The first talk by Joe Leech (@mrjoe)was an introduction into neuroscience, neurons, synapses and more. Then taking us to good old Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. One of the points made was, what really motivates us is both dopamine and serotonine. Which can be related to not only sports, food and drug addiction but also internet addiction, such as checking your Facebook messages. He also touched on the topic of memory, the myth of 7+2 (as the amount of choices people can remember) and that it is better not to innovate unless it’s really necessary (people rely on their memory!)

I am wondering if relating an app that taps in the right moments of dopamine release around food, sports combined with social status that taps will make it extra addictive. You would think it will, but I don’t think apps like Runkeeper and Trainer have more addictive qualities or a longer lifespan then Facebook or Angrybird.

Best question from the audience: is it true that I can literally feel my brain work if I am thinking, or digging up old memories? Apparently you can. This question came from Nick Marsh (@choosenick), the next speaker. He introduced the interesting topic of talking about design.

Who has ever had classes in conversation? Rhetoric? Persuasion? Who needs it daily in their work.. And doesn’t like it when decisions are made only by the loudest person in the room? Let’s say lots of hands went up for all these questions. Nick tracked down some old conversation rules. I can think of some friends who fail at rule 1 already.

The Art of Conversation in Brief, Milton Wright, 1936

1.  Don’t talk too long without pausing for a reaction. More than a minute is usually too long. Forty seconds is ideal.

2.  Never contradict or flatly disagree with the other person. It’s an implied insult.

3.  Don’t be too forceful or emphatic in stating your opinions until you learn the other person’s attitude.

4.  Give the other person intellectual freedom and cooperation, and claim them for yourself.

The idea of learning to better talk about design was something to be discussed further. One of the questions that came up is how can we just talk about design without having to use big words. And being allowed to make mistakes in your story. Nick made a comparison with ideas about sketching. And in a way I think we can consider talking about ideas and designs as sketches too. Informal words, multiple trials of telling a story, and when it comes to presenting the real story it will be well articulated like a polished wireframe.

Obi’s scrappiness principles

1. Use your biggest asset
2. Let others speak for you
3. Make things people want to share
4. Make things people care about
5. Make a model (scrappy) Make it scale (Epic)
6. Repeat. Steal with pride.

Obi gave plenty of examples of marketing done by Google. Even though she doesn’t like the word viral, when talking about things people want to share she refered to Google’s April Fools Day jokes. Such as Google Translate for Animals. Looking at what people care about, these would be events that have a big impact such as elections, or the Eurovision festival. The Royal Wedding was also big in the UK, and Google responded to that with a fairytale logo and some Google Maps specials. For example, dragging the Street View icon on a wedding lated location would turn this into a bride and groom.

When it comes to make a model (scrappy) and make it scale (epic) her advice was to pick either one, but nothing in between.

Some examples were the student project The Prado on Google Earth which turned into the Google Art project, including works in the Tate Gallery, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; and the Uffizi, Florence. Then there we the epic Chrome experiments, such as the beautiful interactive film The Wilderness Downtown, to the song of Arcade fire. Another example is the quickly launched think with google blog, which led to the additional online and offline ThinkQuarterly magazine. On repeating and stealing with pride Obi explains it’s of course exciting to come up with new ideas, but it isn’t always necessary. In reality it something really works, do it again. If it didn’t work, use your learnings to improve what you did, rather then starting with something entirely new. This is a message Obi really tries to convey at Google. An examples of a successful project that have been repeated regularly is Doodle 4Google, which has been around for 6 years, in 30 countries. In the UK every year 400.000 kids take part and 2/3 of uk schools are involved. Why stop?

Global winner Doodle4Google 2010, Barbara Szpirglas

Steal with pride relates for example to the inspiration taken from Obama’s absent voter video, which turned into the personalized christmas card, where christmas is cancelled because 1 person screws up. After introducing her scrappy principles Obi went on to answer questions about Google’s approach to marketing. Some questions & answers:

When Google pulls the plug on a project

Its always usage, Google is obsessed about statistics. If a product is new, it gets lots of users, but the question is does the interest stay.

