, "Well, who cares about traditional media? You know, that's old school. Maybe they have problems transforming their antiquated business model to the Internet, but so what?" The most popular and probably the most important revenue model for any Web 2.0 business is also advertising. Everybody's all excited about new platforms like Facebook and Twitter, and we all talk about them, all the time. But they're not making any money; they do not have a business model.
And whatever business model they do eventually figure out, I guarantee it will involve advertising. So, it is time for us to stop hiding our heads in the sand. Advertising is not going to go away. Advertising is going to decline during this current period of economic uncertainty.
But when it comes back, it's going to come back with a vengeance. And I guarantee you that advertising will be a major, if not the most important way that any business makes money on the Internet. And so, for you all, as UX professionals, you have a responsibility to make things not suck. And so, that's going to start with advertising. So, here's some of the things that I've learned, that I think you should know about advertising. The first thing, and probably one of the things that is kind of hard to wrap your head around, is just how many people are involved. Historically, advertisers and publishers have gotten together in the service of trying to attract what the advertisers call consumers, and what TV people call viewers, and radio people call listeners, and newspaper people call readers, and what we call users. And sitting in the middle of them is a set of people called agencies. And they are a vast network of middle men who are all involved in not just creating, making the creative for the ads, but more importantly they're the people who are responsible for buying the space in the medium, and the people who are responsible for selling it. And these are incredibly high‑touch businesses. One of my clients from Conde Nast said, "You know, for something that's supposed to be mediated by technology, online advertising sure requires a lot of people."
And so, to kind of explain who these people are, I want to talk about who a media buyer is. If you're a publisher, you have a website, someone is coming in to buy that ad space, who is this person?
This person is Brooke. She is in her mid twenties. She was probably in a sorority. She was hired because she is smart and personable. She has a spreadsheet to fill in. Brooke's job is literally all day long. She sits there and she fills out a spreadsheet and she wants numbers to plug into her spreadsheet. Her job is not to invent the future of the Internet. Her job is not to think strategically about different revenue models online. Her job is to fill in those numbers on the spreadsheet.
So, this is an incredibly simplified model and please don't check my math, but basically when she comes in and says she has $100,000 and she wants to buy 500 clicks to an ad. And what she does is she looks through and says, "Are the ad positions what I want? Is there an ad above the fold? How many ad positions are there? Does this site meet the demographics that I want? Is it attracting people in the right age range, in the right household, income group?"
And then she does some pretty simple math to say, "How much does it cost for me to get a thousand people to view this ad?" If that is $20 or $50 or $5, she takes that into account. She takes the traffic to that site and she divides it by 0.1%. Everybody just assumes that the click‑through rate is nonexistent, but they measure that. And then she figures out what the price is going to be and how many clicks she is going to get. It is a very simple business that requires an enormous number of people to do it because it is all based on personal relationships.
One of the things that I think IA should be aware of is that media buyers are purchasing the top level of the nav. So, for example, one of the things when we redesigned the New York Times, we had a whole conversation that was like: "Why do you need a Health section? Most of the content that you publish in your Health section basically also sits in the Science section, they sit right next to each other. What is the difference? There is not really any need to have both."
The truth is there's a very big need to have both, which is that advertisers want to buy that section. If Brooke is working with a pharma client, Brooke comes in and she says, "I want to know that my ad is going to appear on the home page of the health section." They are selling those major categories as a way to say where the ad is going to sit.
Similarly, the Huffington Post used to be formatted, structured very much like a blog. When they redesigned, which they did recently, they redesigned with more global nav categories, with the purpose of being able to sell those section fronts. It doesn't matter to people. It's not that those section fronts are the primary way for people to navigate. The importance is that an advertiser comes in. And, they're very simple. They want to say, "Okay, you have a travel section and the ad for my travel company is going to go on the front page, and on the article pages in that section."
Similarly, we worked on a redesign of the Atlantic. They had previously been organized around content types. The goal there was to give them a separate navigation system, so that the main focus of the architecture would be on topics like politics, or science and technology, which they can sell. You can sell a category called science and technology. You can't sell a category called blog.
I had a conversation with somebody where he was like, "Karen, I thought everything worked the way Google Ads work. I thought you sold everything based on tiny, little, micro key words, and you try to figure out what those key words are." The truth is, Google Ads are bottom up, and banner ads are top down.
Google Ads, you can focus on trying to identify very, very small little key words. But, if you are trying to sell display advertising, banner advertising, it is really all about having giant, important words, like business, travel, politics and science.
I want to talk about the IAB. Does anyone know what the IAB is? It is the Interactive Advertising Bureau. It is a cabal. Just to introduce you to the organization, let's talk for a moment about the IxGA. Everybody knows about the IxGA, right? Here's what the IxGA does. They intend to improve the human condition by advancing the condition of interactive design. That just sounds nice, doesn't it? Yeah, that's a good thing.
Okay, let's talk about the IAB. The IAB, they have six core objectives. Number one is fend off adverse legislation and regulation. I love that verb fend. It just suggests that we don't even want to inspire our members to actually obey the law. We want to be there to avoid anybody making laws that might harm people. The second thing they do is coalesce around market making guidelines and creative standards. Now what the hell does that mean? I'll translate that into language that I know you all would understand, which is the Visio stencil.
So what that means is that you can only make ads of a certain size, you cannot make ads that are any other sizes than these sizes and frankly they don't even want you to use all of these sizes. They really just want you to use one size and that's the rectangle ad.
You can have a rectangle ad, you can have a leder board maybe. People don't really want to even solve the skyscraper anymore. The giant half‑page ad I think is a much better experience for advertisers. But it's very hard to get sites to integrate it because it's kind of big. So really what that means is that the IAB has said, "You can use three ad sizes, you can only use those ad sizes and you cannot ever use anything else."
So what this means is that you have to design your grid around those ads. So if you were working on any project that involves advertising, the absolute first thing that you must do is start designing the grid and figure out where your going to put in the ad.
The rectangle ad has to go above the fold. If you want to have a leder board they really want it to be in the content of the page and not sitting above the header. If you want to have a left nab you can put a skyscraper in there because it'll fit, otherwise you don't need the skyscraper.
Somebody commented to me, "God why do all the web pages look the same and can't you guys come up with something more creative to do, more creative ways to put the ads on." And I laughed and I said, "I guarantee you I have set of grid explorations that puts that rectangle ad every physically possible place that it could go on the page."
The reason that all websites look the same are that you can point to websites in lots of different categories and say they all use the same layout. It's because they all have to put that rectangle ad somewhere above the fold and its not going to really make sense to people unless you put it in the right hand column.
So you are really left doing some grid explorations, trying to get those ads above the fold. My other advice designing your grid series is that you don't need 17 ad positions on the page. Don't walk out of here and say, "Oh. She said advertising is great, so I'm going to put more ads on the page."
Three or four positions is good. When Brooke comes in and she says, "What if I wanna buy this entire page up for my advertiser." If she's looking at six positions, then she's like, "Well that means that means I have to have six different pieces of creative to buy up all those slots."
So if you have three or four positions and they are the standard ads and she knows what to expect she's like, "Great!"
Now, I know some of you are thinking, "God, but Karen the ads, they're so annoying can't we make them stop being so annoying." And my answer there is, "A little bit." Many, many things for a media buyer coming in are gating factors. There has to be an ad above the fold. You have to allow rich media, you can set some specifications, though, for how that might work.
If you look around on‑line you can find media kits for just about every major publisher. They want you to have this information, they are very eager for you to know how you would buy ads on their websites. So you could look around.
I think Business Week does a great job of specifying things like how big can the rich media file size be, how many times can the animation loop around, how does audio get called by the user. These are all thing that you can specify and they will ask you to specify.
It doesn't mean that you can go in and say, "Oh you can't have any audio at all." Or, "You can't have any rich media at all." That would mean that they won't buy ads on your site. But you can set a few requirements for what might make that acceptable. This is what we do for Cool Hunting. We just said, "What do we think is going to be the maximum allowable irritation that will get advertisers to buy our ads but will still not totally piss off our users?"
If you're interested in this or any more information you can just Google media kit and find lots and lots of specifics about not just what requirements they have, but how much they charge for ads. Keep in mind that whatever they put in their media kit about their rates is really the hotel rack rate. Everything gets negotiated and dealt and there are back room deals.
