Hi, I’m Wyatt Mitchell. I’m the design director of Wired magazine, which is not very far from here at all. And what I’d like to do in this presentation today is give you a sense of what it’s been like over the last two years of our putting out the digital version of our magazine, some of the glossy bits, some of the very polished things that we’ve done, and hopefully give you a sense of some of the bumpy, hugely awful mistakes that we’ve made along the way also, and some that seem like a good idea right now and probably next week I’ll find out were actually really dumb.

So in this, there are a couple videos, which hopefully will keep me from having to talk quite so much, and a few slides here that I’ll talk about. But I’d like to start the story off in this fashion, in the way that it sort of happened at least to my eyes.

About two years ago, our creative director, Scott Dadich, called me into his office and said, “Hey, do you know about – did you hear that Apple’s coming out with this tablet slate computer with iPhone-like gesturing capabilities?” and I said, “No.” And he said, “What if we do our magazine on this thing?” And I’m like, “All right, well, I’m gonna go get some coffee, and when you’ve come to your senses, we’ll put our normal print magazine.”

[Audience laughter]

So it started very simply, just like that. A kooky idea that someone says to someone else, and they say it to someone else, and two years later we’re on our fifth issue of putting out this thing called Wired on the iPad.

Something I found very fascinating about Sara’s presentation is – there will certainly be a lot of similarities in what I have to say today and what Sara said a few moments ago. But I think an interesting distinction is, this type of thing can be done both from the outside, as Sara’s perspective was, or from the inside.

We were already making a print magazine every month, and so one of the challenges was, we still only have a month, but now we have to make a print magazine and a vertical tablet magazine and a horizontal tablet magazine all in the same 30 days. So things started to get squished, and work started to double and triple. So knowing that going in, we had to think about how to be efficient about doing this. So as I said, I’m not gonna – I have a tendency to ramble, so I’m gonna try and keep it quiet.

This first little bit here is a video. This is the sort of glossy bit. I’m gonna talk about the bumpy stuff later. This is the little glossy sort of – as soon as we finished – this was our first edition. As soon as we finished this, we wanted to capture it on video, so this is a little video, sort of a little taste of what it felt like when it was done.

[Video plays]

So that is the shiny, glossy bit after all the hard work was done, and we were obviously hoping Apple would be very pleased with our product. But going back to the beginning, the initial thought was: How, as a magazine and as a brand, can we make use of this new product that was, at that point, a rumor? What can we do? What kinda possibilities is this gonna open for us?

Obviously, being in the design department, that meant, oh, let’s make everything move, the end of the static picture, which obviously is very exciting, but there’s other things you have to sort of sit and think about. Does it need to move? What does it mean to a still-life photographer or a more conventional photographer? Do we make every photographer shoot a movie? Does every illustrator have to animate? These are sort of the initial ideas that we had to sort of consider, while at the same time making use of this soon-to-be-released interactive product that allows a lot of this stuff to happen.

So we teamed up with the good people from Adobe, who are also not far from where we are right now, and started to work together on how we might put this thing together. One of the reasons, one of the very obvious reasons that we wanted to work with Adobe is that Adobe makes all the software that we’re already using: the Photoshops and the Illustrators and the InDesigns. So it seemed to make pretty good sense to keep it all in that sort of software family.

The other notion that we had at Wired was we wanted to keep the product in the hands of the creators. We didn’t wanna create a print magazine and then hand it off to someone, a group of designers that we didn’t know. We wanted the designers who designed the magazine and the writers who write the magazine and the editors who edit the magazine to make the iPad edition as well. No one knows the product better than the people who actually made it the first time. So that sorta became the second thing that we did.

And then, looking into the future, we were realizing that we were gonna have to go from the print version to a variety of screens. This is not clicking. There we go. To the iPad, to any other type of tablet, to a laptop, to any number of smartphones, to ultimately a desktop as well.

So then – now we’ve got all the ideas laid out on the table, and now it’s the tough part of actually executing. So we had to sort of hold the mirror up to our faces and say, okay, what are we as a magazine? What defines our magazine, and how would that translate into this smaller, yet more versatile, product? And being from the design department, I immediately said design is the most important thing. And hopefully that’s at least partially true. The design is a big factor at Wired.

So we had to start to think about, well, we have a pretty complicated design for a commercial magazine, one that comes out every month. How do we create an app that can sort of tolerate and handle all of the kooky things – sometimes kooky, sometimes not kooky things that we do? Here’s a variety of layouts that we’ve done maybe in the last year or two, from the very simple to the very complicated. Some that are illustrative; some are photographic-based; some are renders; some are conceptual; so on and so forth. We wanted to have something that could support all of what we do and without losing any steam.

So that brought up an immediate question of flexibility. Flexibility versus fidelity. And as we looked out on the horizon, we were thinking, well, what are other magazines doing? What is a magazine like The New Yorker doing? They don’t have nearly the design responsibility that we have, but they have five times the amount of sort of reader engagement that we have. They’re gonna deliver you a 30,000-word story that they expect you to read from beginning to end.

So we started to look at sort of this – we created what we called the design fidelity spectrum. Now, this is not a static notion; this is something that changes from issue to issue, for every type of magazine. In any given month, Wired might be the most overly designed magazine of the month.

[Audience laughter]

In any given month, The New Yorker might be lower on the spectrum in that it doesn’t have quite that responsibility. Also factoring in that is how often the product comes out. Obviously, a newspaper – a daily newspaper has the responsibility of producing its product daily. The New Yorker comes out weekly. We have the luxury of having an entire month to put our thing together.

So what that really means is that, on any given cycle, one magazine may be more – if Glamour, for instance, has a giant package, a giant, complicated package, they might be the most design-intensive magazine of the month. And The New Yorker might have an equally complicated package, which sort of boosts them into the high design fidelity range. So there’s certainly a back-and-forth. So, again, it’s thinking of a product that can handle the highs and lows of design.

As a result, we came up with some simple notions: the better the design, the easier the reading experience. I think that’s pretty universal. And with that, the deeper the engagement; and with that, the more connected the consumer; and with that, the stronger the brand relationship. Pretty simple logic that goes behind that, but you can see where this is sort of leading.

So, again, back to Wired, the notion is how do we kind of make the best of what we have? In the print magazine, we like to think that we have a pretty good-looking magazine. We have decent photography. We have decent illustration. We have decent typography on the page. Will that – can you just shrink that down and put that on an iPad? Probably not. It’s a different world altogether.

So for instance, you might think that The New Yorker has – they do. The New Yorker has beautiful type textures. They make it very easy for you to sit and read long stories. There’s not a lot of gaps. There’s not a lot of widows. There’s not a lot of sort of nonsense that’s gonna throw you off of your reading experience. We do a decent job of that in the print magazine, but how do we do that in a tablet form?

So what that meant for us is, we need to design – we need to have made for us a new typeface, a new typeface that makes it easy to read on a tablet. And that’s really talking about pixels. I will spare you some of this. This is a little bit inside baseball, but for those who have decent eyes and can see the screen, there’s a noticeable difference between just an off-the-shelf font and a custom font when it gets scaled down.

Another notion that we wanted to – that we had to take into consideration was the Web. Certainly, Wired has a Web site that is wonderful and does lots of wonderful things. But by the same token, it isn’t the print. What we do in print gets modified and customized for the Web. How can we, with this new opportunity, create something that has the interactivity of the Web but has the fidelity of the print?

So what you’re seeing here is, on the left, the original print spread and, on the right, what that translated to for the Web. What you lose in the Web is a little bit of the sort of finer details, sort of the little filigree. But in thinking about the iPad, we might be able to do both. So the question was, can you have flexibility and fidelity?

What I’m gonna talk about here is a little bit of what Sara talked about, and I may actually skip over it a little bit because I don’t wanna bore you guys. It’s about how the architecture of building an app – do you read from left to right, do the articles go from left to right or do they go up and down, how does the user engage the app. Clearly, we’ve established a certain set of rules, and people are used to how they work. It’s about evolving what we have already done.

There’s an example of how we engage print; this is an example of how we would normally engage something on an iPhone or on the Web. It’s vertical.

In working with Adobe, obviously we wanted to create something that – we wanted to create a product that, as a magazine, stood alone and had essentially a UI layer that laid over the top of it, so we’re always – we don’t – again, this is harking back to the notion that we wanted to keep the creation in the hands of the creators, and then have an overlay that allows the product to live on various pieces of hardware and different types of software, and ultimately get to a point where you have a library of magazines that can easily be accessed, but with a familiar sort of architecture that you could at one point get used to.

To give myself a little bit of a break here, I’m gonna let the video talk a little bit here. For this first issue, we commissioned – here’s a moment where we were able to really sort of flex our muscles and see what it was like to turn a familiar page in our magazine which is called Infoporn – turn it into not a static 2D print page, but let’s see how far we can go with this new sort of format. So here’s a little video investigating how that took place.

[Video begins playing]

Male: Wired has a profound skill set with infographics. We really like doing it. We have this incredibly talented design department. We have all these kind of data nerds as editors, so we’re good with information. We’re good with data. We’re good with maps. We’re good with depicting something that you could really dive into and get a lot of detail from on a static page.

Male: The tablet lets us do that with more verve, more vitality, more energy. It really becomes an experience that our readers can not only learn about an idea, but they can actually tend to experience the idea. It can make them part of it, a participant in the kind of unpacking and cognition of an idea.

Male: I started thinking about Mars because of something I saw on the Internet which mapped the places that, on Mars, that either Spirit or Opportunity, the little rovers, had been.

Male: You actually want these to be how the probes, whichever probe we’re talking about –

Male: Brad thinks he can get that data.

Male: The goal was to try to figure out a way to lift the flatness from the page and bring the infographics to life in a way that you can start to see that this is an actual planet that’s out there that maybe you can explore.

Male: And beyond that, there are assets associated with that. There’s photos and footage and all the different pieces of information that NASA’s gleaned from those missions. So we have six canvases to tell stories on and what is on those six is up to us. So we settled on this notion of a 360, and then the user actually controls it by swiping, so you have a sort of mini-scrubber navigation within the planet infographic.

Male: And as the planet moves, each one of the missions unfolds. You can see the planet actually turn. You want them to see that when something’s put in motion like this, that they’re not only learning something more about what you’re trying to tell them, but that also the experience is better, that it’s just cooler, right? That you can read and go, “Wow, that is neat.”

[Video ends]

And there we have it. That was sort of the star of our first issue, and so the responsibility now is to every month come up with a Mars map for our issue. But that’s it. Thank you for listening.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Hi, I’m Sara. It’s great to be here. I wanna share with you today our Mag Plus project, a platform for digital magazines, and the launch of the Popular Science app. I wanna take you on a journey throughout that development, share with you our insights, problems, and also some upcoming features that I hope to get your feedback on.

So why are digital magazines interesting at all? Well, when there’s a new technical device – in this case the mighty, shiny iPad – there is always a major media behavioral change. And being a media company, obviously that’s where you want to be.

At Bonnier we have a lot of magazines, and magazines are pretty good starting points for new digital products. And why? Well, they’re pretty helpful products. When you ask people, they claim that magazines for them, more than any other media product, stimulates their imagination; it inspires them; it makes them think. And with the iPad, for the first time, with this beautiful screen, natural interface, and controlled environment, we could at least give it a try to reengineer exactly that experience, to maintain those relaxed and inspiring magazine features and presenting impactful stories.

What you see running in the background is a concept video that we did back in December 2009. At that point in time, as everyone else, we were just listening to the rumors about the iPad to come. And we got a bit tired of the rumors, so we thought, “Let’s make a video and just imagine how it could be to present the magazine on this possible near-future product.”

I wanna share with you the design principles we had at that point in time, because we’ve actually stayed with them throughout the project. And the first design principle that we used – let’s see if this works – we called “silent mode.” Silent mode is all about that “time for myself” that people appreciate so much with a magazine, that lean-back experience when you cuddle up in the couch, and it’s about less distractions. And we really believe and we wanted to design a concept that had less complexity, simply because we believe that that increases emotion.

The second design principles we used was a clearly defined beginning and end, a simple linear flow, a defined storyline. And going back to the notion that some things can be and wants to be completed, that sense of completion.

The third design principle we used was designed pages – carefully, artistically crafted pages in every issue, every article. That might sound obvious, being a media company, but honestly, on the Web we forgot quite a lot about it. So this is all about going back to what we’re good at. We worked a lot about how ads should be less interruptive and more part of the flow, adding either commercial arts to the consumers or being useful in other ways.

And more importantly, maybe, and finally, we talked a lot about fluid motion, about going away from the page-flipping experience and rather think about the Mag Plus concept as a panning camera. And the reason why we thought that was important is simply because if – let’s see if this works – if this would be the main thing for us to translate moving forward to digital words, to bring back from print, I think we’d have pretty big problems, being media companies. We may have problems anyway, but…

So we did this video, and it was pretty much fun. We got some good feedback. Then Steve came and he presented the iPad. So we thought, “Wow, now we have to move from the video and really do something, a real app?” And Steve, you know, he gave us 60 days, but no iPad, so we had to make our own.

The first part of our project, as you see, was pretty lo-tech. We had no iPad. We had pieces of paper. We did a lot of cutting. We did a lot of deconstructing of print magazines. And we rebuilt it all on numbers of iPods. But realizing a lot of problems when you move from print to digital, in the way you have to work differently with images, in the way the parallel stories, you have a print, you know a lot of articles have the same page has to be much more linear, following the way your hands read through an iPad.

So pretty useful exercises, and 60 days later we did launch the Popular Science app. It’s pretty intuitive digiography. Articles are vertical. They sit next to each other, and horizontally. And it’s a deconstructed print experience, so there are basically two layers that are connected to each other and interrelated, but you can easily swap between them. And one of the layers is more focusing on the browsing experience, with beautiful images, and the other one is more of the core reading experience. And in that way, we built a platform where the content is flexible in relationship to each other, rather than rigid.

One of our design – or our experience vision, you could say, was to build not the wrist screen presenting – sorry, was to build the actual watch – sorry, I have to go to my – yeah, our experience vision was to build not a wrist screen running clock software, but the actual watch. And what we do mean with that is that you should not work through layers of buttons and through the screen to experience the product. It should feel like you’re touching the actual magazine using your body language and using your natural interface.

So we launched this app. We were pretty happy with the results. We were on top-20 list the first week, and we were the best-selling magazine. But, however, we also pretty soon discovered a lot of problems, one of them being that in the mighty app world you’re just one among many – one magazine among games, among utility apps, among all sorts of things. And the UI paradigm of the app store just give you one way to present your content through that little icon, and obviously, that’s not so easy when you want to engage and attract new readers.

So we realized pretty quickly that we had to build something more. We had to build more of a world for magazine fans, and we had to increase the number of engagement that the reader can have with their app, as well as the number of reading moments. And around 45 percent of all apps bought are bought as a consequence of a social recommendation. But that happens outside of the app store, and we as magazine publishers, we’re not part of that game, which is a problem moving forward.

So it’s really pretty basic. It’s all about increasing those reading moments. People read their magazines, either print or digital, in many different places, on many different screens, and we just have to be there. But people also do a lot of other things with their magazines, and you may not wanna know all about them, ’cause some are pretty weird.

[Audience laughter]

But what you do wanna know is that around 90 percent of all people, among many of our titles, they save their magazines for more than a year. And the average magazine gets passed along about six to seven times to friends. And we also know that sites, like Polyvore, that use fashion content to build what they call fashion sets – that is, just scrapbooks, more or less – they have like 20 million scrapbooks produced that people do and create based on content. Once again, we’re not part of that game.

So we have to be, and we have to increase those magazine moments. It cannot only about reading in that specific app. And that’s not new, obviously. We can take lessons from games media, from multiple social networks, like Xbox Live, for example, where social relationships encouraged more gaming moments. And you can say that Last.fm has done the same thing for music. You can say that LibraryThing and Goodreads has done the same thing for books. But for magazines, there is no such world.

So what I wanted to talk about today is about how to move forward from a reading app and what else that can be done to digital magazines. And I wanna talk about a future project that we have initiated to start to build, and share with you some of those features. And they’re about activating my magazine collection, to do more things, things that “I, me, myself” can do, managing my magazines. But it’s also about “us” and better ways of sharing, better ways of socializing the magazine content.

So we call this concept, as a companion to the Mag Plus, “Service Plus.” Very exciting name. But the actual features, I hope you find interesting. Looking at me managing, we’ve used as a starting point a very natural and familiar metaphor of the stack. We want to stay close to the design principles, and we wanted to, in one way there, to translate that emotional attachment that people have to the physical objects or magazines. So we want to represent the digital magazines any way it looks in the real world, because people are pretty proud of their stacks at home. They’re something that defines them as person.

And looking at how we could be in the digital world, this is now the stack. And in the stack, the spines are built up by the imagery and the design from each brand, so they’re all represented. If you scroll down, you’ll get your older issues, because the default view is a chronological order.

And as you can see, there are also smaller items in between the spines, and those are the articles that you’ve saved to read later or that’s been recommended to you by friends. The stack is also a way where you can rifle through all the different issues so you can get more information about each magazine, as what’s in there, what’s the content, who else is reading it, so you can participate in the social conversation around the magazine.

Another powerful way of sorting your titles is by brand, and then each brand gets a tab. You can read more about each brand, the content of an issue. And there’s also a way of having ghost spines that, when you purchase them, they get colored in, so you can recommend that you’re missing a piece in your collection and please buy that magazine.

Obviously, you need to save for later. As I said earlier, we need to increase the magazine moments. People want to save things and they want to read them when it suits them, maybe in another device, in a phone or a similar thing.

And people love to do many things, as I said, with their magazine. They usually draw on them, so obviously we have to allow them to do that. They cut out things. And they build different sort of scrapbooks that we obviously should provide to them as a way of organizing that material.

Looking at the sharing part of Service Plus, obviously there’s a need to communicate with the users, to tell them about there are new issues coming that you should read, but also to get all sorts of social information, or that trees’ worth, the paper you have saved. But things that friends have done, other ways of recommending that you should start to read more.

What’s interesting also with the stack is that they can become a very powerful social tool. You can use the stack to pick out your favorite issues, your favorite articles, and, with a natural gesture, package them, swipe to the right, and you create reading lists that you can share with friends or with family or whoever you want to. Give them a title, and then send them away.

Finally, to make digital magazines more contemporary objects, they obviously need to catch a little bit more of the wind from the Web. So each article do need a permanent URL so people can refer to it, talk about it, share it, blog about it. And quite honestly, it’s a bit of a shame that we have digital magazines that are – where the text is less useful than the Web has been for 15 years. So there is some improvement that’s necessary.

But once that’s done, we think it’s interesting that you can easily build different ways of – or making it possible for people to monitor the activity streams that’s going around the magazine – what’s available, what are other people reading, other people doing stacks, obviously your own reading pattern (what have you read, what have you not read, what’s left for you), managing your alerts, and not the least, indulge in more or less important pop charts of the magazine world – what’s happening right now, what are people talking about, and what are people reading.

And you can do less important things, like comparing your reading rhythm compared to how other people read. But we can also, as media publisher, present our magazines in a more interesting social context. The next issue can be presented with not only what’s in there, the content, but also who else is reading it, who else is talking about it, and why is this issue important outside of the actual app.

So that was our vision, or actually, even our product plan, what we want to build for Mag Plus coming up. So with those words, I just wanted to say thank you from the Mag Plus team, and thank you from me.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Cameron Gray: Hi, I’m Cameron Gray, and I’m here to talk to you today about the work that Paula and I did to transform Mindflash from a developer-driven organization to a UX-focused organization. And that’s Laura, but we’ll get to her. She’s actually in the audience too.

So the first thing that you need to know about me is I’m an engineer. I run product and engineering, but I come from an engineering background, and until not too long ago, I was writing code on a fairly regular basis.

This means I am not a designer. I’m not a user experience expert. I didn’t go to design school.

[Audience laughter]

I’m still a little surprised that Peter invited me to speak here today. But I put on my best jeans and a sport coat and did my slides in Keynote, so I figured you’ll let me stay.

[Audience laughter]

As an engineer, I’m a system thinker, something Paula accuses me of on a regular basis. And I thought that Michael Lopp, in his latest book, really captured what it means to be a system thinker. And as a system thinker, we’re always looking for the rules, because when we have the rules, we know that we can win. This means that system thinkers build products from a feature-based approach. We particularly like competitive feature analysis. It’s great, right? Because I’ve got the rules, and once I know the rules, I just need to check all the boxes and I win.