Brand consistency along all products and countries

Google doesn’t have a brand book, only some basics eg on how to use the logo. We try to teach the marketing people how to do it, what can be done with the brand. The best way to learn is to have a discussion on what you can and cant do with the brand. Google is described as being very functional, and Obi is very happy that the brand is the product. The brand is very much linked to the product, if the product is amazing the brand goes up and vice versa. An example is the very bad initial reception of Street View in Germany. YouTube was never marketed as google brand because it had such a strong presence already. And Android is more a brand thats affiliated. It’s open source and therefore ‘the green robot can be dressed anyway you like’. Chrome is also a platform brand, which doesn’t necessarily look Google, the Google logo was dropped.

About online and offline advertising

The online ads are loved because they can be tracked.  Googles department maxes out online budget, and then comes tv. Tv works incredible well, because you can see immediate search impact when an advertisiment is aired. Outdoor is much harder, and is tracked trhough traditional questionnaires. It is very effective in awareness but not in product usage. Google doesn’t care about ad awareness, they care about product awareness. In the case of Chrome this was important and the chrome add was very simple. The reason was that the new EU laws forced browser choice so awareness was important.

About YouTube ads

Youtube had experiment for ages with ads, and opted for the solution where the user can skip pre roll if they want to. They had learned a lot of drop off happened with these ads, so they wanted to avoid that. It turned out that if the option to skip is not there, people less often remember the ad. It also turns out to be great A/B testing, the ad people do want to see is clearly the better ad.

About keeping up with competition

After successful launch, if competition appears how do you get your customers to stay? Obi’s answer is that Google generally doesn’t respond to competitors. But then mentions the Google Superbowl Ad, which was indeed a respons to the launch of Bing search engine.

Additionally, in competition it doesn’t work to copy features of the competition. You dont know which of the competitors features are successful, because you don’t have their metrics, so you can’t copy them.

Many more questions were waiting to be asked, but we were running out of time. Thanks to Obi Felten and TechHub for a really interesting talk!

Last Wednesday I went to the Agile UX Meetup Group to hear James O’Brien (@sparrk) talk about his secrets of agile UX. It was a very interesting talk based on lots of work experience. Even though I don’t work in a fully agile environment at the moment, I felt there were lots of little tricks and processes that can make UX life easier. James’ presentation right here on Slideshare:

Some highlights that I personally found helpful:

Prepare to refactor
Organise your files for change, use patterns. There are many ways to do this, differing on the tools you use. Eg, if you’re using Fireworks, symbols are great, and most software will have similar tricks to use. Update the symbol document and all your instances will update automatically.

Use stubbed design

If I understand correctly stubs is a term from software development, where placeholders for features are used in code. To not get distracted in conversations with client and developers about page elements that haven’t been properly designed yet, James recommends to throw on a big STUB label.

UX debt
These are good enough solutions when you don’t have time for more and wireframes need to go out soon. You can stick your UX debt on the wall for later reference. This can be a great way to speed up your work when you need to, without losing track of UX solutions that can be improved.

Rethink deliverables
James suggest interactive deliverables to communicate all states and animations clearly. Even though there is no tool that really addresses this at the moment, I can imagine it’s easy to make a quick html page or template for this purpose. Especially on large projects. Interesting presentation he pointed to is Communicating and selling ux design deliverables by James Srutek.. Main advice there is to apply ux principles to deliverables: Make it visual, tell human stories not just show UI, engage your audience and speak the users’ language. And always have a short executive summary up your sleeve.

Think about UX deliverables as having 2 layers:

1. The idea (the what)
2. The presentation (the how)

Think more about ideas…

He mentions the CRAP principle for deliverables

• Contrast
• Repetition
• Alignment
• Proximity

Be available
When working with developers he also stressed it is very important to always be available for questions. Even when that means you can’t get into your workflow. If you have more then one ID working on a project that could mean you can divide mornings and afternoons, so either one is available, or in other words is ‘the sacrificial lamb’

A lot more was talked about, but for me these were the most interesting and helpful comments..