You can ask to customize the text placement so if you're running Google ads, or any other ads from any other vendors on the site, all of these ad formats come in the exact same standard banner ad sizes. You can customize the colors and customize the styling of it. I highly recommend that you do so. Do anything you can to try to make those ads feel like they're more integrated into the site.
If you're from a bigger site and you actually have a Google ad sales rep or Microsoft ad sales rep you can go to them and ask to let them put the ads, not just in these banner sizes, but let them put the ads in whatever size and shape you want to put them on the site. It's a better experience for users and it's a better experience for advertisers.
You should be thinking creatively about your ad placements, which means that you're going to need to make friends with your ad sales team. There are some interesting examples of things that people are doing to try to bring the ads more integrated into the site.
Pitchfork just launched a redesign and Apple did this whole thing where they showed the iPhone and it actually interacted with the nav and it was like the nav was breaking into the wrapper. I've saw a lot of commentary about how annoying it was but I guarantee you every Pitchfork user who had never heard of the iPhone now has seen what the iPhone looks like.
When we did the New York Times one of the things that they had was an internal ad on the left corner and an external ad on the right corner. One day somebody on our team was like, "Hey what if we sold both of those positions to advertisers?" The ad sales guy was just like, "Oh my God this is the greatest idea," and was really excited about being able to have this sort of dual position in the header. Being able to have this dual position in the header was what enabled us to negotiate not having the entire rectangle ad above the fold. If we hadn't done that, the other designs we were working with had the rectangle ad a lot higher cutting into the content real estate above the top.
The Gawker family of blogs was doing some interesting things right now with skinning their entire site, like skinning the look and feel of the site for an advertiser. A site like HP or an advertiser like HP will buy all of the positions‑‑or Entourage here, you can see how this is skinned.
Everything online is measured. Whenever anybody talks about the benefit of online advertising one of the first things out of their mouth is to say, "Well it's all measurable. Isn't that great?" There's a lot of measurement going on. I don't know exactly how. There's so much data out there.
I can't even really get into this in much detail except to say that what I've learned is that data's cheap and insights expensive. You can gather all of the data that you want about how ads are performing, but finding the really smart people who can go in there and do the hard core work, business analytics work, to figure out what that actually means, those people cost a lot of money.
Finally, the last thing I want you to know about online advertising is that you should forget pretty much everything I've just said here because the banner is dead. Oh my God, they're dead. What are we going to do without them?
So I want to speculate a little bit about the future. I do not claim to know what the future of online advertising is. But I do know that there is no shortage of pundits out there just dying to tell you that the banner is dead. The problem is that they've been saying that for, like, ten years now.
And I would just say that I think it's hooey. The advertising industry's reliance on banner ads is like our country's dependence on foreign oil: everybody knows it's a bad idea, but actually fixing this problem is a lot more complicated.
You have to remember, there is enormous amounts of infrastructure built up around these things. Display advertising in general, whether that's in print, or outdoor, or magazines, or whatever is the cornerstone of the advertising industry. And, frankly, what I would say in response to this is that, rather than expecting banners to go away, you should‑‑when advertising comes back in the next cycle, you should expect bigger, crazier ads.
What that means is that we're all going to be pushing more money online. And the more money that gets spent online, the more advertisers that are saying, "Okay, we're going to invest in bigger campaigns online," it's going to mean better creative for the ads, so there's going to be fewer "punch the monkeys" and more well‑designed ads like you see in print. And, hopefully, many of these sites will stay in business because they're going to be making money off of advertising. I want talk about sponsorships as concept; a way to make money. In the olden days, media had standards for what was advertising and what was content. And they would get very huffy if you tried to bridge those two. That's different on the web: people don't have those same standards.
So, Razorfish, in their commentary about their digital outlook, says, "Package everything as a sponsorship, because advertisers love to convey the idea that they're bringing your content from their brand." I would say my experience with this, when working with Cool Hunting, is that sponsorships continue to just be the icing on the cake; the cherry on top.
Brooke comes in, and she's got a spreadsheet to fill out, and she wants to know your banner placements are. And then, on top of it, what you do is throw in a sponsorship. And you're like, "And, we'll also let you sponsor our gift guide." And she's like, "Oh, well, that's a nice little extra bonus, extra credit check in my spreadsheet."
It's not what she's buying, it's what you're giving her so that she will buy the banner ads. And that, I think, is actually proven by the data here. You can see, this is how the different formats of online advertising have changed in the last few years. Sponsorships is the one that's gone down the most. It's only like two percent of the media share. People are still buying display banners, they're still buying rich media and video. Sponsorships are getting tossed in for free.
And I think I would be remiss in not addressing the subject of, "What if people just paid for it? Can't we just get people to pony over some cash, and get them to buy the content we provide?" And I think this is something you're going to see a lot of interest in and talk about over the next few years because the advertising industry is going to be in a decline.
Chris Anderson is going to tell us that the future of business is free. And that things like giving content away for free to get advertising, or giving something for free and then getting people to pay for it later is the future. The Economist just published an article yesterday basically saying, "No, no, no. It's over again. The idea that content is free online is going the way of the dodo." They said this in 2001, and I think you're going to see the same thing again.
Publishers are going to experiment with it. I think there are all kinds of things that might happen. My experience, just anecdotally in working with this. I was working with the Times when they did an experimental program called Times Select‑‑which was a way that they were going to charge people to look at some of their content online.
They did away with it after not all that very long. I don't have any of the data about how that performs, I don't think they've shared that at all. But one of the anecdotal things that they did share was that they gave online subscription access free to anyone who was a home delivery subscriber. And they thought people who subscribed at home would be delighted. They are like, "That's great it's something for free."
In fact, people who are home delivery subscribers hated it even more. They were surprisingly negative about it. The rationale that they got was that home delivery subscribers said, "We want your content to be read by other people. The reason that we support you is because we want other people to read your editorial."
So for a lot of other brands that are providing content and not functionality. The idea that their ideas are hidden behind a pay wall and not accessible to the blogosphere and not accessible for people to share and link and discuss. The upside they get from the pay wall might be offset by the fact that their brand doesn't get the exposure that it needs.
I've heard people say to be basically, "Karen, can't we come up with something better than this?" What I would say, quite honestly, is that the Internet is the biggest source, the biggest Petri dish, the biggest source of exploration for different revenue models that we've ever seen.
Believe me, if there is a way to charge for something, or monetize something, or experiment with different ways of getting people to pay for things. Whether that's by eyeballs or whether that's by actual cash money. The Internet has experimented with it. I think the next few years will be very interesting in that you'll see people trying and experimenting with a lot more.
But, having done all of this for a while I am left saying that advertising is the worst revenue model for the Internet. Except for all the others. With apologies to Winston Churchill and the concept of democracy.
So, I wanna wrap this up with a couple more thoughts. I went out and interviewed a number of my former clients in preparation for this. One of the guys I talked to was the publisher of, the head of Atlantic Media. He was formerly the publisher of The Week. And I asked him at the end of the interview: Do you have any parting words for the user experience for this community? Anything you really want people to know?
He was like, "Yes." He said, "Everybody wants to think that user experience is like this paramount good, like it is the enviable truth." He said, "You know, you think that if you look at ads on the page and think that provides a bad experience, so you want to take them off the page to provide a better experience."
He said, "If you think that taking the ads off the page and making the page nicer and cleaner and easier to read and less cluttered and less distracting and that user experience in and of itself is going to get more people to come to the web site. That's going to drive enough revenue to make up for the fact that you don't have ads there. You are kidding yourself. User experience is not going to drive that much revenue. If you want content, sites, publishers to be successful, you have to give the advertisers what they want."
Just to conclude this, I really want everybody to think about our future as an industry, our future as professionals. I think if there's a group of people out there who can find really smart ways to integrate the advertising, to provide value for advertisers, still deliver quality experience, it is you guys. But please think about it in terms of: Let's get advertisers to spend more money on the Internet. Give them what they want.
So, I just want to say thanks to the many people who helped me out as I was preparing for this presentation and‑‑I forgot to take the build off of those logos. And that's it. Thank you.
[applause]
[music]