[Audience laughter]

In 2008, at Mindflash we took this approach to build a new version of our training platform, which we so elegantly named V2. And it looked a little bit like this. As you can imagine, this didn’t really resonate with the marketplace like we hoped it would. It had a million features and functions, it had everything you could turn on and off, and it was really, really difficult to use. And it was a really tough moment for us, and it wasn’t very long after we launched this product that the management team at Mindflash came to some really tough conclusions and realized that it was time to start over. And that was when we met Paula and Adaptive Path.

Paula Wellings: Thank you. Hi. I’m Paula Wellings from Adaptive Path. I’m a designer. Oops, and I just made the slides go away. I’m a designer, and I am very interested in how people do things. I spend a lot of time listening and watching people, and starting to figure out what exactly is going on there.

Something else to know about me is I’m an ex-academic, which means I don’t read journals anymore; now I read anthologies. Along those lines, I’m especially interested in situative cognition and essentially how do people in the real world learn how to do things every day in their life.

The other thing to know about me is I’m a designer and I like puzzles. I am especially interested in logic puzzles, but also in people puzzles.

And that leads me really to be especially interested in something I would term the inflection point: when something is heading in one direction, and for some reason it turns and starts heading in another direction.

I think what happened when we first joined with Mindflash is we appeared at a very specific moment in time, where they were essentially having a sensitive period for change. And what that meant was, there was four key things that were happening. Mindflash had just had a fantastic failure, which means that the status quo wasn’t working and they were actually looking for something new, a new approach.

The second thing was they were very clear that they had a key driver that essentially meant that, in order for their business to be successful as a software-as-a-service product, they needed to stop answering the phone; they needed to stop guiding every single person through their product. And this was a key business driver that led to all the decisions we made from that point forward.

The other thing is they had a resilient attitude. Essentially what had happened is they had just built something, spent an entire year working on it, and at the end of that year they were willing and open to starting over and killing all their favorite features if need be.

And I think the fourth thing was they had a good core technology. There were things useful and important in their product, if people could just figure out how to use them.

And so we sort of noticed that we were in this important moment. So what we did at Adaptive Path is we put together the team, and the team was sorta like this, but actually like this.

[Audience laughter]

And when we arrived at Mindflash, we drove in something like this. But nonetheless, we had a team, and we had a plan. And the plan you’ll see here is not really that unusual. Grok the situation, understand the business, understand the customers, and actually very importantly, understand the existing product. You could say, “Well, it tanked. Why’d you spend any time on it?” The reason we spent time on Mindflash’s existing product was, it was a tangible place we could begin to engage the organization in a conversation about what a user experience is by, in some ways, leveraging the existing product to define what a user experience is not.

And so what I would say is, this plan overall is not especially unique. Especially if you’re a designer or a consultant, you’d be like, “Yeah, we understand it. We make a vision; we make a thing.” This was not unique, but I think what’s important to know is that this plan didn’t just change the product. Part of implementing this plan at this particular moment gave us an opportunity to actually change an entire organization.

And so what Cameron and I are going to be doing today is we’re gonna be sorta sharing, in retrospect, what the five critical moves were that we made to essentially turn a developer-driven organization into a user experience company.

Cameron Gray: So our first critical move is there are no quick wins. When our product didn’t take off the way we thought it would, we initially had this mad scramble, like “Oh, this is no problem. We can fix this.” So we thought, “Ah, wizards in contextual help, right? That’ll fix everything.” This is a great example here where we’ve got contextual help, but because you can turn so many things on and off in the product, you could get contextual help where it points to a button that’s not actually there. Then we thought, “Oh, visual design, right? We’ll just make it look pretty, and it’ll be usable.”

These are the sort of immediate quick-wins approaches, and they were not successful for us. And that meant that we had a long road to go. First thing we had to do was we had to change our organization. We were moving towards a more UX focus. That means people’s jobs change. People who were doing one thing every day, you’re taking phone calls, now you’re a product manager. That’s tough.

This also means that we had to learn a whole new technology, because to make a front end for our application that sat on top of our core technology that was really useful and usable and desirable, we needed to do something different.

And finally, we still had this Version 2 product out there that had customers on it that we had this bad relationship with, and we had to tell them honestly that we were taking this thing to end-of-life, and their time was running out. And actually, they really appreciated us being so honest with ‘em.

And it also took time. It took a lot of time. From the first day that we engaged with Adaptive Path through our workshop, through actually building the product and seeing it into private beta, was a year. We think it was worth it, and I wanna show you just a quick video of what we built.

[Video plays]

Female: The Mindflash training management system provides small to medium businesses with an easy and effective way to deliver in-house training online. We save trainers significant time and money by giving them the ability to create multimedia, Web-hosted courses from existing training material in minutes. And with our quizzing tools, it’s simple to make sure your trainees are getting it. We automate trainee invitation and track progress in our reporting tool, giving in-house trainers the confidence that they can quickly and successfully train employees in job-critical information. Mindflash makes it easy to get your training online. Give it a try by visiting us at Mindflash.com.

[Video ends]

Paula Wellings: When we first arrived at Mindflash, I think something to keep in mind is we showed up to the organization that was about 20 people at the time. And everybody there had just spent the entire last year staying up late at night, working hard on the software, making every release come out. People were working hard on marketing their product, on attempting to sell their product, on supporting their product. And we walked into there knowing that it hadn’t been successful and knowing that everybody there had just done blood, sweat, and tears.

The other thing we knew from our stakeholder interviews is we knew that, even in a 20-person company, people in customer service didn’t talk to developers. They did interpersonally; they made chit-chat. But actually talking about the product and where the product was heading was never a conversation that took place between developers and customer service.

And so when we came in, one of the strategies that we really brought to the table was everybody plays. And what you might think is, “everybody plays” sounds like a way to make, like, too many cooks in the kitchen, and it’s gonna be yucky and a disaster ’cause it’s mediocre; this person wants this, this person wants this.

And so I think it’s really important to note that we said “everybody plays,” and it was really important to us to look at how we might leverage the knowledge of the organization. Some folks at Mindflash had been there for six or seven years, had understood and followed their products through a number of different iterations, some successful and obviously some less successful.

And so we sorta had these high, kind of blue-sky ideas of how we could create a sense of shared destiny in this product. And that sounds really great, but I think it’s really important to note that when we went in and said, “We’re gonna do this thing all together,” that we did things like this. We made a list of exactly who was going to sit with who at every single sort of brainstorming or group session. And if you think planning a wedding is difficult –

[Audience laughter]

– this is even harder. And you’ll note, we do, just like a wedding, have the things of who should not be sitting together and who must sit together so they can have an important conversation.

So what we did all together is we listed all the known needs, and notice I say “list.” We are not brainstorming needs; we are looking at all the needs we know from our contextual research, from things that people know from having worked on previous products, from what people know in the organization from listening to their customers. Adaptive Path comes in, and we’ve maybe been spending a month or two understanding people’s customers, but it’s important to know that Mindflash had been spending time trying to distill and understand what their customers wanted for quite a long time.

And so we listed all the known needs, and we identified the ones that we really must meet. And one of the most important things about needs and really clarifying them is noting that needs are things like “I need to interact with my trainees”; “I need to know that people are paying attention and getting what I’m trying to teach them.” Needs are not “I need five different kinds of multiple-choice questions.” Needs are not “I need 14 levels of administrator support.” Needs are not “I need a magic course fixer.” And differentiating needs from solutions really starts to give people a place to understand the people that we’re designing for.

And then the next part was that, once we had needs, was giving everybody an opportunity to share every good solution. Sorta like “bring out your dead.” That means people sometimes wrestled in their drawers, in their cabinets, in “that idea that I had last year, and if we had only done my idea, then our product would’ve been so much more successful.” And every single person shared every single good idea. And we did that essentially so we can prioritize, and everybody together can prioritize.

And throughout this, we really kinda structured an experience where everyone’s work is important and everyone participated. And I think we all sort of learned, like, yeah, everyone’s important, and here we all are. But on the second day of the workshop, it was about 4:00 in the afternoon, and we were running a little late, and we were like, “Okay, now we’re making scenarios,” and everyone’s making a scenario. And someone approached us and basically said, “I’m really, really sorry, but I need to go home.” And we’re like, “Oh, okay.”

And what we very quickly realized, for those of us not in Santa Barbara, was the whole town was on fire. And people were still at our workshop, still trying to get stuff done. And I think what it really said to us is that there is something about being part of your future, no matter if you’re, like, the junior developer or the person who answers the phone, is people were invested in being part of their future, to the point where one guy was like, “My pregnant wife needs to be evacuated from the fire zone, so I’m just gonna go now.”

Something else that I think is worth really knowing is we had this great workshop, and everybody felt connected and part of the vision. But to go from that great one experience to something that continues and is embedded in the organization, people really need tools to think with.

And so we essentially created three what I would say are very important tools that lived in everybody’s everyday life. The first thing is we really differentiated and clarified the competitive landscape. And that meant that, historically, Mindflash had created a product that was great for universities, that spoke “university” really well. And what we were able to do with our research was essentially say that e-learning is not training. When people who are trainers go to work and try to teach people stuff, it’s because they like people; they wanna connect with people. They’re not great at making multiple-choice quizzes. And so really clarifying where are we and where aren’t we.

The second thing we did was we represented customers so that they are the focus of decision making. And I think it’s really important to know that – I think a lot of people make personas, but I think personas that people can actually bring into the decision process every day is really important.

[Video plays]

Male: And we look at what a persona would be, which helps us direct our software to a specific market, which really gives us an advantage over, say, V2, which was the previous product, which had much less focus and ended up not getting much traction, I believe, because it was hard to define what you would do with it.

[Video ends]

Paula Wellings: And the third thing that we did was we made principles that put customers first. And I think when Cameron spoke at the beginning, he spoke about being a systems thinker and how, like, if you can figure out the right rules, you can essentially win at the end. And to a certain extent, rules are really attractive, and so what we essentially did is we created a set of rules that have people consequences. So for example, one of our rules was that the system is the face of the trainer. And what that means, practically, for people in everyday life is that I might, as a trainer, launch a training course to 40 people, and if it crashes on the third click for everybody, you know who looks bad? Me as a trainer looks bad. I lose face. I don’t look professional.

And being able to communicate that to developers completely changes how developers understand their bugs, and bug regression becomes a completely different act which is about really kinda supporting and loving our customer.

[Video plays]

Male: Design principles are kinda like the ten commandments of Mindflash. Basically, they’re good for keeping in mind basically guidelines for what we are trying to do.

[Video ends]

Paula Wellings: And so we created these three principles essentially to empower people to focus by saying “no.” And what that meant was no longer could internal politics make something happen; no longer could someone’s pet project sorta become something that everyone suddenly works on. And the other thing was, all of a sudden just a love for technology and a love for features wasn’t enough to really drive how the product was made.

[Video plays]

Male: For us, one of the big issues is simplicity, because we don’t necessarily talk to our customers or walk them through the process of trying our products or even their first experience. Making it so that it’s very easy to use and intuitive is critical to our sales process, so the very first time they come in, do they know what to do, and are there a million features that they have to turn off or on in order to get it to do what they want it to do? We really wanna stay away from that, so simplicity, I think, is – and ease of use is really our No. 1 thing.

[Video ends]

Cameron Gray: So the fourth critical move is to encourage fishing. And by that we mean transform your entire organization to learn to be user experience designers in some capacity.

The first thing that we had to do was change our thinking, and more importantly – or specifically, get rid of our old vocabulary. We had all these legacy products that had ingrained all this language, and we weren’t speaking the language of our customers; we were trying to teach our customers a language we wanted them to speak instead of listening to them.

So one of our account managers had this great idea to create the “Laura Says” posters, featuring Laura, our product manager, telling us what our new language should be.

[Video plays]

Female: They’re life lessons that you’re supposed to take to heart, where she tells us the truths about life and also our advanced terminology for things that we have to learn to say and what we have to unlearn to say from our legacy products, so that we have a common language. And it’s funny to see her in cartoon format.

[Video ends]

Cameron Gray: This, of course, led us to put stickers all over the office with Laura saying all sorts of fun things and are still up there. And everyone’s personal favorite was, “Laura says, ‘Hanson rocks the hizzouse.’”

[Audience laughter]

We also had to make usability and user testing a core part of everyday life at Mindflash, and we did that using something called pizzability.

[Video plays]

Female: The best usability sessions ever. Free pizza. Pizzability is when the whole company would get together at lunchtime, bring in some pizzas, and we would watch usability sessions, either mashed-up, different sections of different people’s usability or just an entire session of one person and how they used the product, so it allowed the entire company to see how actual people were using our product and see where the hang-ups were and where the successes were.

[Video ends]

Cameron Gray: Once you have a product in the wild, the really important skill to learn is you’ve gotta keep listening to your customers, just like you did when you did generative research like we did with Adaptive Path. And for us, that means we…

[Video plays]

Male: I think probably one of the most important things is to understand that we’re a listening company and that we really care about spending time and investing and hearing what customers and users have to say, and that we respect the users. If the user fails, it’s not their failure; it’s our failure. And I think that that’s a really key thing.

[Video ends]

Cameron Gray: For us, this means that we test everything with real users all the time. We test wireframes and new designs before we build them. We’re an agile team that operate on a sprint calendar, so we test every product iteration as we complete it. And once we have things out there, we just continue to test and test, with real users, and it’s really, really important for us to make sure we recruit users that meet our target market. So testing usability with your mom just isn’t as useful as you think it would be.

It also means that we had to provide a way for our customers to speak to us, because that’s the easiest way to listen, right? And we’re a SAAS, a pure SAAS, so people aren’t calling us on the phone. We have to have customer forums. We have to have places where customers can post ideas. And we have to have a combination of passive and active listening. So actively we’re seeing cases come in, but passively we’re using analytics and we’re using our own internal reporting systems to understand what’s the behavior that matches the communication that we’re getting from the customers.

Our fifth lesson – or our fifth critical move, which is really important. You still need pros on board. So as a system thinker, when you discover, like I did, user experience design as a concept, your initial reaction is, “Oh, no worries. I can understand everything there is to know about this. I’ll just start reading all these books, because somewhere in here I’ll find the rules of user experience design, and then I can win with it.”

Failing that, you’ll just hire the best consultants you can find, and you’ll keep them around forever. We signed statement of work upon statement of work upon statement of work with Adaptive Path, thinking, “Well, they’ll just keep staying around.”

And then, of course, we make user experience design part of our everyday culture with things like pizzability. Well, as an agile team who releases product iterations every four weeks, we find new challenges every four weeks. Every time we release something we learn something new, and every time it’s like, “Oh, gosh, we wish we could go back to Adaptive Path and say, ‘Wait a second, this is new and different, and the personas, the design principles don’t help us here. What do we do?’” And what we found was we needed to have pros on board.

So this is on of our Scrum teams, ’cause we’re an agile shop doing Scrum, and it’s got all the usual cast of characters that you would see in a Scrum team. We have representatives for product. Of course, we have representatives from engineering. We’ve got folks from QA. And what we realized was critically important for us to be successful was to add this guy in the back, and every Scrum team in every organization should have one of them.

[Video plays]

Male: I think Adaptive Path has been kinda like the training wheels on a bike that we really wanted to ride but didn’t know how, and that bike is our software. Basically, in order to be on our own at this point, we kinda needed them to guide us and help us in the beginning, because we just didn’t really know how to make that kind of roadmap that they were able to create for us. And that was a hugely important thing in the development of our product.

[Video ends]

Cameron Gray: And those are our five critical moves.

[Audience applause]
Peter Merholz: I’m wondering if you have any kind of – I know this is something that a lot of folks are thinking about – any just kind of top-of-mind thoughts around agile development, user experience, how they can work together, how in my experience UX tends to feel kind of run roughshod over by agile developers who are trying to launch something every week or two, and the user experience people are like, “Can we think about it first?” So what has worked just in terms of kind of integrating user experience processes that tend to work at kinda one cycle and agile processes that tend to work at other cycles?

Cameron Gray: I think that the really interesting thing about it was that people who do user experience design think of themselves as being involved in an iterative process. But engineers think, “Oh, well, all design’s waterfall.” It’s like, you know, you go do research, then you produce design, and then you give it to us and we build it.

And what we really needed to do was sort of overlap those iterative processes and sorta stagger them in a way. So I’m iterating on design, and I’m delivering increments of design to a development team, who can then deliver incremental product based on that, and you see incremental value. And as long as you’re committed to that and you realize that you can always change, you can always evolve, you’re not designing something that’s gonna be live in three years, then you take a lot of the risk away, and people are willing to maybe not finish everything perfectly but get it out there and see how it does.

Peter Merholz: All right, anybody? Any questions?

Audience Member: I was wondering, where did the proposal to bring in Adaptive Path actually pop up in the organization, and how did it go from “Okay, we need a UX person” to “Okay, we’re working with Adaptive Path”?

Cameron Gray: It was actually – I have to say, like I said before with the quick wins, we spent some time trying to solve our problems on our own, and that was when we really started looking around and studying what other organizations had done that would be successful. And we went through a really quick process, and we met with a lot of different design studios. And when we sat down with the folks at Adaptive Path, I think they just really resonated with us and said, “Hey, this is the right people to work with,” and presented us sort of a rough design strategy based on experience that they’d had with other products, and then presented Paula as somebody that seemed like a really good fit for our space. So it was really a really personal decision about who we felt were the right people to be part of our team.

Peter Merholz: And Paula, do you have anything from your side in terms of how the relationship started?

Paula Wellings: Well, I do think we started the relationship. I think to a certain extent you guys were like, “Can you fix what we got?” And we did start the relationship saying, “Okay, we’ll try and fix what you got.” And so we actually, in our proposal, included a round of quick wins that would fix what they got while we tried to figure out what to do next. And I think, as Cameron mentioned, most of those were interesting as conversation and relationship builders, but as far as impacting the existing product, I don’t think they really brought a lot of value aside from helping us better understand each other.

Peter Merholz: Thank you for your question. Thank you guys for your time.

Paula Wellings: Thank you.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

I am just tickled pink to be here. It’s a wonderful group of speakers, and it’s been wonderful chatting with several of you in the audience. There’s a lot – in terms of experience design, we’re at this wonderful threshold of discovering in a sense a whole new country, very much like the Columbus example that Dave just spoke about. And it does, yes, indeed, involve games, and so that’s what we’re here to talk about, show you a little bit about my research.

So essentially what I do is I am a player experience designer, and XEODesign is the first player experience company. I make games more fun, and I’ve run XEODesign for the past 18 years. We’ve improved over 100 million player experiences for companies such as EA, Ubisoft, Sega, PlayFirst, LeapFrog, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, all of these different companies. And we’ve done that by working with amazing teams. We’ve worked on three in the Myth series. We’ve worked on the Sims 2. We’ve worked on many of the Diner Dashes coming out of PlayFirst. And so with this, what we’ve done is we take our clients to that next level of play.

Where I started, sometimes it’s helpful to know, is that I have an undergraduate degree in cognitive psychology from Stanford. And essentially, I like to say I learned three things at Stanford. One is how people think, learn, and remember. I also learned how to make documentary films, which is how to get people to tell you their real story. And I learned how to program a computer. So I take these three things to take my clients to that next level of play. Here’s some of the companies.

And what I’m also, though, most known for is the research that we’ve done called the Four Keys to Fun. And what this is, this really defines what I mean, at least, about the term “player experience.” Basically, it’s the relationship between the interaction and emotions, basically the interactions that players make and the emotions that they feel. And this relationship is what creates the experiences that players feel during game play, and during good game play it’s even better.

We’ve applied this model to even our own games, so through our sister company XEOPlay, we’ve published a game called Tilt. And actually, what I did is I took this model, the Four Keys to Fun, with me to iPhoneDevCamp. And we actually teamed up with Joe Hewitt, and I designed it, used it to invent a whole new type of game. It was the first game to use the accelerometer on Apple’s platform, so it was the first iPhone accelerometer game.

We only had two Web pages and one YouTube video, and yet we were able to drive 250,000 visits from people coming to check us out. And so that shows you some of the power of what the – some of the power of play can do.

We now have a new version called Tilt HD. It’s on the iPad. And we’re using that to tune the game that we’re actually gonna release on the iPhone along with a metagame. And for those of you coming to my play shop tomorrow, we’re gonna talk a little bit more about that as well.

Here’s the game here, and it features Flip.

[Sound effects playing]

And basically, Flip gets left all alone in the blighted ooze that was once Shady Glen. And Flip’s too young to crawl, so you, the player, have to help control gravity and wind, to eat carbon out of the air, and gather water and seeds to save Shady Glen.