Follow James O’ Brien @sparrk

BlackBerry has started a serious competition with iPhone and Google Android, after reports on decreasing customer satisfaction in 2010. Competitors offer easy to use touchscreen devices, good browsing and great 3rd party apps. With recently launched BlackBerry 6 OS, new devices like Torch and announced releases of Torch 2 and Dakota, BlackBerry seems to be taking big steps to catch up. We’ll be curious to see what the future holds for BlackBerry.

For all interaction designers who will be designing apps for the BlackBerry platform, we’d like to share our Fireworks template. The template is made for BlackBerry devices with resolution 640×480 but as all UI elements are vector images they can easily be resized.

Download the Fireworks BlackBerry mockup template
Additionally, you can use the – fairly limited – BlackBerry UI Guidelines for extra information.

Natural User Interfaces, de nieuwe ontwikkeling in de wereld van interaction design. Touchscreen producten zoals iPhone en de Microsoft Surface zijn voorbeelden van een meer natuurlijke interactie; met de vingers, met beide handen. Natural User Interfaces was ook het onderwerp van de Design by Fire editie 2010, afgelopen woensdag in Pakhuis De Zwijger in Amsterdam. Hier verzamelden zich vele interaction designers voor een dag van nieuwe inzichten en inspiratie.

Bill Buxton presents at Design by Fire

Bill Buxton van Microsoft Research startte de dag voor een wakker en fris publiek en vertelde over de eerste smartphone, the long nose, de auto van nu en het huis van de toekomst. Zijn ontwikkelingen zoals touchscreen technologie echt zo nieuw als ze lijken? En hoe kunnen we leren van onderzoek en productontwep uit het verleden? Bill Buxton deelde zijn visie hierover.

The long nose of innovation

De meeste technologische innovaties die zich nu in sneltreinvaart lijken te ontwikkelen, hebben eigenlijk een aanloop gehad van soms tientallen jaren. Na onderzoek, verfijning en uitbreiding volgt pas in de laatste jaren van de ‘nose’ de vertaling in mainstream producten. Het zijn alleen die meest recente ontwikkelingen die zichtbaar zijn voor het grote publiek. Oftewel de long nose of innovation. Denk aan de muis en touchscreen technologie. Een paar voorbeelden laten zien dat de eerste touchscreen producten al behoorlijk oud zijn:

Als ontwerper is het dus belangrijk om je te laten inspireren door de geschiedenis. Met een flinke dosis ontwerptalent erbij kan dat tot bijzondere resultaten leiden: Jonathan Ive doet combineert beide als geen ander. Jonathan Ive is senior vice president of industrial design bij Apple en voornaamste ontwerper van iMac, iPod, iPhone en iPad. Ongetwijfeld was IBMs ‘Simon’ een bron van inspiratie. De invloeden van Dieter Rams (40 jaar hoofd design bij Braun) zijn ook makkelijk te herkennen.

Braun T3 versus Apple's iPod

Menselijke vaardigheden

Natuurlijke user interfaces van de toekomst zullen nog veel beter inspelen op de sociale, cognitieve en motor-sensorische vaardigheden van de mens. We hoeven ons al niet meer te beperken tot input met een muis. Denk aan hoe de auto van nu die naadloos aansluit met je mobiele telefoon. En ook onze huizen zullen straks een veilige, persoonlijke, en naadloze aansluiting op onze persoon zijn, reagerend op touch, gestures, speech, etcetera. Met ook een gezonde dosis kennis van de menselijke vaardigheden, kunnen we ons werk als interactie ontwerper nog beter uitvoeren.

Eindpresentaties 8UO

Maandag 25 januari presenteer ik bij het Design by Fire cafe in Utrecht over interactie ontwerp voor Android. Daarbij vergelijk ik, hoe kan het ook anders, met ontwerpen voor de iPhone. Oftewel:

‘Ontwerpen voor mobiel is anders dan ontwerpen voor het web. Ontwerpen voor mobiel betekent ontwerpen voor kleine schermen, wisselende context, location based. Tussen mobiele toestellen onderling bestaan ook weer grote verschillen. In haar presentatie vertelt Inge Kuijper over het ontwerpen van applicaties voor Android, en gaat daarbij in op de verschillen tussen Android en iPhone en de betekenis van fragmentatie voor het Android platform.’