Creating Magic Kingdoms: User Experience Lessons from Disney’s Imagineers - Mike Atherton
Ever been in love? We can all recall user experiences we admire. But do we love them?

Emotional engagement is an enormously powerful driver in ensuring product success. One group of UX designers, Disney's Imagineers, uses this approach to build experiences that people not only engage with, but truly love.

Mike Atherton aims to reconnect us to the passions that brought us to the IA Summit with his lighthearted and inspirational presentation. We love the work we do. Let’s make sure our users love it too.

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Transcript of Creating Magic Kingdoms: User Experience Lessons from Disney's Imagineers - Mike Atherton. Main Conference Session, Day 1 – Friday, March 20
[music]
Announcer: Ever been in love? We can all recall user experiences we admire, but do we truly love them? Emotional engagement is an enormously powerful driver in insuring product success. One group of user experience designers, Disney's Imagineers, knows this, and understands how to build user experiences that people not only engage with but truly love.
Mike Atherton presents a lighthearted and inspirational presentation aiming to reconnect us with the passions that brought us here. We love the work we do. Let's just make sure our users love it, too. I hope everyone enjoys the podcast. Cheers.
Mike Atherton: So hi, I'm Mike Atherton and I'm from London. And let's give this a whirl, shall we? Love, exciting and new.
[laughter]
Mike Atherton: It's a many splendored thing. It's a battlefield and a losing game. But what is love anyway? Perhaps you're more Ben and Jerry's than Haagen‑Dazs. Maybe you'd gladly mortgage your children for an iPod Touch but wouldn't be seen dead with a Zune. How would you make Sophie's Choice should I rob you of your Twitter or your Facebook? When we talk about the love we have for the Apples, and Nintendos and even the WordPresses of the world, we're talking about [zing sound] emotional engagement. Now I make user experiences for what some have called a living, most recently with the BBC. I'm fascinated in finding out what separates mere respect from true love. And what's love got to do with it? Well for one thing, designing a product for emotional engagement could be the difference between launching a Smart Car and a Volvo, a Netflix and a Blockbuster, a Firefox and a, well, nobody every tattooed themselves with the other guy's logo.
Emotional engagement is an instant bond with our audience so they feel our product or service is as much theirs. And I believe that emotional engagement aids the design process itself.
But before we get to all that I hope you'll let me indulge in a spot of hero worship because it strikes me as I zip through my mental Rolodex of fetishes that there a group of architects and designers and engineers building user experiences that enjoy that high emotional engagement that's almost like being in love.
Maybe if we take a walk through their work, there are lessons to learn about putting a little heart into our own.
Now they may not have the transient cool of today's Technorati but they've been working tirelessly their brand of magic for over 50 years. And like the kind of experiences we all architect today, it all started with a mouse. I'm speaking of course of Disney's Imagineers. Now I should stress that I am not now nor have I ever been one of them. I'm merely a fan and an evangelist, a Mouseketeer.
Around 1950, Walt Disney was in Griffith Park. He was sitting on a bench and eating peanuts. He'd taken his daughters to the merry‑go‑round. And as he sat watching them play, he thought, Wouldn't it be ‑ I can't do the accent ‑ [with American accent] Wouldn't it be great if...
[laughter]
Mike Atherton: I'm just going to abandon the whole accent thing ‑ if there was a place that the whole family could enjoy themselves at the same time. Well, in that single thought lay the genesis of Disneyland and what would be the discipline of Imagineering. Now Walt's studio was alive with animators, and model makers, and scenery painters, and special effects technicians, and writers, and composers and lyricists. And it was from these ranks that the Imagineers came. These men and women worked tirelessly to design and build some of the best loved user experiences anywhere, things like Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, the Jungle Cruise, Spaceship Earth, Space Mountain, Splash Mountain and yes, the one with that damn song.
[laughter]
Mike Atherton: Guided by Walt's vision and a culture of idea sharing, experimentation and all out guts, they took their film making magic into unchartered territory, actually used their lack of experience to their advantage. As Marty Sklar puts it, "Our greatest asset was ignorance. We didn't know we could fail." Now at this point in the presentation I'd like to introduce you to my co‑host. So let's just unclip this little guy.
[Recording starts]
Walt Disney: ... how Disneyland evolved from a dream to a reality. Now it was about 1954 that we came up with this, what you might call the climax to the [Inaudible 5:50].
[Recording ends]
Mike Atherton: Yeah.
[Recording starts]
Walt Disney: "This was the concept that we hoped Disneyland would eventually be. Now we've made a lot of changes through the years but this still remains the basic plan."
[Recording ends]
Mike Atherton: In fact, Disneyland was a hard sell. This wasn't just a case of an animator going into the them park business. There was no theme park business. Disneyland was a world first. And what separates a theme park from the Coney Island fairgrounds that came before it, well we would call that user experience. Walt wanted visitors to step out of their own reality and into a movie. But this dream needed cold, hard cash. And then bean counters saw nothing but problems. Disney's folly, they called it. How would he operate it year round? Were the tiny details a needless extravagance? Customers won't care. Stick to what you know. If you build it, they won't come.
Well, one weekend Walt collared a storyboard artist, this guy Herb Ryman. "Herbie," he said, won't do the accent again, "I need to show these bankers exactly what we mean. We need to get them excited." Well with Walt on his shoulder all weekend, Herb's renderings captured the essence of Disneyland. And they're not based on the blueprints, no wire frames to work from here, just the swirl of ideas in Walt Disney's head.
Those drawings that Herb Ryman worked on that day started a visual culture that still leads Imagineering even today. We all know that it doesn't really matter how nice you make your functional spec documents or even your wire frames. The client always gets excited over the pretty pictures.
Now in my own work I'll often visualize early project discussions. These are not carefully thought through IA masterpieces. Indeed many of them would fall apart completely if you look at them funny. But really that's the point, having some visual meat to rip into like cynical raptors, it focuses debate and clarifies whether we all have the same broad vision in our heads. That instant connection to artwork isn't just about understanding. It's about getting fired up. It's emotional engagement.
So when Imagineering comes and builds a new attraction, they don't start with blueprints or project plans. No one ever falls in love with a Hobson spigot or a Gangly wrench. This isn't yet about the structural. It's about the dream. Now of course I'm not suggesting that we dump the wire frames, and use cases, and functional specs, we will still need detail after all. I just think they are not what opens purse strings or even heart strings.
Since Disney married Pixar in 2006, John Lasseter, this guy, has helped Imagineering maintain their creative culture. Both Pixar and Imagineering, have strong principles for creative management. Creative people have control over every stage of an idea's development.
Now, I don't just mean visual designers here. Products ideas may move between disciplines, be it story development or architectural engineering. The trick is to create cross discipline teams, who will bring different insights and work well together, refining good ideas into great ones. Daily show and tells, no matter how rough, help people get over any embarrassment when showing incomplete work, and promote healthy competition. Everyone has the freedom to talk to everyone else, regardless of departments or rank. There are no proper channels to go through. Managers aren't always the first to know, and sometimes it is nice to walk into a meeting and be surprised.
Training courses and learning lunches help teams from different disciplines to interact, and appreciate one another's skills. How many times have we sunk hundreds of hours into a project, only to move on and try to forget it the moment it is out the door? Well, instead list the top five things you would do again, and the top five things you wouldn't‑‑the roses, and the thorns.
In the 1960's, Bill Bernbach of the advertising agency DDB, transformed the industry when he invented the creative team. Specifically, the teaming of a copywriter and an art director to work on an ad simultaneously. At the interactive agency, Sapient‑‑you know them? They have adapted this practice, and our pairing information architects with visual designers. The complement of skills ensures balance between structure and esthetic at the BBC.
Anyone with a dream can workup their idea, and present it to a panel of experts, who might throw the odd brick back at them, but only so they can go back to the drawing board and refine their idea. It is a great way of funneling the creative juices from fertile minds‑‑which sounded a little better when I wrote it.
So, by developing user experience in small cross‑discipline groups, organizations like this, and like Pixar, and Imagineering, they learn and succeed by dreaming and doing.
Walt wanted every inch of Disneyland to feel like part of a story, to have a strong narrative, driving the layout and architecture, and design and service. Things that happen in view of the guest are on stage. Park operations are backstage. Staff are cast members, and they wear costumes, not uniforms. Two‑faced facades inspired by movie back lots set the scene, be it a broken‑ down Hollywood hotel, or a Wild West railroad, or Ana Paula Base Camp, or even an 18 story geodesic sphere. They call it 'architectural' story telling.
The Hollywood Tower Hotel has directed every inch to be an 1930's grand hotel, now rather down on its luck. The Base Camp at Expedition Everest tells of a Yeti Hunt through news clippings, and documentary photographs, and artifacts. At the Kidani Village in Animal Kingdom, you will still find the outlines of the old city walls around the Portuguese fortress that once stood there. Engravings commemorate the political events that shook the village in 1961, and yet none of it is real.
There was no fortress, no events of 1961. It is just part of the story on story layering that gives each experience its rich tapestry.
Now, over at the BBC, we're revolutionizing the way that we tell stories online. The BBC, as you probably know, makes thousands of hours of television and radio programming, widely regarded as some of the best programming in the world‑‑oh, and I think so.
Yet our online efforts have met with mixed success, static websites dot the landscape like silos, disconnected from the wider BBC universe. For example, you might like this man, Stephen Fry, and some of you may even know that he was in this show, Black Adder, and he had a comedy partnership with this other guy, who you may know from this show.
He also did something about the Gutenberg Press for the BBC. He suffers from bipolar disorder, which he made a program about. Most recently, he made another series, where he took a trip around these United States. In that series he visited Kentucky, and Hawaii, and Nevada, where he visited one of these brothel, as did this guy, Louis Theroux in another BBC series. Which tells us if nothing else, that our documentary filmmakers are getting one over on us.
Well, for the longest time there was no way to make those connections or follow those journeys. We only retold on air the same stories that were first told online. Now, thanks to minds immeasurably superior to mine, we are seeing those rich relationships exposed, so we may follow our own narrative paths.
If you want to see how Michael Palin became a comedy god as part of Monty Python, and then transitioned into a travel correspondent, visiting the Sahara, which was repeatedly created by climate change, which is an issue that this guy wasn't so big on, but this guy says he will be, well then go on. Follow that camel, because you don't need us to explicitly tell you that story. There is a combination of approaches here. The BBC's Topics Project is a way of bringing together all our stories on a particular theme, lifting them out of their silos, and making aboutness a form of navigation.