It should be noted that these games – there are no buttons to play. All you do is you just tilt the controls, and we base that on what people – that action, that interaction created an experience that people liked about the Apple platform to start with, and then we could extend that enjoyment into a game. That’s what really helped make these so popular. Tilt HD was a No. 1 app in ten – or top ten app in ten countries when we made it free on Earth Day. So it became very popular.

So what I’m here today to talk to you about is how to use emotion to do your job of interaction design better. Not just add fun in a general sense, not just paint on badges or do check-ins. For too long – I really want you to rethink what we mean by interaction design, because for too long user interface/interaction design has focused on really serious-sounding quality metrics and ignoring those that involve play. And yet play is integral to many things that we do as humans, and it’s really a vital ingredient to learning.

And our designs, your designs, all of our designs, create emotions every time the user interacts with them, whether we design those emotions or not. So, again, we’re in this watershed, this wonderful moment in history where we can discover this whole new terrain of human experience coming out of each individual choice that people make.

So I’d like to start, though, with where my fascination with emotion kind of came from, is I was – at the turn of this century, I found myself in Egypt. I was standing out on a temple, on the top of a temple in the middle of the desert, in Dendera, looking out of the desert.

It was a hot, dry day, and my lips were parched, and I reached down for my canteen to get that last sip of water, when I stopped and stood in amazement because there at my feet, someone had carved a game board. And I thought, wow, sort of – two people had stood where I stood and thought to pass their time with a game. And I wondered, what would those people think of the games we play now? And then in the year, say, 2020, what kinds of experiences did I wanna play? So 20 years ahead, what kinds of experience would I wanna play?

And I was thinking about this, that I realized that, as a designer, everything that I knew would have to change because we had neither the tools nor the language to describe experience in any real deep form. And this was in, you know, the year 2000, right? And we had no way to measure those experiences with players.

And so it was that initial response – or that initial experience really shaped the way my research went. In a sense, I became – if you look at – I became fascinated – like Newton watching apples fall. This invisible pull emotion has on human action.

Take, for example, any group of kids at play. In the games that I was designing for my clients, I had thousands of rules, and yet they were lucky if they produced three emotions. Yet looking at any group of kids at play, you see the entire pantheon of human emotion coming from a game with a single rule: tag, you’re it. Wow. Can we do that?

Imagine yourself in the year 2020. Whatever kinds of experience, whether they’re game experiences or accounting experiences or quilt-knitting experiences. In 2020, what kind of experiences do you wanna unlock for yourselves, as well as the people your software serves?

And there’s a potential – if we collaborate and if we do our job right, we could actually unlock human potential of 6 billion people, around the world, working together to improve quality of life through play.

And so that’s what I mean by the future of user experience as play, ’cause if you go to the average workspace, which I love Dave’s example of the cubicles. And basically, if that were a zoo, the Humane Society would protest. The environment and tools are so ill suited to the task at hand, the work that needs to be done. The cognitive process and the emotional process is just really ill designed.

And that’s the reason why so many escape to Facebook and Twitter and FarmVille and Solitaire during the workday. Essentially, boredom is created through repetition and lack of interest. And if you think about it, why are water coolers so popular? Well, it’s because the tasks – there’s very little social interaction in the tasks. That’s why people are hanging out at the water cooler. Why do we need coffee? Well, there’s a lack of challenge and reward system to mastering something difficult, baked into the task itself.

And this is what game design can teach us. It’s not that we need to oversimplify the world in order to make life better. We need to recognize that human beings are complex, pattern-matching, creating machines, right? We use systems, and we need the stimuli and the challenges and the structure to accomplish new goals continually, again and again and again, something new, something new, something new. And our work environment and the way that we structure, all needs to factor that in. It’s not just any type of fun that we’re going to apply. We want specific activities that improve life.

And so if we think about – if we look at games and other types of user experiences, it’s that there really is something missing in the practice. Cognition – if we’re designing interactions, cognition is only half the story. There’s something else that’s missing. If we look at players, what makes them have fun, what they enjoy the most, there’s some other systems involved than usability, time on task, heuristics, that sort of thing. That’s only a piece of what was going on.

And it’s ironic that since 1850 – since 1848, in the case of Phineas Gage – we’ve known that choice, in choice, emotion is the silent partner, is cognition’s silent partner in every decision that we make. Every decision you’ve made in your life has been made at an emotional level first. And if you don’t have – if you have damage to your emotional system, you actually can’t make a choice itself. You could rationally describe it, and even the consequences, but you can’t actually make the choice itself. So we as interaction designers, as user experience experts, we’ve gotta recognize the importance of emotion in our games – or in our software, in our interfaces.

So really, it’s all about experience design. I like to think of experience design as two wheels on the bicycle. There is the rear wheel, which is – a bike is not going anywhere unless the person can find the pedals, right? So that’s where usability comes to the front. They’ve gotta be able to find that drive shaft and make that bike go. And then there’s the front wheel, and that’s where player experience comes in. You’ve gotta master new mechanics. Researchers have new techniques; designers have new methods, in order to make that front wheel fun. That’s how game design is gonna change what we do as experience designers.

So player experience, again, to me, this is what it means to me, is how player interaction creates emotion. And that’s the main point for the rest of my talk, because without emotion, really there is no game.

Neuroscience backs me up here in that emotions help people do five things that are vital tasks in games. It helps us focus. There’s a reason – ever wonder this? There’s a reason why there’s a boiling lava monster in doom on your iPhone. It’s like you’re gonna focus on that, right? And likewise, it’s gonna help you remember how to deal with them and then decide.

For example, this is in Diner Dash. When your customers leave, the first time you see how angry they get, you’re gonna remember “Oh, I better not do that,” and it’s the emotion that’s helping you remember and guide you through that experience. So focus, remember, decide, helps you perform, and helps you learn. We’ll go into more detail about this in my play shop tomorrow.

So what we did was we looked at people at play – people playing at home, school, and work, young and old, male and female – playing everything from Tetris to Halo, on any platform that they prefer. And these were their favorite games, and what we noticed is that they were doing a whole bunch of different things.

But they were experiencing – their favorite moments often had some similarities in emotion. So we did a cluster analysis of those observations, and we noticed that, wow, there was hard fun, with frustration and fiero. There was this easy fun. Different types of actions were creating curiosity, wonder, and surprise, at different times. And then there was serious fun. Excitement, relaxation, and value were coming out of those experiences. And then lastly – that’s for last – is people fun, okay? So we see amusement, amici, amiero, admiration, schadenfreude, naches, wonderful social emotions that were really driving play.

And it was the best – really interesting. Like, what were the mechanics behind there? And I thought, “Wow, we see all these emotions in players.” The question – I just had to ask the question. It’s like, well, if we really identified where these emotions came from, really understood, could we create a palette of toolbrushes, in a sense, different actions coming from games, that each were connected to a different emotion? And then we could, in a sense, literally paste Velcro onto any screen to grab attention. And the second thing we can do is we could then paint it with – color it with any emotion that we choose. We could paint it with emotion to match the brand or to match the task at hand.

And that’s how the Four Fun Keys work. Basically, it’s a new approach to interaction design, coming from games, where we can go into different areas of the experience and then make an adjustment to make things more fun.

This is what the model looks like. This is the one we’ll be working with tomorrow. And this is the Four Keys to Fun. And I just have a moment just to take a look at this and see what you think. So there are the four keys, and there are different tasks that are supported for different work environments. So in a sense, at the center was the PX, the player experience. There are the actions, so these are the verbs. Those are the handles of the toolbrushes, if you will. And then at the outside, on the leaves of the clover, are four different groups of emotion.

There is the – at the top, we see there’s the hard fun of challenge and mastery, you know, the frustration that leads to the feeling of winning. There’s the easy fun, which is – that’s the brass ring. That’s the badge – I mean that’s the point from the score. The easy fun is much more about exploration and role play and creativity, and that’s the vehicle – this interaction is a vehicle for the imagination. In work, you can’t – you need both, right? You need to accomplish that feeling of accomplishment, and you also, though, need to problem-solve.

And then we slip down to the bottom for serious fun, where it’s providing meaning and value and creating excitement through interactions such as repetition and rhythm and completion and collection, and those create other kinds of aspiration and obtaining value. And then lastly, there’s people fun, which is all about social interaction. And I, of course, am trying to condense, you know, 18 years of research into two minutes here and one slide. But that’s the essential relationship is a sense that, if you can then choose your interactions, you can then adjust your emotion profile.

So how did we do the research? Well, let’s take a look here at a couple players, one player. So these are three – he’s playing Star Wars Galaxies, the tutorial for Star Wars Galaxies. And what do we see on – how many people think that there are three – all three images are a player enjoying himself? How many people think all three? Just raise your hand. Okay. All right. Some. And then how many people think there are two, two people, two of ‘em are – two of the photos are that? Okay. Quite a few more. All right. And then how many people think only one? Only one is enjoyment? Okay. Back down to the thing.

Well, it turns out that it is actually only one. It’s this image here on the far right. But it’s not because we can see he’s contracting his lip, because we can see his teeth. It’s actually because he’s contracting the orbicularis oculi.

So for this research, what we did is we identified specific emotions by using Paul Ekman’s facial action coding to measure seven emotions in the face, other emotions in the body. Moment to moment, we took those video clips and then tagged them from their emotions. We then sorted those video clips by emotions, and then that’s how we – and then from those emotions, we then looked at, well, what were the players doing? And that’s how we came out on mechanics. So that’s a bit of how we did the research.

So let’s take a quick tour through the Four Fun Keys and see if we can do this in our time together. There are white papers on our Web site if you want more.

My favorite quote, though – my favorite in games is this one. This is a player’s wife saying that “It’s easy to tell what games my husband enjoys the most. If he screams, ‘I hate it, I hate it, I hate it,’ then I know two things: (a) he’s going to finish it, and then (b) he’s gonna buy version 2.”

[Audience laughter]

What usability metric is gonna measure that kind of devotion, right? What kind of – that’s really twisted. You know, it’s like, what’s going on there? Well, it turns out he likes hard fun. And in hard fun, it’s not simply going to A to B. You can’t just push a button and win. Push a button to print? Yes, that I like. Push a button and win the Grand Prix? Push a button and my term paper gets written for me? There’s definitely something really, really missing.

And turns out, to enjoy the process in games, you need some challenge. So it’s not just add a point; it’s “now we need some challenge.” We’ve gotta have a clear goal, obstacle. You’ve gotta be able to overcome that with practice, over time. You need to fail. Basketball is a fun game because why? Well, the hoop’s this small, and it’s way up there. It wouldn’t be a fun game any other way.

And so we look at, in the literature, it’s very similar to what Shiksa Mahai had already said with his model of flow, and I highly recommend checking out the model. We have added to it here a lot of other concepts from game design, which we will be doing in my play shop tomorrow.

But the important thing is the ideas that basically you can’t – player skill over time, if it doesn’t get more difficult, players will leave because they’re bored. And then on the difficulty on the Y axis, if the game gets too difficult too quickly, then they’re gonna leave ’cause they’re too frustrated. That’s the art of game design: balancing player frustration and skill. And what you want, Shiksa Mahai says, is to be in that zone, that white cone in the middle.

We notice some other things in our research. Most importantly is that, in order to get one of the most important – the Holy Grail of game design is that feeling of winning, right? Which we call fiero, since there’s no real good word in English. It’s that personal triumph over adversity.

In order to get that, you have to frustrate the player so much, they’ve gotta fail so many times – failure is good in games, some failure – and they wanna throw that controller through the window. And at that moment, if they succeed, what happens? Well, they look like this. Right? Okay, “Yesssssss.” You know, “I just got the boss monster”; “I just won the Grand Prix.” Unfortunately, in the upper right here, she just actually got her character to move.

[Audience laughter]

So that was usability. So it can come out of usability as well. And so those are kinda the basic emotions.

So what does it mean for user experience design? Well, we’ve got – so it’s easy to say, “Hey, let’s add points.” But be careful what you wish for. Any kinda point system, people will gang. They’ll change their behavior to maximize their score.

So one of the ways that Twitter broke was by putting that big number underneath your name, and everyone plays the “follow the leader” kind of game, like, “Well, hey, I follow you; you follow me back. Our numbers go up.” But then what happens to your RSS feed? You’re kinda chasing what Mary Hodder and Kaliya Hamlin call your personal hype quotient, and that breaks another – that unbalances the game. They’ve added lists to kind of mitigate that, but it’s still pretty broken. And so what is it you wanna think about? Do ideas encourage?

Another example showing some slightly different things is Mint. So Mint takes some other principles, in the sense it simplifies the world, and that’s one of the things you have to do for a game. You have to simplify their choices, providing clear goals and to amplify feedback. Now, I don’t know how many times bigger those bars are from an average bar chart, but that’s like five or six times. I mean, it’s pretty clear what this screen is about, and it’s amplifying. It’s like, “Woo-hoo, yes, you had a profitable quarter.” And it’s almost – in some instances, it’s wider than it is tall.

And so that game or toy-like feeling comes from amplifying the feedback and really getting across something that’s very important for humans, which is mastery. So hard fun is all about challenge and mastery. It’s not about ease of use. It’s all about overcoming obstacles. Now, hopefully these are obstacles in the work environment and not in the tool, like that poor player. But work essentially is hard fun. What makes work feel good, the good part about work, is not just slipping ‘em off real easy. What feels good about work is, like, yes, you went home and you actually did something. You feel accomplishment by having been frustrated, by having to apply your utmost efforts.

So that takes us on to another thing. So that’s mastery. Let’s talk a little bit about easy fun, which is all about going beyond the challenge. You can play basketball and not keep score. You can just – dribbling the ball feels fun. You can role-play the Harlem Globetrotters if you want. That’s part of what makes basketball such a popular sport.

So in addition to challenge that we have here, as any racetrack designer knows, is that adding curves adds more fun. Now, it’s not just because it makes it more challenging, the curves, but the curves also create novelty, exploration, this new space that you have to then navigate through, so it changes the task up. In fact, in Grand Theft Auto, what we found is that players on a mission from Point A to Point B then get offered other things, like, oh, plate-glass window, freeway exit ramp, parking meter, and like offers in improv theater, it’s up to the player to decide whether to interact. And what happens is that these moments of interaction on the side, if they’re easy fun, then enliven the player experience as a whole.

It’s why I like to think of easy fun as sort of a combination between the Wii-mote and Fantasy Island, you know, aspirational fantasies, and one of my most fun games, which is bubble wrap.

[Audience laughter]

It’s just fun to do, right? It’s just fun. Like anyone who has a Mac here, if you scroll along that dock, woo-hoo, getting all of those little icons to bounce up and down, that’s just fun. I could be completely happy and entertained for about five minutes. And actually, why don’t I – no. I won’t do that, no.

But that’s what it’s all about. It grabs attention, and it stimulates us in conjunction with hard fun, so it’s slightly different.

I like to think of easy fun in another way, which is a Japanese garden. And it makes choices more interesting. They don’t have a sidewalk in a Japanese garden, right? They’ve got stepping stones, and they’re placed just far enough apart so that you have to bring your attention to the here and now, which is exactly what the interaction design of a Japanese garden is supposed to do. Stepping stones too far apart, you fall through; too close together, you get sidewalk and you’ll just run right through the environment. So placing these stones creates more interesting choices.

How can we see that in games? Well, here he’s playing Splinter Cell. Shot a hole in the fish tank. You can see the water coming out. Look at the curiosity on his face. You see it in the eyes and in the mouth. Watch what happens when the level of the water reaches the level of the bullet hole. Okay, you see that? I’ll do that again. So, clearly enjoyment. So we’ve got a smile going. We definitely have the eyes opening and contracting. He enjoyed that. That’s not part of the mission. It isn’t like, “Hey, go shoot a hole in the fish tank.” It’s just there, right? And he does it.

Lots of things. The pure joy of interaction, as I said before, really drives a lot of interaction. So whether it’s Koi Pond on the iPhone, where you’re feeding fish or just tapping the water, or shaking the controller for Urbanspoon, to make that – just the pure sense of going forward.

And our players tell us that we’ve got – in our game, we’ve got – it’s just the idea of tilting. So there are no buttons in the game. All you do is you just tilt the device to play, to move the character, to control gravity and wind. And you wanna steer Flip towards – away from the green blight and then towards the, in this level, white dandelion tufts, so let’s take a look at how that works.

[Video plays]

So there, it was just the sheer newness of that interaction is interesting to players.

I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail here, but you can see it’s sort of this novelty versus the expected. There’s this spectrum. And that you’re hopping from stepping stone to stepping stone in these unique experiences.

In terms of software, we’ve got the mystery egg in – how many people have played FarmVille? Yeah. Oh, really? Wait a minute. All right, so how many people have played FarmVille? Okay. Like five of you. No, maybe ten. And how many people have heard of FarmVille? How many people are on Facebook? Okay. What games are you playing, if any, on Facebook? All right. Ah, okay. Okay. FarmVille, you should check it out. It’s what game designing is leaving behind, but we’re going on.

But anyway, think about Google, the way that they’ve done their logo. This is easy fun. This increases curiosity, and if you are a search engine, what’s the most important emotion that you need? I mean, there are two, really. But the most important one is curiosity. Right? ‘Cause if you are curious as the user, as the researcher, and if Google can make you more curious, then you’ll actually be able to more easily focus on going through that whole wall of links and reading all that text, because you’re intensely – “I’ve gotta know what happened on Lost this weekend.” You know, that kinda feeling. If you could engender that in a search engine, you’ve got a much more efficient tool.

They’ve got this “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. And the humor in here, a little bit more of what we call people fun, but that also engenders some great things; it refreshes the task as they go. And it creates imagination.

So easy fun inspires in relief, and people will balance the game. Like, if they get too frustrated in a racing sim or they get too frustrated in a matching game on Diner Dash, then they’ll go do something fun just because. They’ll drive the racetrack backwards. They’ll put all their Sims in the pool and pull out the ladders just to see what happens. Nobody here has done that, right? Nobody has tortured Sims?

That’s the thing with our next thing. We’re talking about serious fun. One of the classic mistakes – if you ever have to do an educational game or try and make your educational site more game-like, the classic mistake is to hand your player a nuclear reactor simulation and then don’t let them do what? What would people really want to do – what do you want to do – what’s the very first thing – if I did that to you, what would the very first thing you’d wanna do?

[Inaudible audience responses]

Yeah, core meltdown, right? It’s like, “Oh, the instructor says no, no, we don’t wanna teach ‘em how to do core meltdown.” It’s like, it’s a game. Simplify the world. Amplify the feedback. And suspend the consequences so that you can freely explore, and then that will actually – because it’s a game, you actually learn more of that domain than you would ever be able to experience in real life.

Games are not just about badges. In fact, James Paul Gee talks about, if you can master a simulation, you master the content. And I predict that we will soon have simulations as a standard SAT format, in addition to multiple-choice and true-and-false and those kinds of essay questions.

Anyway, so let’s move on to serious fun. So it’s really – serious fun is this opportunity – it was really strange. We kept seeing this over and over again. It’s this really strange thing about this opportunity to change how players think, feel, and behave. People at the time – and, again, this was in 2003, 2004 – were playing card games to work out. They’re playing Dance Dance Revolution to lose weight. It was really odd.

What were they doing? Well, it was because games were – the excitement from games were enhancing an otherwise boring task. So it was getting them something that they already valued, accomplished, in a way that was much more enjoyable. And so that’s what these serious fun mechanics are all about. It’s their reward systems that create values before, during, and after play. It is not just giving a badge. You have to be very careful if you give badges for stuff. You can actually demotivate folks sometimes if the task is intrinsically motivating in and of itself.

But stepping back, what I’d like to think of – easy fun is the bubble wrap of game design; serious fun is like the Swiffer. Swiffer, of course, is designed by IDEO, one of my favorite product design companies, and you always see – we always see it, like, picking up bright confetti little object thingies, right? Not what I see at home, but we see that.

And for me – I don’t know about you, but for me, this looks exactly like Bejeweled, the game of Bejeweled. Because why? Well, collect all you can. The goal is collect all you can, and enhance your progress, and give you that desire to aspire and acquire. There’s a reason why there’s a bit of revolution in home vacuuming equipment. They all have clear canisters so you can see all of the little bugs and whatever getting sucked up. It enhances your sense of progress. It enhances your sense of work well done.

Jobs don’t do this, right? Jobs really don’t do this very well at all. It’s often delayed feedback, and the goal’s unclear, and we’ve got this – and if I get any feedback at all, it’s three or four months later. And right now – but it’s like, I wanna do the Swiffer. It’s like, yeah, I’m getting my work done, and boy, it feels good.