Design by Fire cafe

The first Co Creation Friday of the 1%club took place last Friday at Accenture. The main question on Co Creation Friday: how can 1%club grow faster? Over 35 professionals participated in brainstorms on how to make the 1%club bigger and better. The brainstorms had subjects such as: ‘How do we involve the corporate world with 1%club?’ or ‘How do we make better use of exisiting social media?’. The group I was in got to brainstorm about the – very broad – social media question.

After the first brainstorm session we came up with some quick wins, such as the possibility to share a specific project on your Facebook Wall, using Facebook Connect to sign in easily and a more prominent position of the Share links on the pages. We also came up with a high level concept for a Facebook or Hyves widget, to motivate your friends or football team to support a project together, with a little help of peer pressure.

We were asked to think about the widget concept a bit more, so this is what we did. In a very speedy second session we tried to design the widget in more detail. An interesting process when the team consists of business consultants, a business development manager, and a scientist/philosopher. That’s different from brainstorming with your own colleagues that use the exact same approach as you know! We managed to prepare our presentation perfectly in time.

At the end of the evening all groups presented their results, from SEO strategies to viral videos. Overall the Co Creation Friday was good vibes, and fun people.

Curious and want to become a member? Have a look on the 1%club website!

Photos
Co Creation Friday on Flickr

Twitter
Co Creation Friday on Twitter #cocreafri

Loyal customers lead to more revenue

A good customer experience leads to loyal consumers, and those are valuable! The Forrester Customer Experience Index measures the customer experience by looking at usefulness, ease of use and enjoyability.

Bruce Temkin, Vice President & Principal Analyst bij Forrester Research analyzed consumer data to discover how these useful, easy to use and enjoyable services lead to increased revenue. He found a 10 point increase in a firm’s Customer Experience Index results in a $284 million change for every $10 billion in revenue (average across 12 industries):

• Additional purchases: $65 million
• Reduction in churn: $116 million
• Word of mouth: $103 million

More results and details of this research – what are the exact measurements for user experience, and how was ‘word of mouth’ measured – I cannot give you. The entire Forrester report Customer Experience Boosts Revenue can be downloaded (not for free though).

How do you create a good user experience?

How can we create services which make people happy? Which are useful and enjoyable? Those services need to match the expectations of consumers, and to make a real impression they have to exceed those. Jon Bove from Kicker Studio talk about these expectations in her presentation on Service Design. (Apparently, while in Europe service design is the more common term, in the USA service design and customer experience design are both used.) The bottom line of her story: existing online services influence the expectations we have of services in ‘the real world’. We are talking about all developments which fit under the web 2.0 umbrella. A well designed service would then have to take into account the following expectations:

Immediacy

Consumers want a direct reaction, not within a day, but within a second. Twitter and Google can also give us information this fast.

A voice

Consumers want to give feedback, they want to be heard. On the web we can share our opinion too, on websites such as Digg and Get Satisfaction, where consumers and companies can connect. An important lesson companies have to learn, Jennifer Bove says, is to deal with all the feedback they receive. No company is perfect, products and services can always be improved, in an iterative process.

Expertise

Consumers are better informed, and get frustrated when they don’t get all the answers right away. How can a service offer knowledge and expertise, that exceeds the value of online expertise?

Customization

Consumers expect a service which is adapted to their personal needs and taste. If Amazon remembers my last purchases and my wishlist, why doesn’t the bookshop around the corner do that for me?

Co-creation

Jen Bove also mentions co-creation as an important aspect. From the perspective of the designer it is important to involve front line staff and consumers in developing a service. Of course, as an interaction designer, I couldn’t agree more. Both in interaction design as in service design a process of co-creation helps to create a valuable and useful product or service, that suits consumer needs.

• Free book by Bruce Tempkin, Forrester Research: The 6 laws of customer experience
• Jen Bove’s presentation on Service Design