Then there are the more detailed domain modeling efforts, which explicitly define the relationships between our programs, and people, and events, and topics, and even our recipes. These are our voyages into the semantic web, and it is a lot like love. It is rather straight forward in theory, but somewhat messy in practice.
So, non‑linear dynamic narratives aren't exactly like theme park attractions, but like with the imaginers, our designs should be led by the stories we want to tell. Disneyland was designed to be an unbroken user experience‑‑over to my co‑host for a moment.
Walt Disney: At the foot of Main Street, about where you are sitting is the Plaza. The Plaza, or the hub, is the heart of Disneyland. Shooting out from here, like the four cardinal points to the compass, Disneyland is divided into four cardinal realms: Adventureland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland, and Frontierland.
Mike Atherton: The hub and spoke mode created different distinct lands, that didn't visually compete. It allowed for very controlled traffic flow, which paved the way for some very filmic spectacle. When you first entered Disneyland, you do so by a railway station, giving you a sense of arrival at this happy place. At this point, you still can't see into the Park, until you enter under a stoned underpass, and emerging from the darkness you find yourself staring straight down 19th Century, Main Street, USA, with a fairytale Sleeping Beauty Castle ahead in the distance.
It is a deliberate piece of staged management, transporting you from the real world into Disneyland. Now the castle itself serves the same purpose as the hat in the Hollywood studios, or the golf ball at Epcot, or the Tree of Life in the Animal Kingdom. These huge and iconic structures serve as a navigation anchor, signaling the hub from which visitors can spoke out into different directions. They call these proud directions "weenies", I kid you not.
[laughter]
Mike Atherton: Like us, the Imagineers understood that user journey should avoid distraction, so they worked to prevent visual intrusion, which would break the illusion of each distinctly themed land. Still led by the movie making metaphor, Imagineers designed smooth cross‑dissolves from one land into the next. In Florida the journey from Main Street to Adventureland gradually blends themed foliage, color, sound, music and architecture. The Crystal Palace restaurant fuses the American colonial with the British colonial style of India and Asia, providing an ideal transition between the two lands. The Big Thunder Mountain in Florida is modeled after the red rock of Monument Valley, but in Disneyland it's based on the striped hoodoos of Utah's Bryce Canyon. And why?
Well, because in the smaller footprint of Disneyland the cartoon‑like Candy Mountain is better suited to peer over storybook Fantasyland. This attention to detail is everywhere, adapting the filmmaking convention of the long, medium and close‑up shots into the park design.
Long shots are done through false perspective, a trick where the buildings are built progressively smaller as they recede into the distance in order to appear larger than they are. It allows for a grand view within a very small space. The medium shots are the building facades, with theming that turns an ordinary ride queue into a bustling space port or an automotive test center.
And then the close‑ups provide the subliminal detail. In keeping with the "lived in" look, the Imagineers designed signs, doorknobs, light fixtures, trash cans, menus, concession stands and wallpaper, all supporting the attraction's backstory.
Walt and his brother Roy took their first major creative and financial risk back in 1928 when they released their first cartoon with synchronized sound. They did it again with Snow White in 1937, the first time that the critics had used the term "Disney's folly," claiming that there was no market for a full length animated feature and it would never make back its 1.5 million dollar budget.
So despite the success of Snow White, by the time Disneyland opened in 1955, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. The park was their biggest gamble yet for much higher financial stakes.
[Recording starts]
Walt Disney: Oh, it goes back so... I had different cost estimates. One time it was $3,500,000 and I kept fooling around with it. It got up to $7,500,000 and I kept fooling around a little more. Pretty soon it was 12‑and‑a‑half, and I think when we opened Disneyland it was $17,000,000.
[Recording ends]
Mike Atherton: But Walt wasn't afraid to take risks. He made a career focus out of an investment in new technology from those early sound cartoons to surround sound, like Fantasia, to the first monorail in America, to a new kind of animation that would bring three dimensional life to the stories he wanted to tell.
[Recording starts]
Walt Disney: We created a new type of animation. So new that we had to invent a new name for it. Announcer: Audio‑Animatronics? Walt Disney: Right, Audio‑Animatronics.
[Recording ends]
Mike Atherton: This cunning businessman avoided paying for advertising by using his TV show as an extended commercial for the park. He was quick to capitalize on merchandising, and having just lost money on Pinocchio and Fantasia, it's no accident that Sleeping Beauty Castle took its cue from the next film on the drawing board. Despite this expanding media empire, he was driven not by money but by the pursuit of quality. In fact, Walt didn't like the idea of corporations very much, recognizing how much harder it is to maintain clarity of vision and get things done within a large organization. So he repeatedly looked to carve small, creative niches out of his larger structure, the most notable of which was WED Enterprises, known today as Walt Disney Imagineering. These days, entrepreneur risk taking is second nature in our business.
Our medium of choice has matured to a point where the building blocks of innovation &8211; APIs and web services and open source‑‑are readily and cheaply available. Even the teams to help us assemble them are never far away. One evening chef Niall Harbison was lying in bed and came up with an idea for a Twitter‑based recipe application. The next morning he sent out the following tweet.
[Imitating Irish accent] Need a smart developer who... he's Irish, by the way... who thinks that they could build a simple... that's probably racist, isn't it... a simple app in one day. Cash or profit share pay depending on preference. Big idea.
Well, 17 replies and just $300 later, would you believe, twecipe.com launched, offering recipe suggestion for things that you have in your fridge. The product launch came exactly five days after Niall had first thought of the idea. More sophisticated services are still relatively cheap to develop. We're fortunate to live in a time and work in an industry where product development cycles can be measured in days and costs are in the low thousands, not the umpteenth millions. Yet we're also in a worldwide scramble to build the next big thing. With everyone borrowing from the same toolbox, we can afford to take risks and to innovate. We just can't afford not to.
In 1969, Marty Sklar, the guy we heard from earlier, had been asked to pitch an attraction concept to RCA. At the time making strides into personal computers, Marty and John Hench, another Imagineer, came up with a ride through a computer thinking that might RCA's buttons. The pitch went well among the lower ranks of RCA's staff, but then the client hit them with an uber‑client that hadn't been involved in any of the discussions to date. [sarcastically] I don't know if that sounds familiar to you.
The pitch to RCA's head honcho was a bit of a disaster. He didn't see what was so exciting about touring the guts of a computer, so the Disney boys went back to the drawing board and decided to revive an idea that had fired their own passions years earlier. RCA could buy into it if they wanted to, and they did, putting $10,000,000 into an attraction called Space Mountain, today one of the principal icons of Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
It was a valuable lesson in trusting their instincts. Of course they needed to design something that guests would enjoy, but this is, after all, what they do for a living‑‑what they've done now for 50 years. They really should be able to do it and make it user‑centered without having to stop and solicit opinion from guinea pigs every five minutes or being held hostage to the whims of clients or focus groupies. They are the recognized experts. They have the experience to know what their customers want, and so they build it, then they test it in the field.
Now in our own industry, whether we're talking about the YouTubes and Twitters and Diggs and even Googles of our generation, or the Apples and Microsofts of eons ago, we can see that true originality, true change, comes from a clarity of vision and a confidence of purpose.
I'll go out on a limb here and claim that none of the websites that have set the world on fire over the past 10 years were made by an agency working for a client, or even by a particularly large project team. When you look at the poster children of Web 2.0, you see the same story coming up again and again: two or three guys working in their basement to develop an idea that was useful to them personally, and putting a lot of love into their new baby, but somehow transferred to their first flush of users, who loved and nurtured the product just as much.
I propose that those products, and the love users have for them, could only come from that working environment; free of corporate politics, free of clients appeasement, free of iterative compromise and watering down, the death of a thousand cuts. The projects developed in larger organizations seem destined to suffer.
Now, it might appear somewhat unorthodox of me to contrast the working practices of a couple of teenagers in their parents Palo Alto basement with a multi‑billionaire juggernaut like Disney. But Walt Disney Imagineering, the small niche carved out of that larger studio by Walt himself, was designed to be just that think tank of talented enthusiasts, free to dream their dreams.
Sometimes the first idea isn't always the best. In the past, Disney's biggest change from concept to execution was Epcot, or to give it its proper name, the 'sciencey one with the big golf ball,' but who knows what 'Epcot' stands for? Wait‑‑I'll let Walt tell you the best part of his plans for Florida.
[Recording starts]
Walt Disney: The most exciting, by far the most important part of our Florida project, in fact, the heart of everything we'll be doing, Disney World will be our experimental prototype city of tomorrow. We call it "Epcot," spelt "E-P-C-O-T," Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Here it is on a larger scale.
[music]
Walt Disney: Epcot will take its queue from the new ideas, the new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry. It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing, and testing, and demonstrating new materials, and new systems. At Epcot, we will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise. I don't believe there is a challenge anywhere in the world that is more important to people everywhere, then finding solutions to the problems of our cities.
Man 1: So, where do we begin? How do we start answering this great challenge? Well, we are convinced, we must start with the public need, and the need is not just for curing the old ills, the old cities. We think the need is for starting from scratch on virgin land, and building a special kind of new community. First, the area of business and commerce. Next the high density apartment housing. Then the broad green belt and recreation lands, and finally the low density neighborhood residential streets. In other parts of the country, a community the size of this prototype could become part of an entire city complex, composed of many such communities, planned and built a few miles apart.
In Disney World, about 20,000 people will actually live in Epcot. Their homes will be built in ways that permit ease of change, so that new products may continuously be demonstrated. Their schools will welcome new ideas, so that everyone who grows up in Epcot, will have skills in pace with today's world.
Walt Disney: That is the starting point for our Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. And now, where do we go from these preliminary plans and sketches? Well, a project like this is so vast and scoped, that no one company alone can make it a reality, but if we can bring together the technical know‑how of American industry and the creative imagination of the Disney Organization, I am confident we can create right here in Disney World, a showcase to the world, of the American free enterprise system. I believe we can build a community that more people will talk about and come to look at than any other area in the world. And with your cooperation, I am sure this experimental prototype community of tomorrow can influence the future of city living for generations to come. It is an exciting challenge. A once in a lifetime opportunity for everyone who participates, speaking for myself and the entire Disney Organization, we are ready to go right now.