Nobody here has ever done this, I bet. Nobody here has ever watched their hard drive defragment.

[Audience laughter]

That’s serious fun. In fact, Apple is real genius. They’ve got all four keys in all of the stuff that they do. And by the way, best-selling games, as I said, have all the four keys. Other objects definitely do apply the keys as well.

And with Apple, you ever wonder about this? But I thought this was just a stroke of brilliance is, that’s a Bejeweled board too. Right? Basically your mission on the Apple operating system is to collect as many brightly colored gemstones, by using their app store, as you can. There’s a real delight to that. And that’s all serious fun as well.

But before we leave serious fun, I think there’s one more point that’s really important to make, and that is, it’s not just about the numbers. So it’s not just my number going up or the number of badges. It’s not just about money either. So work is not – and work is not about money either. Work, in human endeavor, really gets better if it’s attached to what? If it’s attached to something meaningful, right? If it has meaning, if it attaches to my values, if I can express my value or get some goal that I really care about.

And in our game, players are telling us that the – for Tilt – is that the environmental theme makes them feel better about their kids playing, the educational value of teaching about recycling or alternative energy or eating oil, that sort of thing. It sends a positive message to their kids, and that’s part of the enjoyment. And then in the global game, all the Tilt points that you earn actually go up to a global scoreboard, and then, together, we kind of collaborate to push blight away from the real world, from the entire real world. And there’s a real-world metagame that we’ll be announcing soon.

So serious fun’s graphs look a bit like this. The model looks like this. We have value creation and time. And what I do with my game design clients – and other clients as well, ’cause I’ve worked with Roxio and Cisco and Oracle, other companies to help them improve their user experiences – is that, well, what’s happening at 10? What’s the reward at 10? What’s at 15? What do you want the person to accomplish at 30? At 60, if my company – if my client, in the download casual business, has not converted that player, like they wanna buy, that person’s gone. They’ve lost that customer. So you better believe, at that 60-minute mark, they’re paying attention to, ’cause that’s – you’ve gotta have that player really involved. And then it’s not just me, but it’s me, my friends, my community, my world, this whole spectrum of different layers of value and meaning that’s important for people at play.

So serious fun can provide meaning and meaningful experiences, which brings us to our last thing, which is the kinds of interaction that players find the most meaningful, which is people fun. It’s friendship, because as we all know – I’m sure everyone in the room would agree – is that games are just more fun if you invite friends.

Here’s a mom and her son playing Wii Boxing. For her it’s this great opportunity to work out a little parent-child aggression.

[Audience laughter]

But what’s going on here is there’s social bonding through that activity, that they’re interacting in a way – and basically, people fun is the excuse to interact with your friends. It’s what I like to call – we’ve gotten bubble wrap and Swiffer; now we’re going to mango. People fun is all about mango, for me, and it would be something actually unique for you. And why mango? Well, if my sister says the word “mango” to me, I’m doing that on-the-floor-rolling-laughing thing. And I’m sure you’ve got someone that can do the exact same thing with a different word yourselves, right? And why is that? Well, because, well, you had to have been there, or it was a long story.

The mango to us is a social token. It’s something symbolic in nature that increases in value through use. And as it gets passed between people, back and forth, more emotions build up on it, more excitement, the bonds. It’s weaving a social fabric between the participants. My mother would love to know what the word “mango” means, but my sister and I are not telling, right? No, ’cause that’s us. And so these things kept grouping in all kinds of fun things.

Objects can be social tokens. In our case, games were. In our game, one of the reasons people shared it 250,000 times was that a lot of it was over-the-shoulder play. It’s a single-player game, but yet they were demo-ing it to have a discussion. And in fact, again, the brilliance of the Apple platform is that if I were to take my iPhone here and show you photos, what you would do is, well, you would take your finger and you would, you know, swipe, right? And then you would pinch and zoom, right? Like that. Well, now, if you were to do that same gesture on the back of my hand, we better be on a date or something.

So the social gestures – the gestures you use to interact with the operating system have a social emotion profile. So they baked social emotions into a social device through the types of things that they – the types of interactions that they chose to support on the platform. And that’s why people tell us, “Petting my iPhone makes me happy.” It’s also why – a little bit why – there are so many people, plant, and pet games on Facebook. It’s because the emotion profile around the interactions matches the context in which they’re used.

BJ Fogg talked earlier about putting hot triggers in front of motivated people. Well, what makes something interesting or fit really well is if that interaction generates more of the emotion that I was there for in the first place. So if you think about Facebook – and a great example is the “like” button. I mean, I just “liked” your status. What does that mean, I “liked” your status? Well, actually, what it really means is we’re primates, and I just picked a digital flea off of you just to say hi, and I like you, and then we reconnect in that very simple way, and then you can comment and go on from there. And that’s the way you can express your amici or something.

Ocarina’s an iPhone game, and you can – or a musical instrument you play on your iPhone. You blow into the iPhone, and you can play the flute. And then you can then look at – another view has a Google Earth-like view where you can spin the globe, and you can actually listen to people playing that same instrument around the world. And so that sense, that experience – this is experience design, folks. This is not badges; this is not points. It’s very kinda game-like. And that experience then – players tell us it creates this sense of wonder and connection. Sonic Mule – Smule, who developed this app, they’re brilliant.

Another example is Flipboard. How many people have been playing that on their iPads? Yeah? Playing with that. Listen to my language: playing with that. Yeah, well, it’s a social media thing, and just like, wow, the way that the pages flip, that’s easy fun. And then the content is serious – or it’s people fun, ’cause these are all my Twitter streams, right? This is my Twitter and my Facebook, all coming up, and it’s really cool and formatted magazine format, and it’s animated.

I just wanna make one more point about the people fun is that it does not have to be about “people” people. It can be about pets. Tamagotchi’s mechanics are very well established. This is Tilt in various – this is Flip, the main character for Tilt, and you can see Flip is just that character at iPhoneDevCamp. And then we see an intermediate version, and then now the version that’s in the game that’s shipping. And by creating something that you care and feed over time, that creates social emotions that can increase attachment to your game or your software.

And so we’ve talked a lot about experiences now, and I wanted to sort of wrap up with a couple of closing thoughts and then show you this video, which is all about people fun. So these are folks playing people – sorry, they’re playing Rayman, a mini-game in Rayman on the Wii. And I’m not even including the image of the computer, or of the game, because really what’s happening is the game designer was not designing the game. It’s kinda like Shakespeare. Shakespeare designed the emotional space between characters; game designs design the emotional space between player and game.

Watch on the couch. This is what people fun looks like.

[Video plays]

So it’s fun to move together, right? It’s fun to dance.

[Video continues playing]

A little bit of trash talk. Surprise there.

[Video continues playing]

Fiero.

[Video continues playing, ends]

[Audience laughter]

And this laughter we’re having now, that’s a social emotion as well, right? And that’s what creates – it breaks through something, a cognitive – you can be so in your head and so in that – then that emotion just whoosh, it takes you to another space, and it can actually increase the tension.

So people fun – there are more emotions in the people fun quadrant than the other four combined. Here are some of the emotion cycles or chains. You’ve got – player interaction creates amusement, creates social bonding. I talk about social bonding in terms of amiero, to have a nice, short word for it. You also have gratitude, generosity, and elevation.

But the main point is, like, interaction and emotion create what we call an emotion profile and that you can actually choose – if you remember the paintbrushes – by choosing, the types of choices you put in a user interface, it’s not – in Facebook, it’s not a – you know the Poke button? Brilliant. Brilliant, brilliant, because it’s really one of the – it’s a fixed word, but yet it has a lot of social-token emergent qualities to it, because you poke somebody in the ribs, which – are you just being friendly, or are you flirting with me? There’s a lot of ambiguity around it. And then it’s not – it could’ve been – you think about “wink,” “handshake,” “decapitate,” “slap.” That’s an interaction design. It’s just pushing a button, like “like,” but by putting it in that context, dramatically changes the amount of social emotions that you feel during play.

Social emotions from people fun also do some other important things. We’ve done a lot of research on the viral distribution, the role in viral distribution. We’ll talk a little bit about this in my play shop tomorrow. And there are also other places to get some of the stuff that I’ve spoken about. But then essentially is that you can actually design – by connecting these systems through game mechanics, through mechanics, through choices, you can actually intentionally design viral distribution of your application or of your game, because social bonds are important.

Teamwork requires people fun. The emotion that people feel when they get something to share is something that we can actually design in our games, and who doesn’t wanna spend more time with their friends? It’s very enjoyable, right? Most of us would rather spend our time around the water cooler.

So in summarizing, I’d like you to think of games as motivating systems, not badge systems, not point systems. Look to game examples, because they innovate. And I’ve been talking about games for the past 18 years, and designing them. And they innovate faster. They had pie menus, they had voice control, way before consumer software had them. And then they’ve got more human factors to make a game good, a lot more human factors than just ease of use.

And they don’t think of their players as users; they think of them as players. And that’s really important. And not just any player, but “Hey, I’m playing Diner Dash; I’m a waitress. So that whole user interface is really designed to make me feel more waitress-y.” Or Sly Cooper: “I’m gonna feel more like a thief.” Or in World of Warcraft, I might wanna feel more like a mage or more like a sorcerer. And they do stuff in the UI to enhance that feeling. So if you can find a game allegory to what you’ve got, put that into your persona profile, you’ve got some really fun things.

As I mentioned, that interaction design, whether you do it or not, the interactions you design – your designs are speaking this emotional language whether you intend it to or not. You know you need to do fonts; you know you need to do art; you know you need talent in audio. You may not know that your interaction design is also sending an emotional message.

And then social emotions – that’s what drives all of Web 2.0. So in fact, what we found is that the – with the four keys is that – we released it in 2004, and in 2005 I gave a talk, screaming at the top of my lungs, like “Game industry, wake up. You need to put video capture into all of your game software, so people can make customer-created videos that you then can host on your Web sites, and they’ll share. This’ll be huge. It’ll be viral.” And people are like, “Yeah, yeah, nice. Nice, Nicole.” And that was the same month that a URL, YouTube.com, was registered. So it was a missed opportunity for many, many, many of my clients. They’re catching up, though.

Anyway, so now we’re talking about player experience design and wrapping it up. And so I’d like you to consider, on your next design project, how you can choose the appropriate interaction, the appropriate verbs, the appropriate actions to create the emotions that you want. Apple has got a lot of social emotions in their platform, a lot of curiosity, wonder, and surprise as you rotate to the accelerometer. We built that right into the game mechanic for Tilt. So just playing the game created some of the emotions that matched the platform. And it’s that interaction that is what creates emotion.

And so I’d like you to go back to the beginning and think about that 2020. And what would those sorta things feel like? Could you pay attention to the UI like Velcro, in a sense, and color with any emotion that you choose, to match your brand or match the task at hand? And I’d like you to join me, speak with me afterwards or, you know, in the Twitter-verse. And let’s collaborate to fill out this map, because what we see is that I think we’ve got this opportunity to do something really special.

I think, in my vision of 2020, is I see everyone going to work with an expectation of play. Wouldn’t that be a nice world? That’s my vision. So thank you very much. I’d like to collaborate with you, and if you’ve got – I don’t know if we’ve got time for questions. I think we might be right on time.

If you’d like posters, there is a top-secret URL here: XEODesign.com/UXWeek. And you can download the PDF, and we’ll make it available – it’s up there now, and if you want – well, I’ve written book chapters in the following books, and there are white papers. You can follow me on Twitter. And there’s my SlideShare account, and these slides will also be available.

So thanks very much. I don’t know if we have time for questions, but you’ve been great. It’s been wonderful being here.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

As an anthropologist, I like to take the long view, look at broad-scale changes. And as you look at broad-scale changes over time, media tend to be a really important part of those changes. So if you just think about, say, the importance of something as simple as speaking and language itself, just in the organization of bands and tribes, or then later in the organization of empires, the impact of writing, or the impact of the printing press on the spread of literacy, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and so on – all of this stuff you guys have heard before are these broad-scale changes and the importance of media.

And the reason why media is important here is because media shapes what can be said, how it can be said, who can say it, who can receive those messages, ultimately shaping how all of that knowledge that is created through those communications is stored and accessed, who can access it, and goes even further than that and can even shape how people experience the world, as you guys would know better than anybody. So I’m really interested in how these media shape culture over time.

And just to get us started, I’m actually gonna take us into my fieldwork, which is actually in New Guinea. I’m gonna show you basically an unmediated world that went through some pretty dramatic changes because of a new media form. So we’re gonna fly into the center of this island here, take you on a little virtual fieldwork experience.

You fly into this village. You walk for a couple days, and you end up in villages like this. And this is where I spent a lot of my time as a graduate student studying. And you’ll notice, as you walk around, there’s no money. Everybody grows their own foods. It’s all self-subsistence. Here, you can see they’re growing taro, sweet potato, bananas, and so on. They raise pigs. This is like a big feast.

They’re also very opportunistic, so after a big rain, it’ll wash down the spider webs from the trees, and they can harvest the spiders and the eggs and so on. They’re also – sometimes they’ll capture a snake, and snakes are a great deal. They’re usually a two-for-one deal because snakes, right after they eat, they get really tired and they sit around digesting. You get the snake; you also cut open the snake, and you get what’s inside the snake.

So the reason why I show you this and I start off with this is because that snake was found about 100 feet from where I was staying, which is this house here, when I first arrived. That’s just in the first week that I was there. These are actually my legs up here. This is my sleeping bag.

This is about four, four and a half degrees from the Equator, so it’s the tropics; it’s pretty hot. But nonetheless, this sleeping bag was very important to me. I viewed it as, like, my little America. I used to wrap myself up in this sleeping bag to protect myself from the elements when I first arrived. I mean, I’m a small-town kid from Nebraska, so this was a really big shift for me to go out into this world.

And after we ate this snake, that very same night, I was looking around this hut and I was seeing – there’s holes everywhere. It’s not exactly an airtight hut. And I’m thinking, “Gosh, a snake like that could come in here any time.”

And that very night, I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, but like I said, it’s hot; it’s the tropics. So the sleeping bag comes off of me in the middle of the night. I wake up, and the sleeping bag’s off of me, and I feel this thing across my chest. It’s like this big around, just like right there. And I managed to grab it with my left hand, and I throw it down, but as I throw it, I roll with it, so somehow I’m wrapped up in this thing. So I try to free my right arm so I can pin it down with two arms, but I can’t move my right arm. And this is about the time I realize that I’ve actually pinned down my own right arm like this.

[Audience laughter]

And my arm had actually fallen asleep and was across me like this.

[Audience laughter]

And you come into a world like this. You don’t speak the language, and so you’re just sitting there – basically, all I understood from the first two months was, like, people sorta chattering. Every once in a while I’d hear my name. They called me “white man,” so it was like, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, white man.” And then everybody would laugh, and this went along with hand gestures.

[Audience laughter]

Now, this sounds really funny, but it was actually very devastating to me. It was very hard, and I had to basically start over. It’s like – and this is what anthropologists do. We basically go into these foreign worlds, and then we have to basically be born again. We have to relearn everything. And as I was trying to relearn everything and create a new identity for this world, I started to recognize that creating an identity here is much different than it is creating an identity in the U.S., where I grew up.

And so I started studying the affects of media on shaping identity and shaping human relations and so on. And no sooner had I started studying this than a new media form came into this world, and I spent eight years studying that, and that new media form was writing.

So writing came in in the form of census books first, and it was a pretty dramatic change right from the beginning. These guys are just doing a really simple exercise. They’re trying to take a census list of people’s names. Turns out a lot of people here don’t have names, because in this village you already know everybody that you ever see, so nobody ever needed these abstract third-person names, so they invented ‘em for the census book.

The census had other impacts as well. So villages that once looked like this, which were sort of organized based on relationships to one another, were oftentimes burned and recreated on sort of a grid-like pattern which could be drawn up on paper. And they’d actually flatten out the sides of mountains and create these new villages that are actually numbered to match the census book. So this is, in a way, almost being rewritten by the book.

Even the disputes had changed. So this is a dispute early on, when I first arrived. And you can see everybody comes out into a clearing. Everybody talks about what’s going on. And when writing came in, that also came in with law books. And now these disputes were moved into the courthouse, where people were held up to the letter of the law, and ultimately, if they’re found guilty, they are given a sentence. And sentence by sentence, this culture was essentially being rewritten.

So the point of this is to say that media are not just tools. The media are not just a means of communication. The media mediate relationships, so when media change, relationships change.

And you guys have heard a lot of this stuff before. Lee Rainie has this great, quick summary of this, of all the effects of new media. Here’s a quick rundown: role of experts is challenged by newly empowered voices; new institutions emerge to deal with changes; struggle to revive social and legal norms; concepts of identity and community multiply and transform; new forms of language arise. We’ve seen all of this in the last couple of decades. But of course, Lee Rainie was actually talking about Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the printing press.

So this stuff has been around for a while. So media change, relationships change. Look at television, and look at how television reshaped the family. And we actually had to reorganize our living rooms, and let’s face it, this isn’t just a living room for a lot of people; this is a dining room. And everything is now shifted to face the television set.

And on these television sets, as Neil Postman pointed out in 1985, the conversations of our culture start to happen on television. And the conversations are controlled by the few and designed for the masses. The conversations are always entertaining. That’s how you keep the masses involved, even the serious ones. So you look at our political debates and how they devolved from very long, reasoned arguments down to 30-second soundbites at best.

The conversations are punctuated by 30-second commercials, and these conversations create our culture, which Neil Postman summarized as one of irrelevance, incoherence, and impotence. And what he meant by “impotence” was he asks you to imagine, say, in 1985 you’re sitting there watching a really important news program. And he asks you this series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East, or the rates of inflation, crime, or unemployment? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, etc.? And he goes on; he says, “I shall take the liberty of answering for you: you plan to do nothing.” And that’s essentially what you could do when you’re sitting there watching television. So he goes on to say, “The public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.”

And so now, this is my job. I face large classrooms like this, and I see this indifference on the first day of class every year, and you can sorta see this disengagement. Now, a lot of people say this is a generational thing, but it’s clearly not. I mean, this is the same group here.

[Audience laughter]

I don’t know if you see the difference, but…

[Audience laughter]

But, you know, these guys are awash in a new media environment. There’s this great quote about this: “In the midst of a fabulous array of historically unprecedented and utterly mind-boggling stimuli, whatever.” This is from Thomas de Zengotita.

And my class was really inspired by this. We started studying the word “whatever,” and we did this little brief history of “whatever.” You can do this by doing a Google search, and you frame it by year, and you can see how the word “whatever” changes over time.

And we found that, prior to the 1960s, there were roughly five to seven definitions of the word “whatever.” And they were pretty tame. They were things like “Whatever, that’s what I meant.” So somebody says something to you – or you say something to somebody; they tell it back to you in basically just some slightly different words, and you say, “Whatever, that’s what I meant.” That’s one of the very common ways to say it.

By the late ’60s, it took on this new sort of cultural heft to it, and you could say “whatever” as a way of saying, like, “I’m not part of the system.” It was like, [Imitates stereotypical hippie voice] “Yeah, whatever, man,” you know, like that –

[Audience laughter]

And that’s what you get in the late ’60s. In fact, in 1973 veterans started receiving a little pamphlet from the State Department explaining what this new word “whatever” meant, so these people who had been off at war could understand what was going on.

By the 1990s, this word “whatever” was still going forward, but there was also this new word that was emerging. It was the indifferent “meh.” And we started looking for the first instances of this. We found one in – here’s a Simpsons episode from 1992.

[Video plays]

Bart Simpson: We’re the MTV generation.

Lisa Simpson: We feel neither highs nor lows.

Homer Simpson: Really? What’s it like?

Lisa Simpson: Eh.

[Video ends]

And you see, it was kinda like a “eh,” right? It wasn’t quite a “meh.” But then on Melrose Place bulletin boards and stuff like that, people started writing “meh,” M-E-H, and The Simpsons picked up on that. And here’s in a later episode.

[Video plays]

Homer Simpson: How would you…like to go…to Blockoland!

Lisa and Bart: Meh.

Homer Simpson: But the TV gave me the impression that –

Bart Simpson: We said “meh.”

Lisa Simpson: M-E-H. Meh.

