“Inspirational Learning for User Experience Designers” was how the UX London website sold this event and having just returned from the 3-day event all I can say is, they were spot on. What an intense few days,  I’m suffering from brain overload. If you didn’t make it along and you have even the slightest interest in User Experience (UX), then I would strongly recommend that you book up for next years event. Thanks must go to the whole ClearLeft gang who produced a fantastic event. Their hard work bought together a group of truly inspirational speakers.

Overview

User Experience (UX) is intangible, you can’t hold it or explain it. UX is a design philosophy, not a department. It encompasses all of the following skills;

• Usability Expert
• Information Designer
• Information Architect
• Interaction Designer
• Content Strategist

User engagement is the ultimate goal, great experiences have it and with design thinking we can implement this. It comes down to the fact we are designing for people, for interaction with whatever it is we are creating.

Metrics Driven Design – Joshua Porter

The Design Spectrum

I think our company i-KOS tend to lean very much on the Data driven side of this table. Where as what we should be looking for is a balance between the two.

Map of the UX life cycle

Interested >(sign up)> Trial/Beta User >(1st time user)>Customer>(engagement)>Passionate Customer>(referal)>

We should map the steps of the UX life cycle, noting that the hurdles between them are cognitive.

In an attempt to solve the puzzle Joshua came up with a Metrics Driven Framework:

1. Identify Business Objectives/Goals: Make sure you really understand the business objectives, sometimes they are not what they appear;
2. Map out the UX lifecycle: What specific action do people need to do in order for you to meet your business objectives?
3. Identify Core Metrics: Metrics fall out of the UX lifecycle. Focus on the biggest and emergent hurdles over time. Current analytics software don’t give good feedback, it is mainly vanity metrics that make you feel good.

Continuous Improvement

Once built, sites should not be left to their own devices. We should constantly try to improve the UX which leads to better sales/service. We can do this via many different avenues such as A-B testing, design tweeks etc as long as we measure the results and are not scared to turn back if the new version doesn’t work as well as the old. This can all be based on the Kaizen Cycle.

Designing for Improvisation – Liz Danzico

Liz showed how we can use improvisation to design better UX. The traditional focus has been on the visual design which now needs to be focused on the user.

• Make it present
• Aim to be detectable
• Build in responsiveness
• Seductive Interactions – Stephen P Anderson
• Create intrigue/curiosity
• Increase motivation – psychology
• Remove friction – usability

Making Movies – Michael B Johnson, Pixer

Very, very interesting, an great insight into how Pixer manage projects. Along with some great stories.

A couple of his mantra’s:

• When making movies remember that ‘Pain’ is temporary, ‘Suck’ lasts for ever.
• Fail as quickly as possible
• If you don’t know what to do, then just do something, so we can change it.
• Give a good note. Point out a problem, offer a solution and give it in a timely fashion, when it can be used.
• Removing tension creates better work.
• Sketch fast, sketch well and always have another idea.
• Technology serves the art, art inspires the technology.
• Some very wise words, in my opinion.

Workshops

Information Architecture With Maps – Peter Morville

IA has the struggle of “making the complex clear” by careful information selection and selected omission.

Can a user:

• Find our site
• Find they’re way around our site
• Find our services, despite our site

If we can focus on clarity, human understanding the science of information organisation. The value of each piece of information one needs to consider when mapping out can be illustrated by the IA Honeycomb:

By using MAPS (Mans Ability to Perceive) we can clearly and easily create an indication of how this information should be structured. There are 3 main areas to consider when building a map:

Ontology – deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences.

Taxonomy – the practice and science of classification, arranged in a hierarchical structure.

Choreography – the art of designing sequences of movements in which motion, form, or both are specified.

We may build our navigation in a structured fashion, but we must not forget ‘Desire Lines’ – how/where people take short cuts to where they wish to go. The typical user patterns are:

Understand > Query (search) > Map    or     Browse > Filter > Find

Think of main navigation as the global map & faceted search as the local map.