[Recording ends]
Mike Atherton: Before we sliced it, Walt Disney was dead. Now, if you have ever been to Epcot, you will know that it is not a city of the future. After Walt died, much of the company's imaginative risk taking died with him. Still, the public wouldn't let Epcot lie, and Disney knew it would have to do something. The result was a theme park, focused on science and innovation and corporate sponsorship, representing the spirit of the original vision. In 1982, the Epcot Center opened, located at what would have been the heart of Walt's progress city.
After the story about corporate, it reminds me of the one about husband and wife team, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield, struggling to develop their massively multiplayer online game back in 2002. They were running out of money, and fearing that the end was nigh. They made a difficult decision to ditch the game, and focus instead on its best feature, sharing photos with other players.
Well, that feature morphed into a site called Flickr. What makes this story interesting is that Fake says, "Had we sat down," I won't even try it, and said, "Let's start a photo application, we would have failed. We were stupid and naive, which turned out to be a wonderful thing." Like the early Imagineers, ignorance was their greatest asset. They didn't know they could fail.
Disneyland was propelled by Walt's frustration with movie making. Once a film was made, it was fixed, unchanging forever, but Disneyland he said would never be completed. It would always be evolving and revolving, giving people new reasons to come back.
He had an apartment built above the fire station. On weekends, he would come down and stay in the Park, chatting to guests and finding out just how they would make Disneyland better. Walt called it "Plussing," a never ending cycle of iterative improvement.
Over the years, the Park's have seen different attractions come and go. In fact, the list of the past attractions is easily as long as those still present, gone, but not forgotten, by the fans who still speak of them fondly.
Our Imagineering Legends have consistently acted as creative leaders. When it comes to testing, they are like the drunk with the lamppost, looking more for support then illumination. Wow! Controversial perhaps, to say that product design should be led by the shared vision of the project team. Only involve the opinions of users where necessary, and really then only when you have already gone ahead and built what you wanted to build anyway.
BBC iPlayer is a service that lets you watch or listen to BBC TV and radio shows online, provided you live in the UK. The project first kicked off around 2004, and was mired in political trials, and dog murk, and rights negotiation, and changes in technology platform. It was costing millions in public money, and hadn't so much as a beater site.
And then this guy, Anthony Rose came along, and brought the touch of Silicon Valley to the mahogany corridors of the BBC. That is not straightly accurate, but it makes for a better story.
Audience: [laughter]
Mike Atherton: As creator of the online media group, he fast tracked the development of iPlayer, and instigated a bullish release cycle. In Rose's view, real artist ship fortnightly, every two weeks. The idea is that if something goes out and it's a bit rubbish, it's not the end of the world because in two weeks it will be better. Again, we see the Imagineering practice of a small, self‑contained, creative team carved from a large organization and intent on getting things done. As Walt said, "You don't design for yourself, you design for what you know people want." Yet the way we as an industry build products has brought a shift in the way that we can engage users in product development. We can let change happen in the wild. We can let the audience do our plussing [sic]. By being transparent about the product architectures, by making it as much about the APLA as the UA, the things we make can evolve as users build new services on top using our building blocks to weave new stories. Not that you can weave with building blocks.
To date, Walt Disney Imagineering has built eleven Disney Theme Parks, a town, two cruise ships, dozens of resort hotels, water parks, shopping centers, sports complexes, and entertainment venues worldwide. They have over 28 patents registered. Their names adorn the windows of Main Street, and the legacy they've created in Disney Land and its spiritual sons will outlive them in the way that legacies do. People have loved their work so much that they bought the t‑shirt.
If only the work we did had such staying power, such permanency, not just on stage but in the hearts and minds of our audience. We spend months of our lives pouring our blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily fluid into the things that we build, and we think ourselves lucky if they see their second birthday. It's time and efforts and brain juice we could have spent writing a novel or building a school or bringing enlightenment to the culturally impoverished.
So why do we do what we do? I mean information architecture seems rather a specific area of study, scarcely the thing that people just fall into as they might with management consultancy or petty crime, to name but one.
[laughter]
I think we have touched on the answer. I hope I'm preaching to the converted. I believe that we, all of us, want to make user experiences that are beautiful; lovable in their structure, in their execution, in the stories they tell.
Walt Disney said that Imagineering is not a specific discipline but more a state of mind. We can learn from these creative philosophies passed down through the years to expand our horizons by collaborating cross culture, sticking the spoon of user experience into every layer of the Web application trifle before scrambling it into an eaten mess, to understand the stories we want to tell and to have the sense of purpose, the courage to cut the ties and let our babies breathe and grow in the open air and not in the incubator.
A carousel of progress keeps turning as we sally forth into that great big beautiful tomorrow of the Web's evolution. One where a free and open sharing of information will be underpinned by things we can point at and by relationships we can define succinctly and unambiguously. This cannot simply be an academic exercise in classification and order but a means of weaving new stories through a common language.
As the journalist Sydney Harris once wrote, "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." Or as the Imagineers understand it, it's not the size of your slide rule that's important, but how it's used. Our stock and trade is the functional specification, but shouldn't we also consider the emotional specification? How do we want our users to feel? How do we want them to think of us? Do we want to be the Firefox or the Internet Explorer, the Mustang or the Camry, the Diana or the Camilla?
We must be bold and imaginative; to dream, to believe, to dare, and to do, to think outside the boxes and the arrows, to be passionate yet infectious, but in the good way. To create experiences that people fall in love with, to consider the whole of the web as our own Disneyland, stitching in quality, consistency and excitement, from the long‑shots to the close‑ups, an unbroken user journey moving seamlessly from one adventure to the next. "It's a small world, after all." Thank you.
Audience: [applause]
[Music "It's a Small World."]
Mike Atherton: A couple of minutes for questions, if anybody has any, or there is lunch.
Audience Question: [inaudible 39:48]
Mike Atherton: Exactly. So, I shall repeat the question for the tape. "How do we convince our project sponsors and our clients to let us work in a collaborative cross‑cultural way that follows the Imagineering trend," I guess. To me, I think you only need to really look at the things that are truly successful. When I worked in agencies for 10 years building micro sites for vodka brands, and what have you, and just destroying little pieces of my soul every time. I mean, what is the point? These things take so much time and effort, and it is disproportionate to their value in a lot of cases.
Yet on the flipside of that, you have something like a Twitter or a YouTube, or something, which is developed in a very kind of free and open way. It is developed to be something that is quite single purpose that is not watered down in that way, and because of that, it is phenomenally successful.
So, I guess in answer to your question, I mean you only need to look at the things which those clients often aspire to be, that they often want to piggyback on, or bottle feed from. If they actually want to be the change agents in the industry, then this is the environment to do it.
Yes?
Audience Question: [inaudible 41:09]
Mike Atherton: Chris, right? My hero.
[laughs]
Mike Atherton: I want your job. Yeah. That is right. I mean, Epcot was a bit of an apology really, from what was a strange dream for an animator to have, until it starts getting to the specific planning game. It is interesting to see the legacy that the Park has become. There is some tenants of that. Not only that, but if you take a trip to the town of‑‑not Stratford, but Celebration in Florida. You can see a vision, a reality, of what the Epcot vision might have been, which is a genuine town, but looks like you are living in Disneyland to a certain extent. Thanks.
[applause]
[music]