[Video ends]

[Audience laughter]

All right, so there you go. And of course, okay, so they mentioned the MTV generation. If we were having this conference 15 or 20 years ago and we wanted to talk about today’s youth, we’d have to say this. And I actually found a PowerPoint online that was from this era, and it had this following slide: The MTV generation have short attention spans, materialistic; they’re narcissistic; they’re not easily impressed. And they’re not easily impressed because they’re bombarded with this amazing media, and it’s therefore hard to impress them.

In 1992, the rock anthem of the year was Nirvana, and then you see the word “whatever” there: “I find it hard/It’s hard to find/Oh, well, whatever/Never mind.”

And this is a disempowering environment, so this is part of the issue here. 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 when reality TV started hitting, also in 1992, on MTV, there started to be this new shift, and basically, people were willing to do just about anything to get on TV. We still see it today in shows like Fear Factor and American Idol. But on American Idol, there’s something else going on, and there’s been a lot of people trying to figure out what it is.

But what’s interesting about American Idol is that there’s this other piece happening, and that is that people not only really want to be the next American Idol; there’s also a lot of people who really think they should be. And when you watch them, you’re like, “No, you’re not.”

[Audience laughter]

And so there’s something else going on. So people have attributed this to the self-esteem movement, maybe the sort of self-help generation of parents from the ’70s now raising the children of today. There’s been a lot of talk about why this is, but what we do know is that kids are growing in sorta self-importance – some people call it narcissism. The positive way to look at it is, though, that they’re happier and have more self-esteem. Not necessarily happier; we’ll get back to that, actually.

But there is a new word version of “whatever” that we started to notice in the mid-’90s as well, and this new version looks something like this. It says, like, “Whatever, I’ll do what I want.” It’s the Valley Girl. You guys remember the mid-’90s, when the Valley Girl version of this came out. It’s like, [Imitates Valley Girl voice] “Yeah, whatever.” And it’s got this sort of tinge of like –

[Audience laughter]

There’s a little bit more self-importance there, like “I don’t care what you have to say,” that kinda thing.

Here’s another clip that tries to capture this, from South Park.

[Video plays]

Announcer: And now back to more kids who are out of control, on the Maury Povich show.

Talk show host: Our next mother is Liane Cartman. Her son claims to be the most out-of-control kid in the world and says there’s nothing his stupid mom can do about it. Well, let’s bring him out. Here’s Eric Cartman.

[Booing by talk show audience]

Eric Cartman: Whatever! Whatever! I’ll do what I want!

[Video ends]

[Audience laughter]

All right. So Jean Twenge has actually written about that. She gathered statistics from the 1950s to the present, found all sorts of interesting shifts, and summarizes there in the title Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable Than Ever Before. And the reason why they’re miserable is because they basically have this built-up idea that they’re really important, they’re gonna do great things, like American Idol, and then when they don’t, they’re kinda shocked.

And there’s actually a whole slew of books. You go to the self-help section, you’ll find a slew of books on the quarter-life crisis. And this is the crisis you hit when you’re 25 and you realize you’re not as awesome as you thought you were.

[Audience laughter]

And, you know, we go on watching and loving this stuff.

Now, there’s another way to look at this, of course. This is a key moment developmentally in people’s lives, when they are searching for identity and recognition in a culture in which identity and recognition are not givens. And this is kind of an interesting thing about today’s society is that identity and recognition are not given; you have to find them and you have to earn them and you have to create them.

And so that’s what’s going on in these situations, and at that critical moment, they’re bombarded with new media, and this makes it especially challenging, as seen in this Dove commercial. Here’s a young woman being shaped by the onslaught of media. Some of you may have seen this commercial before.

[Video plays]

Female Voice: You’ll look younger, smaller, lighter, fuller, tighter, thinner, softer.

[Video ends]

This is pretty powerful stuff, and I think it again exemplifies this core idea that I’m trying to get across. From Marshall McLuhan here: “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

So now the question is, what happens in this new media environment? Is there something here that we can create a better world with? Are we stuck with the same old story? What happens now?

So the first thing to note, though, is that as new media came about – basically this new media environment was quite possible ten years before it actually arrived. And Marshall McLuhan notes here, “We look at the present through a rearview mirror; we march backwards into the future.”

So you look at, like, what happened when we sort of launched ourselves into this digital environment. We immediately started grasping at old models for ways to organize this new media environment. So here you see, looking in the rearview mirror, we started organizing our desktops with folders and documents and so on. All of these are metaphors, really. As you guys know, you can organize digital information in all kinds of interesting ways. The early days of the Web were all about Web pages – again, borrowing a metaphor.

Then we moved on in our metaphors. We moved past text, and if you guys remember, like, the DHTML age, the late – sorta ’97, ’98. And you could get all sorts of interesting little scripts to make your Web site really dance. And you can see here one line: “With the advent of DHTML, Web pages are one step closer to its cousin TV in terms of special effects.” And this really bothered Tim Berners-Lee, who was the father of the Web. This is a quote from ’97. He says, “It’s not supposed to be a glorified television channel.” So we’re really stuck in this rearview mirror model of what’s going on. We’re trying to make this new media form an old media form, essentially.

And one of the problems with that, of course, was just the complexity of the code that was emerging. And one of the problems with that was that form and content were suddenly becoming inseparable. This was before the standardization that led to CSS and so on. And so, few users have had the skills to upload content during this time.

And so I made a video about this change. This is the Web 2.0 video that Peter mentioned earlier. You can see here, it’s just like this really quick history of text and how it changed as we went digital. So here’s text on paper, and then you see all this erased, and then we’ll look at what text looks like digitally. And I’m just gonna speed this up, ’cause this is kind of a – I mean, it’s kind of a geeky video, you know? You can geek out on it, if you want, later.

[Audience laughter]

But it’s basically about the shift from HTML to XML and the possibilities that that opened up, the separation of form and content and the possibilities that opened up. So it’s about wikis, blogs, tagging, all those types of things. And ultimately, it’s suggesting here that the Web is not about linking information; it’s about linking people, people sharing, trading, collaborating, and so on. And that means we’re gonna have to rethink a number of things. So the video ends with the suggestion that the changes we’re seeing right now are much bigger than just in media, ’cause these are actually mediating our relationships.

So the real story of this video, though, and the way to really capture how this new media environment is different and what we can do within this new media environment is to look at how this video was made. The video was actually made in the basement of this little house in Kansas. It was made in collaboration with a guy in the Ivory Coast who I’d never met before, ’cause he had released his music with a Creative Commons license, which allowed us to basically collaborate across time and space.

I launched it on a Wednesday, and by Friday it had 253 views. This screenshot exists because I was really, really excited about this. As an anthropologist, if more than 200 people read your work, this is a really big deal.

[Audience laughter]

So I took the screenshot, and I sent it to my department head, and she was so excited too. I mean, it was a big day at Kansas State.

[Audience laughter]

So here you can see it went up to, like, over 1,000 views the next day. It’s part of this big, massive user-generated content. And what I wanna present to you is the idea here, though, that it’s not just about user-generated content; that it’s actually – this new media environment brings us together to create an entirely alternative media environment, which you’ll see here.

So what happened is it goes up to over 1,000 the next day, and as I’m hitting refresh – I’m getting quite obsessed with it, right? Hitting refresh, refresh, refresh. And it’s, like, doubling every time I refresh it. Some – okay, what’s going on here?

And I ended up finding it over at Digg, and you guys know how Digg works. You submit a site; you Digg. It basically can get dugg right up to the front page. So now thousands of people are seeing it through a system which you might call user-generated filtering. It comes right to the top. Other people are bookmarking it on Delicious, essentially organizing the Web, so here’s user-generated organization. And then as people are organizing it, as people are filtering it, it’s becoming part of RSS feeds and being sorta shipped out all over the Web to the people who might be interested in seeing it. And this you might call user-generated distribution.

And so here you have this big alternative to the old media environment, and people even contribute accidentally. So even as people are blogging about it, Google and Technorati and places like that are counting the number of links that are being made to the video, and creating these top-20 lists and so on.

And so here you can see, by Sunday morning, somebody e-mailed me and said, “Hey, did you see you’re in the top five videos?” And this is just counting the number of new links to the videos. And I was super-excited now, and so my wife and I were both now in that basement in Kansas, and we’re just hitting refresh, refresh, refresh.

[Audience laughter]

And it’s Super Bowl Sunday, so we’re thinking, “Okay, we have to get to No. 1 before the Super Bowl, ’cause once the Super Bowl hits, all of the viral videos from the Super Bowl commercials are gonna hit and wash out the top 20.” So we just keep hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, and fortunately, at 12:08 p.m. –

[Audience laughter]

– got to No. 1. So I took the screenshot and sent it off to my department head, with some note about tenure. No. [Laughter]

[Audience laughter]

But it was interesting. So here we are, worried about the Super Bowl. Well, those Super Bowl commercials that are about to hit the Web are – they cost a million dollars to produce that 30-second commercial.

So Doritos had this great idea. They thought, “Okay, in this user-generated environment, we’ll just have our users create – our customers create the video for us.” And you can see here, they actually had an editor select the top five before people could vote on ‘em. And the reason they did that is because there’s been other movements like this, like – I don’t know if you ever saw the Chevy one. They allowed you to make your own commercial about the Tahoe, and you could, like, put it together however you wanted, choose the soundtrack, and then write whatever you want on top of it. And some of the submissions were not quite what they wanted.

[Video plays, with music]

[Audience laughter]

[Video ends]

So trying to avoid this, Doritos just had the top five, and you could vote on the top five. And then this is the video – that’s just a screenshot from the one that won. And they asked these two guys – I think they were 21 years old, roughly 21. They asked them, “How much did that cost you to make?” And they said, “It’s $12.79.” That was the cost of, like, three bags of Doritos they had to break during the filming. And it did quite well. It was the fourth-rated commercial, based on USA Today’s Ad Meter; sort of in psychological effectiveness, it ranked fourth, so it did really well. But it cost $2.6 million just to get it on the air. And if you’re doing the math, that’s a total of roughly two point six – [Laughter]

[Audience laughter]

And they asked the ad executives, “Why would you do this? Why would you pay this kinda money to get 30 seconds of people’s attention?” And they said, “Well, it’s about water-cooler talk. Monday morning, we want everybody talking about our product.” And these days it’s all about blogs and so on. We want people all over the Web talking about our work. Now, it turns out the No. 1 video on the Web the next day was actually zero dollars, and I know that ’cause that was my video. It was still No. 1.

So that’s how a video, through this new media environment, made in a basement in Kansas can actually get out to millions of people. And that’s why I think we need to rethink copyright, rethink authorship.

But it goes beyond that, because this is about how we connect as a society, and that’s why we’re also seeing all sorts of other shifts. Rethinking commerce – it goes far beyond eBay. These days it’s not just about selling your stuff online; you can swap your stuff. You know, just one for one, you can swap it on Swap.com. You can rent your stuff out. You can even rent your house. You can rent your car. And you can even loan money to people. And so basically, we’re seeing the long, slow death of the middleman in basically every domain, and it’s even hitting banks.

So we can also rethink governance, and I’m not just talking about, like, politics, like YouTube politics, that kinda thing. I mean the actual process of governance. If we were to recreate government today, not based in paper but based in digital forms, we might do something really different. The New York Law School was actually experimenting with some of this stuff at the Do Tank, where they imagined different forms of, like, wiki-like government.

And so there’s a lot of possibilities here. And so the “why this matters” piece is pretty simple. This is not controlled by the few. It’s not one-way. It’s created by, for, and around networks, not masses. It can transform individual pursuits into collective action. But I wanna talk about, just for the next 10 or 15 minutes, why this might deeply matter. And this is where it gets, I think, especially interesting is how this might actually shape ourselves in some really profound way.

So here’s a few sort of principles I’m gonna build on. One is, we know ourselves through our relationships with others. Secondly, new media create new waves of relating to others, and therefore, new media will create new ways of knowing ourselves. That’s the main point I’m going to try to get across. And we’re gonna explore this through the idea that we might actually have to rethink ourselves.

So what we did – I just grabbed some of my students. This is in a small class. I also grabbed students in a big class. And we just scour the Web for all kinds of insights, and we especially were interested in studying YouTube. So we just kinda dive right into YouTube, and I’ll give you a quick little overview of what we found there.

This is your quick little view of what’s on YouTube. We’ve been studying YouTube now for over three years, almost since the beginning. So we have all these statistics about what’s on YouTube. Here’s a quick overview of some of the things you’ll see there. First off, these are the most commonly uploaded videos. They’re just family videos.

[Various video remixes of the "Charlie Bit My Finger" video are played]

[Audience laughter]

Now, some of these remixes get actually really sophisticated because video editing is like drag-and-drop editing now, so here’s the “Charlie Bit My Finger” hip-hop version.

[Musical remix of "Charlie Bit My Finger" video is played]

Here’s what we got interested in while we were studying this, is that we found that over 20,000 videos every day are addressed to the YouTube community. And people talk about YouTube as a community.

[Brief clips of various YouTube videos are played]

So this is what we wanted to explore. And now just to provide a little context here, if we’re talking about community online, we might wanna look at community and what’s happened offline.

We’re basically in a six-decade-long decline in community in the U.S. It’s been documented by Robert Putnam in books like Bowling Alone. He basically suggests that we used to bowl in leagues; now we bowl alone. And we’re doing everything, more and more, alone these days. He talks about how there’s this shift from the corner grocery store to these big supermarkets; from small village life and downtowns to suburbia.

And we end up in these suburbs where we’re only connected by televisions, and then, of course, we get bigger and bigger suburbs, bigger and bigger stores, and more and more television. And so we just keep on going and going, until we end up in this situation, where there’s almost this cultural inversion going on where we express – quite radically so, we express this individualism in our society.

And yet we value community. So even as we express more and more individualism, there’s this other side of us that sort of longs for community. We express independence but value relationships. We express commercialization and we find ourselves valuing authenticity. And I think the only way to understand the emergence of any community online is to put it within these boundaries, to understand where American values are today and what’s going on in those domains.

So Robert Putnam goes on to point out that – he says, “My hunch is that meeting in an electronic form is not the equivalent of meeting in a bowling alley.” And so we decided to explore exactly – not just – it’s not enough to say YouTube is a community. It’s more like, what kinda community is it? What’s going on in that environment?

So we just got involved. Here’s an early video.

[Video plays]

Female Voice: – camera, and had a mirror around here to show you guys, but – oh, here it is. This is what I’m talking to. Not you. This. Well, you, but this. I’m talking to you, but for the time being, I don’t know who you are.

[Video ends]

So if you think about this, I mean, this is what mediates the YouTube community. This is how you connect to the YouTube community. And it’s kind of a different situation than normal life. In normal life, in face-to-face conversations, you present yourself knowing what the context is in which you’re presenting yourself. When you face a webcam, you don’t know what context you’re entering into. You don’t know who’s gonna watch you, when, and where, and so on.

And so there’s this plethora of possible contexts that come into play. And this actually leads to an almost accidental self-analysis among people when we did interviews with them. We found that they were forced to be very reflective about who they are and how they wanted to present themselves, just trying to figure out – because they didn’t know who was gonna be on the other end.

And Marshall McLuhan actually started writing about this a long time ago, talking about re-cognition, like recognition of the self. And this is what he had to say about it.

[Video plays]

Marshall McLuhan: We live in the world of the instant replay. Around the planet, all the events are not only being recorded, but replayed. And the amazing thing about the replay is that it offers the means of re-cog, recognition. The first time it’s cognition; the second time is recognition. And the recognition is even deeper, so replay offers a deeper level of awareness than the first play. But we had been getting into some very large matters about the effects of this new environment, this new electric environment, on man and his awareness of himself.

Female Voice: I guess that’s what makes me so uncomfortable about talking on camera. It’s just like, I’m looking at my face. I’m like, “Good god.” ‘Cause when I think of myself, I guess I don’t really think of myself the way I appear to other people. I’m just – yeah, young, naïve. “Oh, she’s so cute. Cute little girl.” I’m not cute. [Laughter]

[Video ends]

Okay, so these are all students of mine sort of experimenting with this form.

So then there’s this other side. We’re looking into the camera to present ourselves, but then we also consume other people’s messages through a screen. And there’s a certain anonymity in that. There’s this anonymity of watching. And Lev Grossman has written about this. He says, “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 mean, this is part of the anonymity here. If you look at some of the comments – this is from one of the “Charlie Bit My Finger” remixes, and you can see the type of conversation that’s happening here. And this is very common on YouTube. This is one of my favorite ones. qwertyu121: “What the fuck are you talking about?” Franklingirl14: “YouTube comments make me angry, grr.” “Then don’t comment on YouTube, you shit-stain.”

[Audience laughter]

I mean, this is pretty common stuff. And the basic model here is anonymity, plus physical distance, plus you have this rare and ephemeral dialogue. Creates this space for hatred as public performance. And you guys have probably tried to avoid, you know, creating user experiences like this.

But there’s also this other aspect of this, that the same three characteristics can also lead to this freedom to experience humanity without fear or anxiety, to be able to sit there and just watch people through the screen.

[Video plays]

Female Voice: It’s slightly voyeuristic, you know? And it allows you to watch other people without staring at them or making them uncomfortable, because they don’t see you watching them. You can just watch their videos. And it’s really interesting. It’s like this sociological experiment where you can just, like, see their being. You can see their person.

[Video ends]

So we found something really surprising when we looked into this: that this cultural inversion also can be read as a cultural tension. And the way to see it as a cultural tension is to recognize that, while we all crave connection on the one hand, as individuals and who very much value independence, we see any connection as a constraint. And what we’re really looking for then, or what we might seek, is a connection without constraint. And YouTube and mediated environments actually provide a possibility for this, for better or for worse, because there’s actually some negative sides to this. But you’ll see some positive sides to this as well.

One of the things you see on YouTube is people confessing things and sharing things that they don’t even share with their families. And here’s some examples.

[Video plays]

Male Voice: It’s just amazing to me how powerful this medium is. I mean, I’m just sitting in my living room, and I’m talking to a camera. My god, the interaction, it’s unbelievable.

Male Voice: __________ we were like, “Oh, this is how it’s been on.” It’s casual. We just talk to the camera.

Male Voice: Just put there, see if that helps. I gotta figure this thing out, eventually. Just came by to say – came by? What do I mean come by? I didn’t come by. I’m sitting right here.

[Video ends]

[Audience laughter]

So here, you’ll see some of these confessions get really powerful.

[Video plays]

Female Voice: January was hard enough for me. Right now, I should be preparing for my, for the birth of my son ________ but I’m not ___________________.

Male Voice: Hi, Mel. I’ve watched your video, and sorry I’m running behind on my schedule here.

Female Voice: I was listening to it, and I felt my tears coming.

Male Voice: It’s a big fucking experiment in putting myself out. We’re all learning from each other and about ourselves. And that’s what I think fuckin’ YouTube should be about.

Female Voice: Thank you, guys.

[Video ends]

So there’s another way to tell this story too, and this is through sort of a hero that emerged on YouTube. If you asked people on YouTube, like the core YouTubers, who are their heroes, they often mention this guy. His name’s Juan Mann. He comes home to Sydney, flies in to Sydney. There’s nobody to hug at the airport, so he goes down – and he’s kinda this quintessential lonely individual of our times – goes down to the mall in Sydney and holds up this “free hugs” sign, and finally somebody takes him up on it and hugs him here.

[Video plays, with music]

And then it starts to spread. You’ll see other people start taking up the sign.

[Video continues to play]

[Audience laughter]

And here you see, it goes on YouTube, gets over 45 million views, and then this goes global. And thousands of these events start happening all over the world. This has been going on now for almost four years, these events all over the world. They’re still going on. And I think this demonstrates a number of things I talked about earlier. One, that this is like now a global conversation, that it shows how people can organize around the world as well through these new media. But you also have to recognize there’s always gonna be the spoofster.

[Video continues playing, ends]

[Audience laughter]

And this is actually a really important part of the new media environment, right, is this commentary, this constant sort of joking back and so on. But sometimes this gets really serious, and I’ll show you a really serious one here. You remember that Dove commercial I showed earlier, which is very powerful, very interesting, right? Well, here’s a remix of that.

[Video remix plays, with music]

So about two weeks and about a million views later, the Greenpeace activists who made this video were at the table with Unilever, and Unilever signed a moratorium to end the deforestation that was used for the palm oil. So that was quite a powerful thing. They actually went on to say that was the most powerful thing they’d ever done as an organization.

So this is obviously – this world is actually – this media environment is enabling new voices. It’s no longer a one-way conversation. But all of that requires – I mean, all of that is basically built on design and built on a lot of the things that you guys do. And so I wanna encourage you guys to start thinking beyond user experience design and start instead thinking about designing the possibilities for human connection. And when you start thinking about that, start recognizing that this world we’re creating, it’s like we each add our own little piece, but then other people add their pieces on top of that, and it just builds on itself and builds on itself and so on.