Fidability

Users don’t always enter through the Home page

Content Strategy – Karen McGrane

Karen kicked off with a fairy tail about a city that wanted to build an art gallery to attract more visitors. She told a captivating story where the people of the city build the most beautiful art gallery ever. They designed every little detail and thought they created the perfect setting for art. When the artists arrived with their art, none of it fitted because during the design & build nobody actually checked what kind & size of art they were producing. And it is the art that should lead, defining the way the art gallery should look and be built… not the other way around.

The above situation is a great metaphor for the current situation the web is in. We all talk about:

Form follows Function, while it should be:

Form follows Function which Follows Content.

“Organisations invest tremendous resources on developing the framework for a great user experience – fabulous design, robust content management infrastructure. Yet when it comes to the content itself, there’s often a gap. The end result is that the value proposition for customers can’t be delivered because of the insufficient, inadequate, and inappropriate.” –  Rahel Bailie

And when you think of it; people don’t come to your site because it looks nice, they don’t visit to look at templates, People come to your site for the content.

We can’t just start creating content. We first have to create a solid strategy of what we’ll be doing with the content. This in turn will help to create a better structure to the sites we build, via strong sitemaps & planning.

Walking back to Why

Whenever clients ask for features/content we need to “Walk back to Why” with every request:

“Yes you can have a video, but why?” – “Are you going to put in time and effort to produce quality content”

Why is a content strategy important?

• Content (mis)management
• Everyone’s a publisher
• UX has expanded

Content strategy must be added into our work flow if we are to ever break the horrible mess we end up in with every project.

Planning – What content do we need to develop? What categories or topics do we need to cover? What do we want to say about the product? What additional content features do we need to develop? How is the content to be presented static or interactive? Who is creating the content? Don’t forget Micro-Copy or meta-data – all of it!

Analysis – What current content exists? What content do we want to keep? What content do we need to create? Do we know everything about the content we need to know?

Creation – This is the phase where we actual start to develop new content, collect the existing reusable content and start planning the launch of the content.

Governance – After everything is done we need to work on the governance, so how will we keep it in control? How do we make sure we can maintain the quality of the content and keep generated newly needed content? What needs to stay up-to-date? Who is responsible?

If we can take the different steps defined above we could easily start to work on Content Strategy. Raise the  awareness that this is an important task with clients. A lot of clients have the feeling that they are responsible for the content and that they only need a new shell. It’s our task to make them believe that content is king.

Good Design Faster – Leah Buley

I was really looking forward to this one, however by the break I felt I’d made a bit of a duff choice. Everything Leah was teaching is exactly how I work when designing, nice to reassured that I’m doing it right though. One thing I did take from the first part was that:

Wireframes illustrate the moment, rather then the transitions/experience.

The second half was more involved and showed how to better involve everyone else in my processes. I need to get more people involved earlier in the process, all gathered around my sketches. Asking for feed back before building the wireframe.

On a related note, a few people I spoke to were singing the praises of Axure for creating wireframes & prototypes. I’ve looked into this before and it does appear to be very good, however, if our Startpoint can be used for prototyping then we may be able to resist this software in favour of everyone having proper copies of the necessary Adobe products.

Design With Intent – Dan Lockton

This was maybe the weakest of the workshops, not because of the content, but from feedback from the other session going on I think I may have benefited more from one of those.

The premiss of this workshop was how to influence user behaviour online. Basically Dan took us through a process of how to use design patterns for influencing behaviour, drawn from multiple disciplines. How to use these patterns to generate concepts.

Users can be likened to pin balls, to be pushed & pulled by your design, without thinking.

Users look for the easiest path, taking short cuts, following biases & defaults, again without thinking. Or, are they genuinely thoughtful, weighing up different behaviour choices & deciding what to do accordingly.

Summery

I have never attended such a well run, interesting and thoroughly enjoyable work related event. I feel I have come away with so much more that I ever imagined. UX London 2011 will be a must-attend event.