A Fundamental Disruption: Moving Information Architecture into the Hands of Individual Consumers - Peter Sweeney & Robert Barlow-Busch
A fundamental assumption in information architecture is that producers need to organize their content before consumers can access it effectively.

But what if content didn’t have to be organized in advance of its access, or even organized by producers at all? What if each consumer’s individual perspective could direct the organization of content, independent of the actions of other consumers?

Primal Fusion's Peter Sweeney, Founder and CTO, and Robert Barlow-Busch, Director of Product Design, demonstrate existing technologies that are already moving the Web towards more consumer-directed forms of information architecture.

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Transcript of A Fundamental Disruption: Moving Information Architecture into the Hands of Individual Consumers Peter Sweeney and Robert Barlow‑Busch. Main Conference Session, Day 1 – Friday, March 20
[music]
There's a fundamental assumption in information architecture that producers need to organize their content before consumers can access it effectively. But what if content didn't have to organized in advance of its access or organized by producers at all? What if each consumer's individual perspective could direct the organization of content independent of the actions of other consumers? Primal Fusion's Robert Barlow Busch and Peter Sweeney provide demonstrations of existing technologies that are already moving the web towards more consumer directed forms or information architecture. I hope everyone enjoys the podcast.
Cheers.
Robert Barlow-Busch: So I want to start here by asking who here owns a digital camera? Wow, just about everybody, that's no surprise. Digital cameras have basically taken over the photography business at this point. Now, if you think back to the first digital cameras that came up, how would you describe their quality and performance?
Audience: Slow.
Robert Barlow-Busch: Slow? Generally kind of lousy. They took awful pictures, right? You could only look at the photos on your computer, you know, existing processes for printing photos really weren't compatible with that. You know the whole idea is that they were lousy to start off with, and professionals completely wrote them off. Why would anyone use that? And yet, today most professional photographers are using digital photography, digital cameras. Now this is a classic characteristic of disruptive technologies. Disruptive technologies start off really under performing, they're just not good enough to actually use or to use for any serious purpose.
However, they do get better. And they eventually get better not just to serve the low end of the market, you know, the people for whom it's just good enough, but they continue on a trajectory until eventually they get good enough to serve the high end of the market as well. And this is sort of the central idea behind disruptive technologies. And if you want to learn more be sure to check out Clayton Christensen's book ,"The Innovator's Dilemma". That's really where this model has come from.
So, today we want to propose that semantic technology is on this curve. Semantic technology needs to be on our radar as information architects. And take a look at really what semantic technology is about. It's about automating the creation of concept models is a very concise way of saying it. It's about allowing computers to recognize ideas and concepts and topics and what they mean and how they're related to each other and then enable new computing algorithms to do interesting things with that data.
Now let's compare that to IA. There is a real overlap between the objectives and goals of these two areas. IA is also about concept models. If you go to the crowd mine site right now actually, you know how they asked us the question about what's your favorite UX tool or IA tool, concept models is I think the second biggest tag in that tag cloud right now. So, it's something that IA has developed a lot of, you know, methods and practices and tools to help with, and semantic technology is coming like a freight train here. It's right in IA's backyard, so we need to be aware of these things.
In a nutshell, the disruption that we suspect is going to occur because we're seeing to start to happen now, is that no longer will you need one group of people to organize data in advance for another group of people. These technologies allow information to be self organizing. And in so doing, it means that consumers will actually be able at the time that they want information to say here's what I want, here's how I'm thinking about this particular subject. And these technologies can respond by in real time, right at that moment, organizing it the way that it should in response to that request from the consumer. So that's the proposal in a nutshell there. So I think I'm going to toss it over to Pete here to tell us a little more about this technology, and why we need to keep our eye on this.
Peter Sweeney: We've heard this sort of thing for a long time, haven't we? There's some people nodding in the audience. The notion of a semantic web of semantic technologies emerging in the mainstream has been something we've expected for many many years. And it's been slow in coming, frankly. So, the question becomes, "When? When might this happen?" Well, what we wanted to do today is actually show you some technologies that are actually up and running today to make it very much in the present, but the other thing I wanted to, if we can go to the next slide, is talk about why the pace of the semantic technology and the semantic innovation is accelerating, because it's important to understand not only where we are on the curve right now, but how quickly we're rising up that curve. What is really interesting about Web 2.0 is something that is not in the semantic technology crowd, but it more than anything else, I think, is really accelerating the emergence of these semantic technologies into the mainstream. And the reason is that semantic technologies love data. They love big data. And Web 2.0 has created this abundance of semi‑structured data into the ecosystem. Wikipedia, for example, that poster child of Web 2.0, is the most important source for semantic technologies now. Now, you have a number of these very niche and specialized semantic technologies that have been baking over decades, frankly, but once they have this data, this proliferation of semi‑structured data to work with, they become far more performant, for more quickly than in the past.
The other thing that's happening is this notion of the semantic web. How many people have heard about the semantic web? Just a quick pull. Oh, fantastic. So, the semantic web is a group of initiatives. A whole bunch of stuff is going on, in order to essentially provide semantic technologists with a way, a common framework to cooperate and to inter‑operate. So basically what's happening is that companies like Primal Fusion and many many others are creating this type of specialized semantic data and pushing it out into this ecosystem that we call the semantic web. And because of that, each of these technologies can begin to cooperate in ways that they couldn't before. So we have this spirit of cooperation, all using this common framework, and again that's accelerating the emergence of this structured data. So, again, we're going to keep it real, we're going to show you some.. Are we going to show…
[laughs]
Robert Barlow-Busch: Looks like we're not going to show functioning demos.
Peter Sweeney: We're going to do puppet shows to show you what this stuff could look like, but the undercurrent of all of this is as these technologies begin playing together, you're going to see an accelerating emergence of a truly semantic web over the next coming years. Okay.
Robert Barlow-Busch: Alright, so, if anybody has burning questions as we go, feel free to shout them out. We'll absolutely, we'll have some time for discussing some of these big ideas at the end. So, yeah, I apologize folks, while Pete was talking, I was trying to get the network running. The Peabody network does not reach here. Do we have more good news?
Audience: [inaudible]
Robert Barlow-Busch: Yeah, well, I'm going to proceed.
Audience: If you have a laptop, you can tether it.
Robert Barlow-Busch: We'll probably wind up running out of time. So the good news is having the functional demos is not absolutely essential for this. We're going to go to Plan B.
Okay, so the first product that we want to talk about is Freebase. Anybody familiar with Freebase? Freebase is an interesting example. Let me just get this over to the screen here. So here we have a screenshot of Freebase. And I'm going to turn backwards to see what I'm clicking now. What Freebase is is it's almost like Wikipedia, but for the relationships between ideas and concepts. It's open to anyone to go in and edit and add just like Wikipedia is. So what we're looking at right now is a page for The Peabody Hotel. And what's interesting is that you see it understands what The Peabody Hotel is. There's this idea of types. I'm going to mirror my display, one sec. Okay, you guys see that still? Cool. Now I can see it too. So if we go, we can see that the Peabody Hotel has certain characteristics, like a location. It has a type of building. It is a type of structure. Now what I was going to demo here, if we go into say, "Building," and we say, "Show me the schema for building," what we would see is that building as an idea has all kinds of structure around it.
You would see that buildings have architects, they have architectural styles. They even have information about projects related to buildings. There's this enormous wealth of information about what objects are and what fundamental components they're made up of. So it's a fantastic resource.
Peter Sweeney: Now what's underpinning Freebies and many other semantic services is a subset of the semantic web called Linked Open Data. Now linked open data is, essentially it's like a great, big distributed database. Presently it has about four point five billion records of information within it. And what's so cool about this resource and the semantic web is that anybody can use it. And anybody can use it like a database. So it's not just retrieving four point five billion records, it's how can each of those different facts be joined together to create more information, and to create new insights into information. Again, all of it is already available.
Robert Barlow-Busch: So this is an example of one product that we could have in our toolbox for getting data. Another one we want to talk about now is Zephyra, and a product called Remix. This is just an example of a general class of tools that are provided for folks, such as ourselves, to use to actually work with data and build new applications from. So, Zephyra, Remix was used to build this example of, it came out of MIT originally, the Simile Project, and this particular product is called Exhibit. And what we would see, if we could click on this, is that this is a really interesting RIA that allows you to learn information about U.S. Presidents. It, essentially it's created a sort of a faceted navigation experience for you to see. It's mashed up data about Presidents with Google maps and with a timeline on the top and with facets down the left where you can say, "Show me, you know Presidents by religion, or by political affiliation," and it's a neat little tool to sort of play with data.
Peter Sweeney: So another part of the semantic web, but this time it's on the Tool Set side, so not just providing the data but also providing tools to do interesting stuff with it. Really important point about this is that these tools are designed not for professionals. They're not designed necessarily for classificationists, or librarians or architects, but consumers. Anyone who wants to build a type of complex website like this has the tools available right now to go out and do that.
Robert Barlow-Busch: Alright, moving on to another demo, here. This is an interesting one. Has anyone had a chance to play with Callay, open Callay and through it? You'll want to check this out. So this is brought to us by Thompson Reuters, the news agency. They're using semantic technology very heavily right now. And they're making some of their tools available to anyone. So in this example, let me pull this screen up for everyone. What I would be able to demo, I can show you the results of this only, is, you can provide a URL to this service and it will go to that URL and it will read the documents. And in this case we actually pointed it to that seminal interview back in I think, 2000 of Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld by O'Reilly. So the results here, if I could scroll them, you would see that Callay has identified a whole bunch of core ideas in that paper. It's identified people, it's identified places, it's identified disciplines. All kinds of rich information that is now available to us to use in many other purposes.