And the best way I know how to present this is through the metaphor of music, ’cause music allows you to imagine these different layers sort of appearing on top of one another. So here’s one final video to show you guys.

This is Eric Whitacre. He’s a composer, and a while ago he saw on YouTube this young woman singing one of his songs back to him, and he was inspired by this, and he thought, “Well, maybe I could just have people all over YouTube try out for my choir, and we can do this virtual choir around the world.” So he ended up getting 185 people all over the world, from 12 different countries, and here they are singing one of his songs, which he has conducted virtually through this film here.

[Video begins playing, with music]

And it shows, like, how this collaboration, the collaboration of layers upon layers that we see throughout the Web – on Wikipedia, everywhere – can be so powerful and amazing.

But this gets really serious as well. Think about 2007, the aftermath of the Kenyan elections, and there’s a lot of violence going on. Four Kenyans get together, and they release a new platform called Ushahidi, which means “witness” in Swahili. It allowed people to take their cell phones and send reports out about what was happening on the ground. People could get reports based on where they were from these other reports going on. That platform basically created an army of 45,000 citizen journalists who were able to document what was happening at these critical moments.

That same platform then was used three years later in Haiti, so here you have this devastation. A group of college students at Tufts University implement the same platform because the Kenyans had given it away. And here you can see they answer over 170,000 tweets. The tweets are things like this: “We are looking for Geby Joseph, who got buried under Royal University.”

And people on the ground are getting the updates based on where they’re at. They’re not using Google Maps; they’re using OpenStreetMaps, which is based – created by volunteers all over the world. Those are the maps that are actually on the ground, ’cause those were the best maps available.

So Clark Craig of the U.S. Marine Corps had this to say about it. He says, “It is saving lives every day. I wish I had time to document every example, but there are too many. I say with confidence that there are hundreds of these kinds of success stories. The Marine Corps is using a project every second of the day to get aid and assistance to the people that need it most.”

[Video ends]

So in many ways – I mean, I had talked to Peter about this when he invited me to come – I’ve always viewed people like you as very important people, ’cause you create the media through which we connect, and hopefully create ways that we can connect in ever better ways.

And I hope that you’ll consider designing for a new future of “whatever.” I talked earlier about how, in the ’60s, it was “I don’t care, whatever,” like sort of “Whatever you think.” In the ’90s, it became “Whatever, I don’t care what you think.” And hopefully we can build a future which is “I care; let’s do whatever it takes, by whatever means necessary.” Thanks.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

It’s gonna be a little bit of a difficult act to follow with what Chris and Nathan were talking around, and there’s a lot of crossover with what I do. But I’m gonna approach this from a very different angle, as one of the people who actually create this stuff for film and television.

And I’ve gotta admit, this is one of the most feared talks I’ve ever had to do, because generally I’m talking to Photoshop artists or After Effects artists and motion graphics people. And this is the first time I’ve actually had to do it in front of a group of UI/UX professionals, and so it feels like I’m lining up for my execution here, so…

[Audience laughter]

Generally, it’s very hard to describe what I do, and I dread social functions because the first question you always get after somebody – you even introduced your name is – anybody?

Response: What do you do?

What do you do? It’s never what you like or who is your favorite Muppet.

[Audience laughter]

It’s always like, “What do you do?” And I struggle to do this, so even my mother has no idea what I actually do. And I actually worked out a way in the end to try and describe what it is, and it’s essentially – I’ll just say, well, you know, when people are using computers, and they’re tapping away, and there’s like a couple of beeps, and the little mouse clicks, and all of a sudden it just flashes up on screen, and you see this one thing. They say, “Oh, yeah. Somebody does that? Why would they do that?”

But of course, people know the other version of this as well, which is more like, you know…

[Audience laughter]

And they’re two clichés that are used a hell of a lot, but there’s very good reasons for their existence in films. And what I’ll do is I’m gonna explore some of the work that I’ve done here and then actually set it in the context that you’ll recognize based on you doing proper UX work, as far as you have requirements, stakeholders, and design process, and delivery; you actually have to deliver a job.

But to kind of play into this and show you some of my background, what I’ll do is I’ll play my last serial I created that has a collage of some of the work that I’ve done over the years.

[Video plays, with music]

Could we cut the lights down a little or…?

[Video continues playing]

[Video ends]

Now, that’s kind of a little collection of some of the film I’ve done over a period of about 12 years. And it is – one frame is described as “beautiful junk.”

[Audience laughter]

And it’s always something –

[Audience applause]

We’ve always really struggled to define what you actually call this stuff, and it’s like, is it screen graphics, or is it screen interfaces, or – there’s no real good term for it. A couple of years ago, I started using one particular term, and it seems to have kinda stuck. And of course, you’re probably familiar with the idea of GUIs. So what we actually create are FUIs.

[Audience laughter]

And they can be generally referred to as fantasy user interfaces, and it’s kinda started to stick now. When you mention the word “FUI,” people actually think you’re not actually insulting them or something.

But the one thing that – and the great criticisms that keep coming up about a lot of this stuff and how we actually do it is, is it really just about looks? And there is probably no group such as yourselves, other than maybe Slashdot forum members, who watch this stuff with such a critical eye.

But without context to something and understanding some decisions that are made around something, that eye can be really easily deceived, ’cause despite the kinda gaudiness and general unreality of a lot of the FUIs that get created for movies and TV, there’s really good reasons for why they look the way they do. And despite some of the similarity of purpose, visually, FUI has to GUI work and interface design work, there are actually massively different requirements, and it’s the requirements that define how this stuff looks and works. And irrespective of how insane it can sometimes look compared to the real world, certainly once you know those things, you can start to get a grip on them.

So what are those things? So there is essentially three major requirements for anything, so one of them is style. So why – it has to look a certain way, for a certain reason. The next one is action. It’s gotta do something, and it’s gotta specifically apply in some way within the context of the film. And then, unfortunately, the third requirement is what I call X factor. So these are the kind of hard-to-define factors that you get into anything. So I’m gonna look at each one of these things and go through some of the ways I’ve applied it within my work, and also a couple of small examples from other people’s as well.

So when it comes to style requirements, so why do they look the way they do? And it all depends. This requirement comes from the nature of the film. So is it realistic? Is it a sci-fi film? Is it realistic but kind of a little bit quirky, like, say, Mission Impossible, where the actual base part of it is very non-real. Mission Impossible doesn’t exist, so you can kind of push these things a little bit.

So first is just realistic, and most of the time you don’t even see these interfaces in films. They actually melt away. You’re so used to seeing this day in, day out, that you just don’t spot them at all.

And then a couple of examples of this. As soon as I show them, though, you’re gonna be going, “Well, that’s not very realistic.” So even when you do realistic, there’s a couple of things that you have to alter and change. So I generally don’t use anything that looks like OS X or Windows. And there’s very good logistical and technical reasons for doing that; there’s also diplomatic reasons. So they would love their stuff to be in films, unless it’s the baddie. And if the baddie’s got it, they don’t want it. They don’t want their product represented like that. And plus, they wanna approve all the changes and everything else, so it’s very hard to use realistic.

So what I tend to do with a lot of this design is actually almost look towards more things like GNOME and open-source systems like Linux, and skin these systems, so they have the cues. All the design cues are there. All the buttons look like they work. All the iconography looks similar. And some of this stuff is actually sourced from open-source libraries that get used in real software. So it looks familiar. There’s nothing about that that could look kinda funky.

The thing that is unrealistic about realistic screens, I say, is that we tend to speed it up. We make it look like it’s doing something, make it look like it’s doing something really, really fast, because unfortunately, if you have a database in your system and you type a search term in, nothing happens. It waits. It’s searching. But in a film, you’re having to tell “this is what they’re doing,” so you have to cull it out somehow. You have to, like, put a progress bar that zips along multiple times or whatever. So you just have to make it look like there’s a lot more going on than there really is.

But a lot of times you just don’t see it. But I’ve even tried the realistic to actually – we once had to do a set of 150 computers for an office scene, and we just tried to put this up on every single screen.

[Audience laughter]

And in the end, we got away with half of them.

So the next type is what I also call realistic, but this is where you can push it a little bit. It’s still set in real recognizable worlds. It’s in our time period. It’s normal people doing normal things, but their machines might be more sophisticated. So an example of this, like from Déjà Vu, it is a current-day plot – it’s a current-day circumstance, I say. But the plot involves time travel. It involves looking through time. So the technology they have has to look different. It’s gotta feel like there’s something special and different about it.

Now, the previous screen I showed you was also from Déjà Vu, but it was from a very different scene and a very different area in that movie, which was actually part of a forensics lab, which was just part of the regular FBI – or ATF, sorry, was in the movie. But that has to look genuine and real, but in this section of the film, you have to convey that, actually, these guys have got something better. This is way more sophisticated.

So you use essentially a lot of similar visual cues, with buttons and things like that. But it looks more polished in some ways. Design-wise, it looks like it’s been thought about and laid out a little bit more. And it’s the same across the whole system. We actually create an OS for this kinda thing. So even for full-screen work, all these elements are actually reused and retasked across a whole set of areas. So this was actually in the original reel, right at the beginning of the big wall screen. This was across that entire thing.

But there’s also areas in – they’re the sorts of realistic stuff which at first glance you think, “Well, this is completely unreal.” So screens done for Children of Men. Now, this is areas where you start to get into futurism. And I love doing futurism, but there’s gonna be a whole lot of people who will throw shoes at me or something when I say it, but it’s generally not that difficult a job, because most stuff evolves. It doesn’t change radically. Things change very slowly over time.

I mean, OS X looks wonderful now. It’s still a window, and there’s a mouse, and there’s buttons that close that window, and there’s icons in there, and there’s folders. And 30 years on, it’s exactly the same. It just looks better in some ways. And there’s a whole many more refinements to it now, simplifying it.

But things evolve. They become slicker. Even though for this particular film it was set in 2027, technology froze in 2010. So the idea was to use almost like a Windows 7-type look and feel to stuff, and even the spreadsheet is based on Excel, which was a prototype. I think they beat it at the time. This was two years before it came out. But you use those kinda cues from that kinda thing to make it look like it’s set in a realistic period of time.

But oddly enough, in realistic stuff, it can go horribly wrong as well. So this particular screen was done for Mission Impossible. In fact, the entire Mission Impossible complex all has this interface on it. And did some really nice sophisticated design work for it and actually based it all off, like, military devices. So military devices tend to be one task. They’re set up to do one thing. Low color; very, very basic.

And it just didn’t quite fit in to the sort of look and feel that the director was wanting for this film. And he had these reference photos and said, “This is what we want it to look like.” And they were actually from the CIA, and there were some CIA systems, and it was IRIX from about ’94 – ’93, yeah. So I thought, “Yeah, that’s what you want. That’s what you get.” And it is kind of altered a little bit to just keep it something – a bit more punch in there.

But then talking later with the military advisor, which seems to be complementary with every single film they do these days, he looked at the photos and laughed. I said, “Yeah, they’re 15 years old.” So that’s the clearance time on a lot of this stuff. So instead of having the current-day system, which is generally – looks pretty much the same as what we use, it’s actually a lot older.

But also in realistic as well, of course, we’re now used to having devices that operate as applications, so even an interface for something like The Island, which was like a communication device which is displayed on a piece of glass, and even though it’s sci-fi, we can actually still use some of the same cues, so I’d actually class this as a realistic type of thing.

The third area of style is what we affectionately call “fluff.”

[Audience laughter]

And you have a free range to do this kinda work. But the real irony here is, this is the hardest stuff to do. You still have to use a lot of design cues from the real world and yet create something radical and different. And that can be really, really hard to do because, generally, anybody who works in design knows that the tighter the limitations on what you can do really kind of pushes you to do something really good. But with this kind of area, you can do almost anything you want.

So for this kinda thing, for Mr. and Mrs. Smith, it was taking, like I said, the military devices, and these were some of the design cues I used for the Mission Impossible originally. But everything can get used again somewhere.

[Video clip plays from Mr. and Mrs. Smith]

The next one is actually the concept for Mission Impossible originally, so this is what it was supposed to look like. So it’s building upon existing devices and the way they look and work, and even keeping cues like using old LED fonts. And one of the tasks you actually have to do is recreate a lot of this stuff and actually make your own fonts.

But to keep the little design cues like that, to give the impression of “this is a device that does one thing, and one thing only,” and then populate the set for that kinda thing. But sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but everything gets reused. So this formed the cornerstone of a lot of concept work I did for Call of Duty, one of the games, so all the cut screens that were done in that are based on the same sort of thing. So it’s good to recycle.

And then another example, even though it’s fantastical – it was actually a medical device used in The Island. But this was actually taking cues from things like audio instrumentation, so a lot of audio software has this thing about reproducing the physical device to be used. So we took it – in a medical context, people have medical devices they use. Why not do a similar thing? ‘Cause they’re using it on a screen rather than having some abstract kind of device. They can just use the almost identical device on a display.

And even though this is still fluff, I mean, it’s like it tells a little bit of the story there. They’re looking at this guy. The part of the story is they’re gonna remove his liver. You see this up on screen, and it focuses that target on there.

And this actually shows another little point here with the next screen, ’cause this other one is also from The Island, and each screen is specifically tailored for its environment. So the screens themselves and the FUIs actually are tailored to particular sets, and they can actually be used almost as characters. These are defining looks to different things.

So from the very same film, even though this is the medical area, there’s a group of mercenaries, and their whole interface is radically different. But you’ll use that consistent sort of look and feel for everything that they have. So it also allows people to visually separate, so if you use the same system on everything, it all kind of blurs together. So it allows us to actually make things stand apart.

So the second big area of requirements is actually what we call the action requirements. And what does this stuff actually have to do? So the first part of this is the most basic, and it’s just set dressing. Everything that’s gotta populate a set, everything that is on a set, there’s a decision about why that stuff is there, how it looks, and how it’s gonna work.

And an example from the previous film we talked about, The Island, is just – this was shot just when the set was empty; everyone was at lunch. But it’s just to make this thing look like a control room, so the vast majority of this stuff you never really see up close. And it really just makes this place and gives it a certain sort of look and feel.

The second requirement within actions is what we call location linking, and this is where you start to really use screens to some good effect in movies. So you have something going on in one place; you have something going on in another place. And to just imply that from an edit in the movie can be very, very difficult.

So you’ll always notice that they’re either on a phone or they’re talking to something, and the two people are always doing the similar things. But even if they’re cutting back and forth, you can see these two are doing something with each other. And that’s the – a lot of the times, this actually gets used as well in films, so people will be at a terminal. They’ll be looking into another place. This particular example was from Mission Impossible III. It’s got that lovely interface again.

And another example from xXx 2 I think it was, yeah. So some people are somewhere in a control room. They’re talking to the guy who’s on a train, and it’s continually cutting between these two things. And I think in the end cut, this actually was cut completely. It’s not even in the final cut. And so they’re giving instructions back and forth, but you get big red letters. That’s what we need.

[Audience laughter]

But it tells you what is going on, so just using pure film and pure visual effects doesn’t always do it. Sometimes they wanna cull this out and smack you around the head with it to actually tell you what’s happening.

And one of my favorite examples of this is what I thought – I used to think, until about half an hour ago – was one of the earliest examples of screen graphics in films, and that was from Dr. Strangelove. And this is one of the best examples I’ve ever seen of location linking between two places, and there’s only two real big scenes in this. There’s the war room and there’s the bomber. There’s the base thing as well, but most of the action happens between these two places. And yet all the time you are linked to them. You see those – that bomber is always on that screen, and it’s always there. So you’re connecting different things back together, and it’s being used as a really powerful editorial device.

So the third part of this is what we call story insights. Now, people do stuff in films; there’s a story to tell. And sometimes it’s kinda tricky to get across what is actually going on. So the people who now use visual effects, they’ll try and do narrative, but it tends to get a little bit boring. It’s like reading the Dan Brown book. It’s like –

[Audience laughter]

– you have 15 pages about the history of this envelope that they found. And it just doesn’t work; it will kill any film that you watch.

So sometimes they will do this talk, but while they’re doing it, they’ll cull out a specific piece of action and they might even have a simulation on screen. So this is from Tomb Raider originally, and a lot of the action’s gonna happen because of all the planets aligning at certain parts, and they align in three different stages. So this was kinda done just as an illustration, so as they’re talking to each other about what’s happening, you get this idea that everything is lining up. As a visual device, it immediately just tells people very quickly, “Oh, this is happening,” and gets the piece of wood and hits them over the head.

[Audience laughter]

But they get it. There’s no abstraction there or anything, so it becomes a lot easier.

Another area for this is for straight action. Something is going on. So this is where you specifically pull out and talk about a key part of the story, and the screens are used to illustrate that. And what I’ll do here is I’ll play the sequence, and what you’re gonna hear is the audio cut from the scene, which I take that audio cut and then I animate and create the sequence based on what is going on in that background, using various sources of video and edits. So you can see and hear this.

[Video begins playing]

So of course, you’re gonna get cuts back and forth ’cause the live action here just goes on.

[Video continues playing]

Oh, by the way, those little sound effects that you hear, it turns out every editor has a CD that’s been passed around with each other that has all these sound effects on them, and they’ve been doing it for almost 20 years. That’s why every single film has the same sounds, so we can do this.

[Video continues playing]

So we’ll use this to specifically cull out actions and synchronize it with a cut that’s going on. So he’s obviously not too happy about that.

[Video ends]

So the next area, the last area of this is kinda what we – doesn’t kinda fit into any particular slot, and it’s a very different application for it. And this is where you actually create either the way something – how something is looking at something or heads-up displays, so it’s the ways of looking into the film. And this is more of a visual effect than an interface, but it implies certain actions going on.

This example here is from Alien vs. Predator, to use a lot of the design cues that were based from the original film, from the set dressing, from the design of the creatures and everything. And this thing slides in and has an analysis thing on it, so it’s doing something; it’s looking at something. And it just keeps those cues in there. And it’s not quite in the same category, but it’s close. Though the irony is, the specification I had for this in the final film, they forgot about the soundtrack down the left side, so it got slipped off completely.

Another example from The Island, which is things like scopes. So this is like the wet dream of a sniper, a scope. And what do you want on there? What can you have on there?

And another short example from The Island, which was just the heads-up displays on the flying bikes, so these are just small things that you create as part of the product that goes into the whole film.

And then, of course, you get into what you might regard as the X factor. So if there’s one particular problem we get designing stuff for film, what do you reckon it is? Anybody? People. People are the hardest part of anything. The stakeholders in a project are generally the most influential part of the project, but they also bring a lot of their own ideas with them as well.

[Audience laughter]

So what you have is all these groups of people on a set that want some input in some way. And they bring a lot of these preconceptions and expectations, and usually always at the last moment. This is the last thing they’re thinking about in the movie or on a TV show. It’s like, “Right, we’re doing this, we’re doing this, we’re doing this. Oh, what’s going on that screen?” Two minutes before shooting usually, yeah.

And they’re not bad at what they do. These are fantastically creative and talented people doing very specific things, and it’s the last thing that they wanna think about. They’re not good at thinking about that. It’s the same as a CEO of any large company: they’re not UX people. They’re not designers. They go at the process in a very different way, but of course, they’re making decisions about what you’re actually doing, which can be a real diplomatic tightrope to walk.

And so it can be a lot easier sometimes for these people to actually use prior art in movies that they’ve already seen, or examples in the real world that they’ve already seen. And this is a real irony about Nathan and Chris’s talk is that it’s probably reversed now. We’re no longer going from sci-fi influencing, in some cases, what is going on in the real world, even though a lot of sci-fi reflected what those expectations and social contexts were. They’ll actually go back to the DVD library and say, “Uh, yeah, we want it like that.” It’s like, “Okay, you do something like –” “No, no, I want that.” So it can be very hard for this stuff to actually now progress and adapt and change.

But of course, they have one priority in all of this, and this really comes up to what defines the overarching requirements of all of this stuff, which is why it looks nothing like the real world and why it doesn’t work anything like the real world. And that requirement is to tell the story. That is all that is there. Doesn’t matter what it looks like, how it works; it’s just gotta tell that story, and that’s all that matters to the people making the movies.

So if it hits those first two points in the major requirements, about style and action and what it’s going to do, that’s it. They don’t care. It’s done what it’s doing. Get it out. When it’s only, unfortunately, people like ourselves who look at this stuff a lot more critically and think, “What the hell is that?” And it can be really easy to be really harsh on the artist who created this stuff. I mean, the CSI effect applies to more than just jury expectations in trials. It can actually apply now to expectations about what computers can do.

But those guys do incredible work. They’re turning out a show every week, and a massive amount of work. And they have one thing: all they’re doing is telling a little piece of the story using a screen. It’s not an interface. It’s not a computer. It’s just a screen showing a piece of video, telling this is what happened. And in that respect, they’ve done their job fantastically.

So I mean, talking about that, what I’ll do is I’ll just play this one sequence from The Island, so it kind of encompasses a lot of those clips and expands on some from the reel. But thinking about how those requirements and contexts work, you can probably watch this in a very different way and actually get something back and see how this kinda works.

[Video begins playing]

They love spinning heads in this film.

[Video continues playing]

A lot of the time, I mean, things that do the head thing, it gets reused a lot because you can also have very limited resources and media to use, so you kinda have to make do.

[Video continues playing]

[Video ends]

So this really kinda ties up a lot of those pieces and how they go together. So you have action; you have things telling the story; you have things linking locations. So it’s a really good example of all the different areas and how they’re applied or get used.

But of course, there’s one thing missing from that yet, and that is deployment. So everybody’s gotta deliver something, whether it’s a piece of software or it’s a site, it’s an application, whatever. But the way this is done might actually surprise you, and we never, ever create an interactive application. It just doesn’t exist. It is impossible to do in the time that we have. You may have two months to create 200 of these things, so you have to knock several of these things out every day. You cannot create interactive applications at that kinda rate.

So what these have actually done – they’re actually old faux animation in them, so they’re all faux interactive. And everything’s actually done in Photoshop and then actually animated in After Effects, but it’s animated in a very, very particular way. So I will actually use my mouse. I don’t have a cursor, and I’ll click here, click there. And I use the thing on screen.

Then also think about the stages of this. It does this, and then it has to hold here and loop for a while, and then it goes into the next stage and then holds for a while. So I can create these cues for it. And all I actually render out is a single animation, and actually using graphics format which I first used about 17 years ago, 16 years ago, called just Graphics 256.

So all of these things you see are all 256-color movies. So when we actually apply this stuff on set and move this stuff around, it’s tiny. It’s like a megabyte, 2 megabytes a movie. And a lot of those that you’ve seen are actually tiny movies. And so using this horrific old – amazing piece of technology, but it’s a usability nightmare, which was DeBabelizer.

[Audience laughter]

And it is the most awful program to use, but extraordinarily powerful, so we use that for converting these movies down.

And it’s also not, as you probably imagine – you see the special shot and the extras on DVDs and movies. There’s all these blue screens everywhere, and people will track these shots in after. It’s very rare that you actually do that, and if you do that, there’s a failure somewhere else, either to deliver the thing for it or it requires footage that’s being shot out of sequence, so what is required on there has not yet been shot.

So generally, all of this stuff actually goes and gets played live on set, so everything looks and feels like it’s actually working. All of these movies are up there, and we will queue them up and we’ll actually have our own separate control room and a special piece of software where we can synchronize these movies and just put key frames on them. It’s like, okay, from zero to 50, loop; from 51 to 100, next in the sequence, then go into the next loop. So it’s just take a single movie, and then you have to queue it on action.

But what you see on set there is just the monitors. All the boxes are empty, because it is a nightmare for the sound guy. So he will beat us with that big long boom of his if we bring a computer anywhere near a set.

So what we actually have is, right underneath this is – here. So these are some friends, and this is our setup, and it’s actually a mirror of the set above us. And we also have feeds from little video cameras we put all over the set. We have feeds from the video assist, and we watch the action. So the actual actor/actress, cues, action, whatever’s going on, we watch that and then we do the interaction. We don’t let them touch anything. Actors have to concentrate on – they’re quite capable, I’m sure.

[Audience laughter]

It’s just they’re concentrating on a performance, not using a computer, and that is gonna take them out of it completely to do that. So we’ll be there as – my buddy Adrian is here – on a key, ready to watch this and then hit that key, next sequence. So it just looks like they did the action themselves. They can hit anything they want, but we make sure it was just that and they didn’t hit the button twice or do something stupid with it. But this is the kinda thing, so we’ll load the movie up, set the range of key frames and put it on some keys and functions.

But quickly, where does these ideas come from? And this is, like, really where it ties back to what Chris and Nathan were talking about. How do you create this stuff?

And generally, it doesn’t exist in a bubble. We don’t just make this stuff up. I look everywhere at the real world for a lot of influence and a lot of ideas and things I can use that inspire me for these things. There’s not irony here. This is the other way around. The surface came out about six months after The Island, and strangely enough, The Island got credited for it, but of course, that’s not true. Surface computing’s been around ten years before that.

And you take a lot of these ideas from labs and universities and companies and garage projects that people are doing every day, but you try to take it and then just make it look like it works. You take all those rough edges off it; you make it look casual, almost, the way they do it, and really just make it sort of everyday.

But I mean, this – there’s a couple of frames of something I lifted from a little short talk I did on copying. And it was the idea of where does your influence come from, why is copying a good thing rather than a bad thing, or how do you copy well. It was actually a talk of the inspiration loop.

So you just do a straight copy of something, you end up exactly where you began, and it’s not generally a good thing. But if you’re inspired by something, you’ll eventually end up with something slightly different; you take that one point and end up somewhere else. But of course, you have, like, multiple sources continuously, so you never do that, and in real life it’s more like that.

So it’s actually good to copy, as far as I’m concerned. It’s actually good to be inspired by real stuff. Somebody else has already made the mistakes. Stand on their shoulders and make it better. Don’t ever be afraid of doing that. But as long as you make it better and don’t just copy it.

But of course, I had to have this one shot I have in here that was exactly the same as the previous one.

[Audience laughter]

But all I really wanted to say is, don’t be too harsh when you see this kind of stuff, because without the context of what the stuff is there for and what it is doing, especially when people go, “That’s the most unrealistic screen anybody’s ever seen in a film,” when it was actually real software. So it was called NView and it ran on IRIX back in ’93, and it was a 3D file browser. But the script editor, that was a whole different thing.

But anyway, thank you. I hope that gave you some insight.

[Audience applause]

Peter Merholz: Thank you. There was actually one question on Twitter that I wanted to ask you, which is if you’re willing to reveal any Easter eggs in your interface designs that we could hunt once we’ve left here.

There are. There are, actually.

[Audience laughter]

There’s lots, but unfortunately, they won’t mean much to anybody who is not somebody I know, because one of the greatest problems you have is populating, is content. So whenever you had that lottery thing in The Island, they’re all people I know.

[Audience laughter]

So all the names and everything –

Peter Merholz: Taken from your address book and tumbled right in there.

Yeah. I get information, and I also – a lot of you have mug shots, like CIA mug shots, whatever; you have to flick through a library. They’re all people I met at conferences and various different places.

[Audience laughter]

Peter Merholz: So maybe you can get ‘em to take a picture of you, and you can be in his next film. Well, thank you very much, Mark.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Everyone should have a little packet of stuff that got handed out. And what I’d like to share today is something that I’ve been kind of exploring and working on for quite a while, but it’s recently kinda come to a new catalyzing point. And I noticed some of my other colleagues in this so-called “rock block” mentioned the thing you need to know about me. And I guess if there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I’m a wonderer. I wonder a lot.

I design. I drive. I do other human, regular things, but I actually do wonder, and I look up at the clouds, and I kind of think about things. I wonder about big things, like where’s technology going, and is that interaction gonna work for the customers that we’re designing it for. And I wonder about little things, like where I put my keys.

But part of it is I wonder about creativity, and I wonder about the activity of having ideas, both as individuals and as part of a community of practice. And in the field that we’re in, that’s increasingly the skill that we need to be able to make sure is we’re always on our game.

And I like to think about ideas, and having ideas is like breathing, right? You start with questions. You breathe the questions in, and then somehow you breathe those ideas out. And it’s kind of an iterative process, and it goes back and forth, and ideas and questions come in all different shapes and sizes.

But it’s that process of breathing and being really good at it that I think is part of an exchange with the world. And working in creative teams, how we can facilitate our own creative exchanges, I think is part of what it means to be in an organization that can learn, that can advance, that can solve hard problems when they come up, and that can constantly be thinking about new ways to approach the problems that – as Cameron said earlier in the talk, the new problems that come up every day.

So I also like to think about ideas a little bit like sex, right? So you wanna have a lot of ‘em, and you want ‘em to be really awesome every time, and you wanna have ‘em with great people.

So with that kind of as our foundation, I thought we could structure the time today a little bit as breathing in and breathing out. So for the first half of the day – or our session together, I’ll be breathing out and telling you some things. And in the second half, you’ll be breathing out, and we’ll be sharing things together, like capturing some of our own knowledge and what we do in our own organizations to foster a creative culture.

So speaking of wondering, this was a catalyzing event. I was about to get on a plane, and I was in the bookstore. And I love Harvard Business Review, and with a title like Harvard Business Review on Breakthrough Thinking, how can you go wrong? So I bought this book, and I was reading it on the plane, and this one article really stood out. This was an article called “How to Kill Creativity.” That’s just a buzzkill right there.

But it was fascinating, and this is written in 1998. The Harvard Business Review imprint is kind of a collection, a curatorial collection of past articles that have been published in the mag. And Dr. Teresa Amabile is a researcher who’s been working on organizational creativity for over 35 years. So she has this ginormous body of really interesting work about organizational and personal creativity.

And as I was reading it, not only is her work very well founded, a lot of anecdotal but also empirical evidence from organizations, but it also had this really beautiful structure to it, and I just couldn’t get it out of my mind. And I had to put it down there because I thought, “You know, if this was in some kind of visual framework kind of form, I wonder if I could use this to be more knowledgeable and thoughtful about the kind of everyday practices we do at Adaptive Path, and get better at them, make sure we don’t lose anything with some of our activities, that we enforce the creative culture, and fill in some of the gaps that I know we have.”

So into this thing. So this thing is an accounting of the article, with some extensions and enhancements based on my experience at Adaptive Path, that kinda tries to structure what’s at play within an environment of creativity, and specifically a creative culture. And the way that it’s framed is in three kinda major ways.

So the idea is that this blueprint can work as kind of a guide for creative culture, ’cause it frames it in three big chunks. One, how do you get it? How do you initially create a creative culture? The second one is, how do you nourish it, foster it? And the third one is, how do you support it? And those sound like they might all be the same thing, but there’s some really different interesting principles at play with those.

So after I made this framework, I went through a bunch of our activities – this is just a little bit of a side project – behaviors and practices, things we do at Adaptive Path, to see why were these things working. I don’t know if you experienced this, but occasionally there’s a behavior or a meeting or an activity you do as a company, and you think, “Oh, that feels like us. It feels right.” And then someone comes in, and they wanna change it, or your organization grows and it’s not working any longer, and you think, “Well, we can’t get rid of that. That’s like our heart and soul.” You can’t really put your finger on why.

And I found that, by using this kind of blueprint as a framework, I could better understand why, and that meant we were okay to mix things up and change things when they needed to be changed. There wasn’t that fear of losing something really important.

So I’m just gonna walk through a little bit of the structure of the blueprint. It’s divided into three different zones. First one’s – they’re all labeled, but they’re very teeny print, as Peter said. So the first zone is what creates a creative culture, what feeds it, and then the last one, what supports it. And then if you do any reading around creative literature or kind of the nature of how ideation and new things happen in organizational structures, you’ll probably recognize things like this.

So there’s the second piece of the structure of these areas, and there’s nine of them. And they have these big, broad words, right? Like “expertise,” “creative thinking skills,” or “motivation.” There’s huge bodies of work just on these topics alone. “Challenge,” “freedom,” “resources,” and they all sound so great, but when you start to actually put your mind around what that means, it gets very – it’s too abstract. You kinda can’t connect to it. I don’t know what freedom looks like at Adaptive Path. I think I have it, but I don’t really know.

Especially in the organizational structure section. So work group features. Well, we all got ‘em, whether or not they’re good, right? But what does that really mean? And a lot of the literature kinda stays at this level, and it gives you great anecdotes and examples. But it doesn’t give you something to play with, some tool or some kinda system, as BJ Fogg might reference.

So the cool part about the article and the extensions to it are, there’s actually these 32 elements that sit underneath those areas that start to give more specificity and life. These are things like passion, which admittedly is still pretty open and broad. But there’s examples. There’s little bits of that that actually help you say, “Oh, I know how I can work on that in the organization,” or “I can see that.” Things like time for exploration.

If I asked you, “Harry, do you have time for exploration in your design creative practice at your work?” – no. He would say no. But he’d have an answer, right? What if I said, “Do you have resources?” Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything. So things like goals that don’t shift, as we all know. Card. Thank you, by the way, for the – and time for exploration. Those are things that research has shown really are important to foster a sense of creative practice, freshness, and enlivening us.

And then onto the organization section, things like mandating information-sharing is one that occurred. And it’s just one example that companies who have essentially forced or mandated information-sharing have started to see really different responses in how their communities of practice start to interrelate and cross-pollinate ideas.

And so using this blueprint, there’s two major ways that I’ve been playing with it, and this all part of a greater experiment to see how far this can go. You can use it as an assessment tool. So you can go through, look at some of the elements that are at play, and say, “How do we do that? Do we do that thing? Do we have time for exploration? Yes, no?” You can use it to kinda figure out a gap analysis for yourself.

Or you can also use it as an ideation tool. What kinds of activities or practices could we do every day that can be simple, cheap, and become part of our everyday, habitualized activity that could reinforce or promote this activity?

And then the kicker is making sure you were working at the right level of scale, right? So activities still is pretty an open term, but things like meetings, resources or rooms, physical space. Conferences like this would be considered an activity, a place where you can go, get outside of your own design challenges and socialize around ideas. Routines, behaviors, policies are also activities. And by putting these two pieces to work, you can actually start to play with and craft your own creative culture.

So I’m gonna walk through just about three different examples, because you know it’s coming, right? I’m gonna ask you to write one of these down from your own culture, so start thinking. And hopefully, if you had a chance to even take a glance at it, you’ll already have a little bit of a preview.

But I wanna walk you through three that are part of the 57 that I’ve collected both from Adaptive Path, interviews with people, as well as just magazines and articles that I’ve been reading.

And the first – so the blueprint of one of these, like, note cards that are capturing this activity is to just write it down in as simple, basic terms as possible. This actually isn’t rocket science. There are things that we forget about because there’s so much part of our daily routine.

So here’s one called Five-Minute Madness. We do this at Adaptive Path. It’s a session of five minutes where you pose a question that you think may or may not be true. And then we do this at our company meetings once a month, and there’s six slots. You sign up. And for five minutes, the group discusses that question. But the kicker is, you have to kinda say something you don’t think is true, or might not be true, or you’re not sure. So it’s automatically kind of an odd thing to be doing. After the group discusses it, five minutes, stop sign goes up, you’re done, but it’s been a little bit of that getting it out there, starting to foster other conversations.

What’s interesting about this is, when you start to take it and deconstruct it and put it against the creative blueprint, some really important fundamental pieces start to emerge, right? So departing from the status quo. You have to say something you think isn’t true, so it’s a place where groupthink can’t be the No. 1 – it can’t be the informing part of the question. You’re forced to get outta your comfort zone.

It encourages diverse perspectives in our work groups, because you’re used to listening to a different perspective and point of view. In fact, you expect it.

It reinforces open communication. It says that our company meetings, this is a place where you can say something, not be sure, but rely on the group social aspect to help you make those ideas better.

For the recipients or the listeners, it helps you meet things with an open mind. So you hear something that – “Holy crap, that’s wrong.” But you’re there, and you’re able to actually balance in practice, not having that gut “no” reaction, that negative bias.

And honestly, without Five-Minute Madness, I don’t think I’d be standing up here doing something, an activity in a venue I’ve never done before, with more people than I’ve ever done it before, because really, Five-Minute Madness is about taking risks. It’s kinda hard to stand up in front of your colleagues and say, “Here’s something I don’t think is true.” It’s even worse to kinda be wrong or think you’re wrong in front of your colleagues. But, you know, if you practice, you could get really good at it, as I have learned.

So that’s one of them. The second is something that many companies do, and I hope that this will make the activity part of it feel pretty accessible, is brown bags. Someone from either the organization or outside the organization comes in. You have lunch. You listen to what they gotta say. Google puts theirs on video. A lot of the other big companies down south, in Silicon Valley, have open ones the public can come to.

And, again, when you put this against some of the practices, you hear – you start to realize it’s firing on different levels. So we’ve heard from a variety of futurists, people doing interesting research, and what it does is it gets out of our own problem space and helps us understand themes and trends in other problem spaces, and that’s part of that creative thinking skill set that we need to have.

We also ask folks if they wanna share their portfolio. It’s like any time you join an organization. It’s like that person’s brand new when they walk in and they’ve never done anything before, unless they insist on telling you about it, right? But this is a chance to kinda have a little bit of a ride-along to who they were before. That means you can get to know their skills and abilities in a way that might not come up naturally within the course of your work together.

Also ad hoc working sessions. Just working with people that you don’t always have an opportunity to work with can smooth quite a bit of those paths when you are in a critical project and you have to have a good working relationship based on honesty and an open mind.

And then the last one, and this is directly kind of an assault against many colleagues who feel that meetings are essentially the death knell of any kind of productive behavior, right? Like show up in a meeting – worse yet, standing meetings. God forbid, you meet once a week to talk to people that you work with, right?

But as part of our sales consulting meeting, we do a few things within the body of that meeting that I think are unusual. So the name of this activity is weekly consulting sales meeting, and when we apply that against this creative blueprint, you see that we actually have conversations around the fit between practitioners and the nature of the creative work that’s up for a possibility to work on, from the point of Adaptive Path. We actually intentionally talk about that. We don’t talk necessarily about the approach and the fit, but we talk about how we get to a better approach and fit. We talk philosophically about it.

We also try and match people with assignments. People are able to stand up and say, “That’s interesting to me. I’ve done something like that. That’s a creative problem I wanna help solve.” It’s very hard to get that kind of leverage and even that kind of insight or feedback in many companies. And if you make a place for it, it’ll happen, and then kinda natural collections of working teams start to emerge.

It also helps us know each other’s passions. So even if you don’t work on a project that strikes at that heart of the passion, I know what it is. I can find out what Paula’s interested in, or Pam, or Peter, or any of their colleagues, because they’re actually vocal about it. They’re used to stating what they expect in the world, and that makes it more likely to happen.

And that paves the way for shared excitement. When you are working on a project, you know that when times get rough, people wake up and they say, “I signed up for this because I’m interested and I care.”

So looking at the weekly consulting meeting and saying “Wow, I think that’s actually a driver of some pretty core fundamental creative behaviors in our organization” was a real wakeup call for me. And I hadn’t expected that kinda follow-up and feedback from admittedly a very simple list of stuff kinda put together in a visual model.

So then the next question is, if you’re gonna plus it or do something more with it, how can we generate more of these things and capture more activities like this and then socialize them? Because someone’s organization might think, “Oh, it’s old-hat to have brown bags,” but in another organization, that might just be that small, simple behavior that can start to move things around.

And thus was born this lightning session of rapid collaboration. And so all you need to do such a thing is a visual prompt, something to write on and write with, and a whole bunch of awesome, smart people, all with individual ideas that just aren’t connected yet.

So the instructions – now for the breathing – I’m gonna start breathing in; you guys are gonna start breathing out your creativity and your insights – is a ten-minute activity. And if you think that’s short, it’s okay. That’s like four YouTube videos. Right?

[Audience laughter]

Think how – or even TED videos, right? So you can get a lot done in ten minutes if you’re focused.

So we’re gonna bring the lights up. I want you to look through the teeny-tiny little print, but it is clear. It’s just quite small. And look around for something that seems to make sense. None of this is complex or should feel fairly obvious, but look for something that you guys do. Do you feel like your money is appropriate amount? Are there principles or practices in your company that help that be true? Human resources policies, even? That might be something you wanna work on. How does your organization communicate that the work matters?

So just take a look through this, pick an element, and then think about an activity. How does that actually take form in the world? So if you have mutual support, how does that actually start to happen?

When I was test-driving this on a friend who works in a completely different field, he was irritated and said, “You know, we don’t have a creative culture. We don’t have a creative company. I don’t wanna do this anymore.” And he said – and I’m like, “Well, when you work with people, how do you know that you guys are supporting each other when times get rough?” He goes, “Well, we know each other really well. We go to lunch every day.” As a team. Their whole team. Every day. I was like, “Well, that’s an activity.” He’s like, “Really?” I’m like, “Yeah. You go to lunch every day? You guys are actually there for each other.”