Peter Sweeney: This is a classic technology called, I'm sorry, yeah?
Woman1: [inaudible]
Robert Barlow-Busch: The URL? We'll share these, we'll post these up on SlideShare by the way so you'll be able to see that.
Man3: Semanticproxy.opencallay.com.
Peter Sweeney: So information extraction is what this is about and the notion is you have this unstructured information, a document, and from it you can pull structure data, data that computers can read. The other thing that's really cool about this type of initiative is that they're providing the description of what these things are, they're called entities, in a way that other companies would understand. So they're using a vocabulary that other companies can share and use to inter‑operate. So if you combine a technology such as this with a resource such as the linked data web, you can use this to provide, for example, a structured entity like the name of a person, you can take that key, which is in computer‑speak and talk to the data web in order to pull out all of the information that might be joined to that particular person. So you can see how these technologies are cumulative.
It's not just a one hit wonder. I mean, in of itself, the idea of extracting a structured entity from an unstructured document doesn't seem very interesting, but when you piece it together into this larger ecosystem of activity, some really, really cool stuff begins to happen.
Robert Barlow-Busch: Alright, so breezing through some more of these. And we really are breezing since they're not working. Clusty. Anybody played with Clusty? OK, quite a few hands here. So Clusty is a useful tool. It's basically a search engine but a little step beyond that. Let me just zoom in here so you can see a Clusty screen shot up close. There we go. So when you do a search with Clusty, it is presenting you with the normal search results we'd expect to see, but then it's clustering ideas contained within those search results. Basically providing a way to filter through the vast number of results you have. Now for any of these we could click them and expand to see more ideas, to dig down into it again, feeling very much like the familiar faceted navigation experience that we have. And all of this, fully automated. So Pete, you had some thoughts.
Peter Sweeney: Yeah, so clustering is a fantastic tool that you've got if you've got large corpra to manage. What it's able to do is, looking at a very large set of documents it can extract the key themes of the different concepts that are embedded across those different documents. So that's something that takes an awful lot of work for people to do. The other thing that's cool about it is that because these topics exist across documents, it can actually infer relationships between different ideas. So for example, if I have document A and document B and both of them share a particular idea then perhaps they share different ideas across those documents as well. So those types of inferences are possible with semantic technology as well.
So what we have is not just pulling out themes and ideas, but also pulling out connections and relationships across those ideas as well.
Robert Barlow-Busch: So we're starting to see some examples of how this technology is enabling, you know, useful consumer applications. So another example of that is Cosmix. Anyone familiar with Cosmix? A couple of hands. Another one that I encourage you to check out. So with Cosmix, let me go through the little dance here again, pull it up so you can see. Cosmix is a site where you visit it and say, "Here's a topic I'm interested in." So in this case we are looking at climate change. And it basically creates a website for you about this topic. Now if we were to explore this website, we'd see that it's pulled together, snippets of information from Wikipedia, from search results, from blogs, from news stories, there's audio, there's video, and all of this is augmented, again as you can see over on the right with related ideas to climate change so you can then explore some more. So it's another way to experience information about this topic on the web.
Peter Sweeney: So this is obviously hitting close to home, or at least it should be. You have a site here that's actually building websites. And it's building a website every time somebody types something into the query box. So what it's doing behind the scenes, at least as far as I can guess is that it's taking a query, whatever you type into that search box, and it's situating it within a very large concept model that Cosmix has running underneath the surface. So the notion of using taxonomies or ontologies behind the scenes is a very important part of semantic technologies in general. Once they get the intent from the user, they can take that and situate it as best as they can within that existing concept model, and then they can do some really cool things, and really fast things. When they find out, for example, that this particular topic belongs in this particular spot within this knowledge structure, they can judiciously decide which other sources on the web might be relevant to this particular topic, and then in real time, they can take that query and federate it across all of those different sources. So, it's unfortunate that we can't scroll down here, because it's really quite impressive the amount of content that they can aggregate together. Different photos, different blogs, q and a, a whole host of different media, all within the context that the person has established.
Audience member: I wish to ask you a question about this example. You started... [inaudible]
Peter Sweeney: Oh, this particular one is human rights now, but I'm sure your question will hold either topic.
[laughs]
Audience member: I was wondering about how you guys got from there to there.
Robert Barlow-Busch: Oh, okay. We didn't. [laughs] We didn't get from there to here.
Different screen shots at different times. Okay, let's take a look at our final example right now. I should mention that, just to reinforce a point that Pete's made, about how there's a real spirit of collaboration and cooperation in this industry, so a lot of these products that we're seeing make their data available to you to use in various ways. And so, the final example is the product that we're currently working on at Primal Fusion, same thing holds true. This data will be available to folks to use in few ways. So, let's zoom in a little bit so you can see this more clearly. Here we are. So, this is a product that's in a very early alpha stage right now, but let me sort of example to you through a scenario what you could accomplish with this. What we're attempting to do is to take these ideas and the power of semantics and bring it to a far more personal level right now. So let's imagine that, you know, I'm a student and I have to write a paper on the relationship of climate change to economics. What we've built here is a product that will allow you to have a conversation with Primal Fusion to say here's what I'm thinking about, you know, the end goal is for you to say this is the idea in my mind, this is how I'm thinking about that idea, and for the underlying data to be available to software agents to help you go act on your thoughts in various different ways.
So in this scenario, I would come and say, I'm thinking about climate change. Down below, in the lower panel, we go out to Wikipedia in this example, and we read everything on Wikipedia that has anything to do with climate change, and come back with some of the salient ideas about climate change. At that point, I make some selections, and say OK, climate change is a big subject, let me tell you a little bit about how I'm thinking about it. So, you pick off some of these subjects, and you say remember those thoughts.
Really what you're doing in a nutshell is you're building a tag cloud up in this top panel that represents your take on this subject. So, what I'm looking at right now is really just ideas about climate change, but my paper is about climate change in economics. So I need to bring some other ideas that the system currently doesn't think of as being related, and I would do that by going down to the bottom and exploring economics now. I'm still keeping my context on climate change. So, we do the same thing: we read Wikipedia all about economics, give you lots of ideas about economics, pick off the ones that are relevant to how you're thinking, and remember those. And so, the tag cloud you would have up top would really reflect this combination of ideas from these two distinct disciplines. Underneath that is a lot of semantic data that's connecting these things. Primal Fusion is automatically creating new taxonomies and ontologies about these topics.
And then at this point, there are a lot of different things in the future that you'll be able to do for today in our alpha. You can create a website. Let me just quickly show you what those websites look like. I will make no claims to saying that they're pretty at the moment. But the idea is that you can create this resource that didn't exist before about this intersection of topics that, you know, other semantics technologies might not normally think of as being related. So, that's in a nutshell what's going on with this particular product at this stage in its development. Pete, you had some further thoughts.
Peter Sweeney: Yeah, so, most of the technologies in the semantic world are of analysis. They're about trying to extract these structured representations of knowledge from existing sources. So you have a bunch of documents, and you want to be able to pull out all of the different ideas and thoughts within those documents. Primal Fusion, by comparison, is a synthetic technology, so it's not about extracting ideas, as much as helping people create new ideas. So the artifact that we've introduced here is what we call a thought network, and the thought network is really just a specialized type of semantic graph of machine readable data. And what the technology is doing by having this conversation with the consumer is it's actually creating, dynamically, the semantic graph that didn't exist before. And why that's so important is that once a computer has this machine readable data, it can do some amazing things with it, and we've seen a lot of those, well we've told you a lot about [laughing] some of those amazing things already. But things like creating a website is a cakewalk, once you give a computer, you know, a list of the ideas, the connections, and the content that's collated within it. You can create documents, you can tell it automate searches on the Internet, you can tell it to find like minded individuals. You have this incredible breadth of new capabilities that are enabled with the semantic data.
So, what we're trying to show here in a nutshell is this idea of all of this tack is quite specialized, it's quite deep, but it's all very purposeful in within specific niches. But once you have a distributed web and once you have a semantic web, you have an ability to piece together solutions that use each of these specialties and cooperate to create some really powerful solutions. So just a quick survey of some of the things that we've looked at. Just as a quick caveat, I'm not an information architect. So what we're hoping to do in the q and a is surface some of the ideas that we have about these subjects, and get from you your impressions on a, whether the stuff really is disruptive to what you do, and if so, how is it disruptive.
But just as a quick survey of some of the things that we've looked at, we've looked at concept extraction, extracting the structural concept models from unstructured information or even just the idea of information. We've looked at connecting information together in a myriad of different ways. We've looked at taking content inventories and collating content to a conceptual model that you've created. We've looked a number of examples of website building, you know, technologies that are able to synthesize documents and to synthesize websites. And in Primal Fusion, we've looked at synthesizing the actual semantic data itself, giving people an ability to create semantic representations of the way that they were thinking about the world so that computers can actually help automate their lives.
So, for us, again as people are coming, you know, from without the information architecture world, that seems to be stepping on some toes. You know, and just to return to, and I should also say that obviously information architecture is much much broader than the activities that I've just enumerated there, but I think it's also important to note that the semantic technology is coming fast, it's becoming quite good at the very specialized tasks that it provides, and also I think it provides a tremendous extension to an IA's tool kit in order to enable consumers to really provide more malleable and more personal information.
Robert Barlow-Busch: So, flag us down, come up, grab these cards, be happy to give them out. Thanks for coming today, folks.
[applause]

ROI: Speaking the Language of Business - Eric Reiss
What is the business value of Information Architecture? Eric Reiss, co-founder of FatDUX, a user-experience design company headquartered in Copenhagen, reviews our current approaches, including limited use of the bean-counter acronyms, and explains why these arguments are usually not compelling for business executives.

With an uncertain economy and tight budgets, we need to convince them that what we do will help their business and why. Our responsibility, Eric argues, is to focus on giving our clients viable choices rather than "it depends."

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The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0 - Chiara Fox
Information architects have been singing the praises of metadata, thesauri, and controlled vocabularies for years. But there is a new game in town: the Semantic Web.

Chiara Fox, Senior Information Architect at Adaptive Path, answers the questions "What exactly is the Semantic Web?" and "Why should I care?" She provides greater context in how ontologies are similar and different from thesauri and taxonomies, provides examples of how this technology is being used in the marketplace, and looks at how these concepts can be incorporated into the information architecture work that we do today.

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Designing Rules: The Engine of User Experience - Dan Brown
Rules provide an underlying structure that governs the experience: what is displayed, when it’s displayed, and how it responds to user actions.

The depth of systems means that information architects no longer design structures with specific pieces of content in mind, but instead have to design structures around classifications, categories, and abstractions. Information architects must consider the rules that govern these objects and their appearance, display, and response to users.

Co-founder and principal at EightShapes, Dan Brown lays the groundwork for how we think and talk about this aspect of our work and provides a rationale for why thinking about rules is important. He distinguishes good rules from bad and offers a framework for designing and documenting them.

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A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely - Joe Sokohl
Not only do we work with people across the hall, across town, and across the country, but we also work with people we never meet from countries we know about only through Wikipedia or the Travel Channel.

UX Lead for PracticeWorks, Joe Sokohl discusses principles to live by when managing teams remotely including: communication, flexibility, sensitivity, courage, and the best tool of all, empathy.

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Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design - Cindy Chastain
In the context of design, experience themes can be used as a conceptual framework that unifies the form, shape and quality of interactions. They expand our approach to user-centered design by reminding us to step back and consider the aesthetic and semantic experience of a product.

In this presentation, User Experience designer and screenwriter, Cindy Chastain looks at what makes experience themes unique and important, using examples from other crafts to illustrate her points. She also discusses how themes can be used in the design process and demonstrates her approach with a project she has recently completed.

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Design Games for IA - Donna Spencer
Would you like your design team to collaborate better? Are you looking to gather more valuable insights from your focus groups and interviews?

Freelance Information Architect and Interaction Designer, Donna Spencer, describes design games as a fun, technology-neutral way of gathering design insights for your projects. In this presentation she focuses on games and tips most applicable to IA projects, for all types of projects and people, including:
* Freelisting; * Design the Home page and Divide-the-Dollar; * Reverse-it and Idea cards

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Site Redesign: When Hell Freezes Over Use A Blowtorch - Melissa Matross
Head of the user experience discipline for Hotwire, an Expedia-owned discount travel website, Melissa Matross shares lessons from successes, failures, and pain at Hotwire to help guide those embarking on a large-scale UX project.

Based on her experience driving the first successful Site Redesign at Hotwire, Melissa discusses strategies and tactics to:
* Sell your large-scale UX project, gaining support and approval to augment UX and Engineering staff to resource the effort. * Make your project happen by distributing the work while showcasing UX leadership and maintaining momentum toward completion. * Demonstrate UX successes and build equity within the organization for future work.

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Motivating Teams: Inspiring People To Do Great Work - Dorelle Rabinowitz
How does a manager deal with an inherited team, rather than a team she hand-picked? Sometimes a manager has to motivate someone who applied for that manager’s job – and is extremely resentful. What about the differences between innies and outies?

Dorelle Rabinowitz, lead of the Design Systems Group at eBay, shares stories from both managers and individual contributors about how they either inspired their teams to do great things or how things fell apart.

Dorelle also talks about communication styles, team exercises like design sessions and reviews, sharing work, mentoring, and ways to foster a sense of community – all through real-life examples.

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IA Spy School - Joe Dyer
Fact: The greatest Information Architect in the world may never get his or her work implemented without the ability to influence decision makers.

Senior Information Architect at Travelocity, Joe Dyer runs the IA Spy School, outlining simple techniques and methods for working IAs to gather, share, and exploit data to gain influence over decision makers, including areas of:
* Intelligence Gathering * The Power of sharing intelligence and building a repository * Five methods used to gain influence with any decision maker * Ethical considerations when collecting and sharing intelligence.

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Evolve or Die: the Future of IA examined - Christina Wodtke, Gene Smith, Russ Unger, Joshua Porter
For Information Architecture to stay relevant in this world of highly dynamic social websites, it must adopt new bodies of learning and new strategies.

This panel, consisting of Christina Wodtke, Gene Smith, Russ Unger, and Joshua Porter use scenario planning to look at four futures of IA exploring ways IA can evolve, including one dystopia in which IA does not. Four senior practitioners will outline each scenario, then invite dialog from the audience.

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The Adoption of Web Standards into Web Design and Development: A Report on a Large Survey - David Robbins
David Robins, Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management at Kent State University, shares preliminary results from a survey developed in partnership with colleague Sanda Katila to explore how web designers and developers are adopting web standards into their work processes.. The survey was administered to 128 people from 12 countries.
The preliminary results cover: # The level of commitment to web standards by designers, developers and organizations. # What forces drive the adoption of web standards. # The extent to which web standards have influenced work processes.

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Using Enterprise IA to Support Business Strategy: Driving Revenue and Brand Health with Better Information Management - - Samantha Starmer & Gary Carlson
Samantha Starmer, Senior manager at REI.com, and Gary Carlson, a senior consultant, share a case study where they identified a business case and ROI for an enterprise information architecture project that led to significant money and resource commitments.

Samantha and Gary explain how they were able to evangelize horizontally and vertically, present their case to executives, and bring a true business perspective to the project. In the end, these approaches enabled wide cross-divisional support.

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These podcasts are sponsored by:
The "American Society of Information Science & Technology":http://asist.org/: Since 1937, ASIS&T has been THE society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.
The "IA Summit":http://www.iasummit.org: the premier gathering place for information architects and other user experience professionals. The theme of the event this year, Expanding Our Horizons, inspired peers and industry experts to come together to speak about a wide range of topics. This included information as wide ranging as practical techniques & tools to evolving practices to create better user experiences.
"Boxes & Arrows":http://www.boxesandarrows.com: Since 2001, Boxes & Arrows has been a peer-written journal promoting contributors who want to provoke thinking, push limits, and teach a few things along the way. Contribute as an editor or author, and get your ideas out there. "boxesandarrows.com/about/participate":http://www.boxesandarrows.com/about/participate