And then the last simple step is just to write it down. Really basic. It might be a brown bag. It might be having lunch. It might be that thing that helps get more exploration space or sticking to deadlines. Holy crap, if anyone here has some good thoughts on that, I think there’s gonna be a really, really wild audience for those.

And we’re gonna do this in ten minutes, and the result of this work, after we’ve captured things like this, is gonna be a whole bunch of things like this. Hopefully 200, 300, 350, if everybody does one. That’s a lot of really big ideas to start to – or little ideas, even, to start to look through.

We’re gonna take ten minutes for that, and then I’ll tell you what the next step in my commitment back to you is gonna be.

So how am I gonna make the most of what you just did and your efforts and contributions? Well, I don’t know yet, ’cause I don’t know what’s gonna come out of this. But I suspect, coming from a UX practice, that there will be cards, and they will be stacked or sorted in some way, okay? They might even be clustered. There might even be more than one cluster, and they will hopefully be associated with areas across this structure, which means that we can use it now as kind of a collection of areas – if you look through and do some gap analysis – of areas that you do wanna invest some of your time and efforts in, and have some simple and clear and proven ideas for what you can do in your own organizations.

And that always brings up, at the last point, is like, “What’s the point of this, anyway?” And anytime I think about a creative culture, we talk about it, it becomes this kind of its own idea on itself, and you can’t disconnect that from the bigger picture.

So a little bit back to the clouds. Imagine every day waking up and being part – not only participating in, but actually actively helping form, foster, nourish, and support an environment that’s open, where people really can get the best ideas out there and collectively can co-create those, when we can do that with customers. We can do that with other people out in the world.

And what that lets us do as designers – how that generosity, how that openness, how really that spirit of living and learning in public, to always get to that best idea – not your idea, but that best idea, can actually help make great experiences for others.

So we are on our way to lunch. I wanna give a shout-out to all the creative contributors who have brought this work this far. Dr. Teresa Amabile for her catalyzing article; of course, the Harvard Business Review; some other folks at Adaptive Path who I rely on; and, of course, you.

And what I’m gonna do is scan all these articles – or all the contributions that you’ve made and put them together in some semblance of function and have something available by the end of UX Week, okay?

So on your way out, we’ve got volunteers at the door, and you can just drop your ideas off there or at information afterwards, anytime during the week. Okay, thank you for your time.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

I’m gonna be talking about user interface design in video games, which is kind of a strange beast because the games industry is – I don’t know, it’s a weird place. It can be dysfunctional. It can be kinda insular sometimes. But it’s also full of lots of great opportunities.

And really, when I got into the position – this was back – the first game I – one of the first games I worked on was Guitar Hero, and I was kinda told I was coming in as, like, a graphic designer. And what you realize right away is, when you’re working on a small team that has, like, tight deadlines, you end up taking on a lot of other responsibility, and you kinda just have to adapt and kinda figure out ways to rise to the challenge. So my role became much more kind of involved in, like, how do I communicate with the player? How does the player interact with the game?

And so yeah, I’m gonna talk about that. But first I just wanted to look at sorta the history of video game hardware, because this is like a place where I have almost, like, no control over stuff. You’re making a game for a certain console, so you have to kind of accept the conventions and the input methods and the controllers that it has.

And if you kinda look where games started, like sorta the arcade cabinet was sorta the precursor to home consoles, and these were purpose-built for one game. They had well-labeled buttons – punch, kick. They did exactly what they said they did. And the instructions were right there in front of you, and it’s in a social context, so you can watch someone else playing and sort of understand how to play it yourself.

And when that became, like, the Atari 2600, it was kinda designed almost more like a toaster or a radio, and all the options, all the switches were right there on the machine. There wasn’t really a thought that a game might have an options screen or something, or sorta different things within the game. It was just – it actually even has – I think this is funny – has a hardware difficulty switch, so you can set easy, medium, or hard right there on the console. And that’s something that we’re probably never gonna see again on a modern console.

But yeah, so you follow that evolution, and you get to, like, the NES controller. This is where I started out when I was a kid, and probably a lot of people here did. And it’s simple. It’s got five buttons. Most games you can figure out through trial and error, like Super Mario Brothers. So you can basically pick up the controller and start pressing buttons and see what happens, and kinda like, “Okay, oops, I died.”

[Audience laughter]

And so yeah, that’s pretty easy to grasp. You don’t need a lot of handholding. You don’t need to explain too much what’s going on there.

But then you contrast that with now – the Xbox 360 controller, compared to the Nintendo controller, has a gazillion buttons, and I’m not even showing you the buttons on top. There’s like four more up there. So there’s a lot more – even a simple game has to use that controller, and so you kinda have to take that into consideration when you’re kinda trying to explain how a game works to a new player.

And I saw this article recently in The New Yorker, where someone who had never played video games decided to try out the Xbox 360 and play a lot of current games. This is, like, an author and contributor. And so here is his experience using the controller: “To begin with, you must master the controller. On the Xbox 360 controller, which looks like a catamaran, there are 17 possible points of contact. You must press or nudge or woggle these various buttons singly or in combination, performing tiny feats of exactitude that are different for each game. It’s a little like playing ‘Blue Rondo à la Turk’ on the clarinet, then switching to the tenor sax, then the oboe, then back to the clarinet.”

And I mean, it’s a good point. It’s so easy to forget that that crazy controller isn’t something that’s super-obvious or super-easy for everyone. People that are kind of already established gamers have kinda gone through the evolution of the controller and had buttons introduced to them incrementally over time.

So kinda what we do, a common way of dealing with sort of this complexity now is to sort of tutorialize games early on, to kind of teach players, as they’re playing the game, how it’s played and what buttons to press. And this can be – I mean, this is kind of a – it’s a common solution. People like things that they’ve seen in other games, and they’re comfortable with putting it in their own.

So I wanted to kinda – I didn’t wanna pick on any current games, so I decided to go back to Super Mario Brothers, and let’s see what happens if we kinda tried to tutorialize it like it’s coming out now. Let’s say it doesn’t exist. How to play it isn’t burned into, like, our collective unconscious. Let’s say we have to make it, like, with the Xbox controller. How do we do that? Oh, well, already, there’s instructions on the screen immediately. Oh, and it’s stopping to tell you what’s going on here and what button to press. Oh, yeah, you need to kinda jump like that. And yeah, still dead anyway. And then, oh, you died, and that’s what that’s about.

[Audience laughter]

So yeah, and my job is kind of about that balance, like how much do we tell the player without annoying them? We don’t wanna negatively impact the experience. And if possible, we wanna positively impact the experience.

So I wanted to talk – well, first, before I get into it, I wanna say that every studio is different. The one thing that’s consistent about game studios is just their inconsistency. So I’m gonna be talking from my experience. I’m not promising you that this is super-universal, although I think it is to some degree.

And this word I wanted to share first of all. When I was working at Harmonix on Guitar Hero, the art director, Ryan Lesser, used the word “the metagame” a lot, which means – kind of in a general sense, it’s the actual menus themselves. It’s just what you have to navigate through to get to the game.

But it also kind of has another meaning, which is like, it’s sort of the state of mind you want the player to be in. It’s like how you want them to feel about the game and kind of if there’s – if you look at Guitar Hero, there’s no story there. It’s a very simple game, but there’s this implied narrative that you’re, like, outside a concert and you’re looking at these cool rock posters, and it kinda just like puts you in the moment.

And in terms of how user experience is kind of considered, it’s definitely not as formally considered as I think a lot of people here might be accustomed to. But here, to steal another video game symbol, here’s the Triforce of user experience in game development. And these are kind of the people that are really thinking about how someone is experiencing the game.

So you’ve got – so I’d be the user interface designer, kind of in the middle there, and I’m sort of drawing influence in two different ways, from the game designer on one side – and this can be more than one person, more than one designer – and sort of the art or creative lead on the other side. And usually any kind of outside feedback that I have, that comes from the play tests, or if we’ve gotten people to come in and play the game, that usually comes through one of these people to meet usually the game designer.

And here’s kinda how they influence it in the general sense. The game designer is all about usability. They want the game to be simple and clear and effective. They don’t want people getting bogged down and stuff, or confused by the menus or anything like that. It should be easily explained. And kinda the art or creative lead, they want the personality of the game expressed through the UI. They want it to really match the feel – they want it to be credible. And I kinda need to take all this in and kinda balance it and kinda try to add my own sort of ideas to it.

And so it becomes sort of this thing of usability versus experience, because in a way, games don’t have to be super-utilitarian. People are playing them to have a good time. They’re there for the experience. So if the UI can contribute to that experience in a way, it’s a good thing. And I wanted to share kind of a recent example of that.

So I don’t know if a lot of people here played Brutal Legend, but this was the last game I worked on at Double Fine, and it was my first game there. And so this is, like, some concept art from it. It was already in development before I started there, and I knew it was, like, this really just completely unique and really crazy-looking game from Tim Schafer. And it just had this very – it had this reputation as being a very different, unique sorta game.

And so I kind of wanted to find a way to represent that, so when I was kinda tasked with creating the front end, or the main menu for the game, I pitched this idea to Tim Schafer, who’s the creative director: Since so much of the artwork is inspired by sort of these gatefold albums from the ’70s, what if we just made an actual gatefold record album and just, like, took all this sort of influence and pushed it into that, and then we have this actual kind of physical album that we throw in front of the player, and that’s what they navigate through. Like, that’s the first thing they see when they turn on the game. And he was into it, and that’s what we ended up doing.

So this is the menu. Actually, I’ll just let this play. So basically what happens is you’re kinda – Jack Black is talking to you as the player, takes you into this record store, and grabs this record outta the back and puts it down. And right away the player – I mean, it doesn’t really look like a menu, but you see “Press Start.” You press it, it opens, and you kinda realize you can control this sort of unique interface in front of you. And it’s sort of intuitive because people know how to – a lot of people, at least, have looked through a vinyl album, stared at the artwork, taken the record out, just examining it, especially the kind of old – these gatefold albums, which have just crazy art all over them.

And that became the menu, and what you’re seeing here is the final version of it. And what’s funny is – I was really happy with the way it came together in the end. It was kind of like an ordeal to make it happen, but it came together, and it was awesome. And this was, like, two months away from shipping the game, and I loved it, but some people didn’t. Some people were worried about this. In fact, our publisher was really worried about it because they were concerned that because you couldn’t see – I mean, obviously, the usability isn’t great. You can’t see all the options at once, and they were worried people are not gonna find multiplayer; people are not gonna be able to make sense of this; this doesn’t look right.

So then we had to kinda come up with all these sort of solutions to try to solve the problem, which may not have actually been a problem. In my mind, it wasn’t a problem, but sort of all these ideas were thrown around of ways of just putting text on the screen, and none of them felt right. They all kinda felt like they were detracting from this kinda cool experience.

And kinda my first instinct when I was kind of thinking – I was being told “We have to solve this, what do we do?” Well, maybe we can tutorialize it. Maybe we can explain it to the player. So I kinda created this, and I got a response from Tim saying, “Man, that’s like a big old apology for our awesome album.”

So after that, I decided to just kinda back off, and we couldn’t find a solution that everyone was happy with, so it ended up shipping without text all over the screen. And people loved it. Gamers really responded to it, like, all over the Internet when the demo came out. It felt different, but it felt right for the game. It really kind of emphasized what people wanted to see from the game, and it was unexpected, and I think that’s one of the things that people really enjoyed about it.

So yeah, and another thing it did was it even created this discussion where people started talking about, like, other interesting UIs and other interesting menus they had seen in games, and it was cool because you don’t really see that that often. Gamers don’t usually talk about UI unless it’s really, really bad, so it was nice to see that for a change.

So why isn’t there more challenging UI design? Why isn’t there more weird stuff out there? Or lessons I’ve learned. Well, there’s a lot of challenges. It’s tough to get people to buy into your idea, ’cause you really need that kind of support if you wanna do something a little weird. And obviously, an easy, simple UI is always gonna be less controversial. And it’s less work, and that can play a big factor.

But people – the usability, like, a very simple, easy-to-use menu is – the advantage of that is obvious during development, ’cause people in the office are gonna be playing the game all the time. So if something is simple and easy to use, they’re gonna respond to that. If something’s different but has a lot of personality and is kind of, like, unique, some people will love it, but some people will be kinda nervous about it, ’cause it’s a little harder to use.

And the reason I mention an easy UI is also less work. It’s because there’s like an unglamorous part of my job, which is localizing to all these foreign languages. Like, if I put art in a texture, then I have to remake it four times over for, like, Italian and German and French and Spanish. And the tools we use, aside from Photoshop, which is the same everywhere, most of the tools that I use for getting stuff into the games – I’ve worked in three different studios, and I’ve had three different tools, so there’s always a learning curve involved.

And it’s a one-person job. You have a lot of responsibility thrown onto you. But I also actually put that as a good thing. Because it’s a one-person job, you can actually make a huge difference, especially on small teams. It’s basically just a matter of saying, “Hey, can I do this cool thing?” and hopefully someone else is into it too, and then they’ll be like, “Yeah, go ahead.”

And you’re also responsible for the game’s first impression, just the packaging. I know a lot of us here are probably Apple fans, and Apple packages their products really well. And putting a good metagame around a game is kind of the same thing. It’s the packaging. It’s what gets people excited, and it’s what reflects the style of the game.

Yeah, so to wrap it up, I just wanted to talk about the future, because I often talk about how complicated controllers have gotten, but we’re actually at an interesting point now, where we’re starting to see kind of – instead of each system being this more powerful, more advanced console, we’re starting to see that go in different directions now.

Like, you had the Wii, which wasn’t super-powerful but had this different control mechanism, and people responded to that. And now there’s like – iPhone gaming has become huge, and that was never intended as a gaming platform originally, but now it’s bringing a lot of people that might not have been into games, getting them introduced. And Microsoft has Connect coming out soon, where there will be no controller at all, and I think that that’s another great way to bring in people that might not be really familiar – are really kind of daunted by that complicated Xbox controller.

So yeah, it’s an exciting time to be in UI. There’s gonna be a lot more sort of opportunities going forward for people that are interested in getting involved, and it pays to be bold. And that’s my talk. Thanks.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Hello, everybody. I think I met Peter 13, 14 years ago. I was working at Wired magazine, and we were – I was working on the Web properties at Wired magazine. And we were doing our first-ever usability test for some new stuff that we were working on, and our first-ever user who came in to sit down there was Peter.

[Audience laughter]

And I remember, I was behind the glass watching him, and he basically told us he couldn’t make sense of anything that we were doing, and none of it – and I was like, “Who is this guy saying all this stuff?” I think for about two years afterwards, we never did any more usability testing, ’cause I was always like, “Ah, the users are way too obnoxious when they come in.”

[Audience laughter]

So that’s my story of meeting Peter.

Yeah, so I picked a small topic for the 30 minutes that we have today, but I think we could get through it pretty quickly. Yeah, so Peter and I and a bunch of other people cofounded Adaptive Path. Adaptive Path has done a lot of stuff in the almost – geez, almost ten years since we started it. But I think fundamentally at the core was always the Web, and moved into user research and business strategy and service design and all that kinda stuff, but at the core, we started – we did stuff on the Web. And I think almost every project today always has that at the core.

My career has gone in different directions, and I’m working on a bunch of new stuff that is all about this thing we call the Web and this platform that we’ve created. And I wanna tell you a few stories about a bunch of different things, all relating to, I think, a fundamental thesis, which is that if we can understand the way the Web works and we try to work in the same way, we’re gonna be a lot more successful.

And so the first story I wanna tell you about, actually, is about beer. Are there any fans of beer in the audience here? Hey, look. Turns out. I am a big fan of beer. In fact, I travel a lot for work, and one of the things I do when I go to a new city is to figure out, like, what are they making here, ’cause there’s been this sort of renaissance of craft microbrew. And it’s a good way to sorta get to know an area, to see the kind of beer that they’re making and what’s popular.

So for those of you out of town coming here to my city, San Francisco, if you were to go to a place that specializes in beer – like, for example, Magnolia’s in the Haight, or also in the Haight, the Toronado – you will find that people that are really into beer will go to places that have beer on hand pump, coming straight outta the cask, served at room temperature, almost flat.

It is a very, very traditional way of making beer. Looks something like this, right? From hundreds of years ago, how they sort of made beer that way, because there was no refrigeration, which is kinda obvious, right? There was no electricity. Refrigeration, all that kinda stuff came much later. But it sort of informed how they made beer and how they sorta kept it and preserved it and how it tasted then, and we can sorta get a sense of that.

But that idea that things couldn’t be cold. Before, oh, about 200 years ago, really, there was no way to make anything cold. And it fascinates me because there’s a story about ice that really sort of resonates around this idea of technological progress.

So 200 years ago, you couldn’t get a glass of cold lemonade on a hot summer day like today. The only people who really had ice were the very wealthy, who had ponds on their land that would freeze over in the winter, and then they’d hire a bunch of workers to go out and saw the ice off of the pond, dig big holes, put all the ice in there, and insulate it with hay and stuff, and then see how long they could make it last over the summer so they could have fancy parties and drop ice cubes into people’s glasses. That was literally the only way in the summertime, like, in New England, that you could have a cold drink.

That, it turned out, was a business opportunity for a guy named Frederic Tudor. Frederic Tudor said, “You know, this is awesome that people really wanna have cold drinks or preserve their food or things like that. Let’s see if we can apply some technology and maybe think about the business model here in a way that we could get this out to more people than just the wealthy landowners.”

So he innovated in a few ways. He made a sort of ice plow that he could hook up to horses that did the work of ten men. But his real innovation was shipping, right? He realized that he could effectively build these ships that were so well insulated he could get the ice from New England down to places where it was hot all the time.

And so he began to ship ice down to places like the Bahamas, Cuba. Even out to London. He was able to sort of work out the timetable to get ice over there. There’s records of Queen Victoria buying ice from Frederic Tudor to serve at the palace. He even for a while shipped ice all the way to Calcutta. And there wasn’t much left when it got there, but there was enough to actually turn a profit and to do that.

Some of this ice he harvested right off of Walden Pond. And this comes from the book of the same name here, writing, “The sweltering inhabitants of Charleston, New Orleans, Madras and Bombay and Calcutta drink at my well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of Ganges.” And I think here that he was really using some poetic language to talk about peeing in the river, but regardless, it was a thing, right? It was actually – turned out to be a pretty big part of the New England economy, was this shipping and storage of ice harvested from ponds.

There’s lots of historical evidence, and Tudor became wealthy, became the sort of ice king of New England. But, as you can imagine, technology marches on, right? So his shipping and his storage device was only innovative for so long.

Later in the 19th century, around the 1850s or so, there was a guy named Dr. John Gorrie. He was an epidemiologist who studied communicable diseases in the tropics and did a lot of work in Florida trying to figure out how these diseases were different from diseases elsewhere. And his hypothesis was around the heat and humidity made them more severe and made them propagate faster, these tropical diseases.

And so he started to work on a technology for getting his hospital wards to cool down, and invented the first mechanical refrigeration, or at least was awarded one of the first patents. Many people were working on this at the time. But it quickly took off, right? The result being that it was able to be commercialized in cities, and icehouses kinda cropped up everywhere, meaning they could have these big, giant refrigeration units that spit out blocks of ice. And they could store them here, and they could make them year round, and they would start delivery service. And people could have ice in their homes and drove the price down to about a penny a pound, and included the development of the icebox, where people could keep food and keep ice so that they could have regular deliveries. And this was very successful. This was sorta the next generation of how refrigeration was working.

But as you can imagine, technology – just like today, just like all the little devices you’ve got in your pocket, and the laptops in front of you – every iteration of this technology meant that the price came down and that the devices got smaller, to the point where you could actually take one of those big machines and put it in your house. And now we have sort of the democratization of refrigeration, where anybody can make ice now, and it doesn’t require a distribution network or big warehouses or anything like that.

Here’s something from the 1920s in the GE catalog, talking about the old-fashioned kitchen full of work, the hundreds of lost hours, the result of lost youth and beauty, and then you could imagine, boom, the new iKitchen. Look at this. Here we go, the modern GE kitchen, which will easily pay for itself over time. So the marketing that we see today in technology, no different from the marketing in the past.

But this was insanely successful, right? It turned GE into one of the biggest companies in the world, manufacturing all sorts of appliances, but really starting with refrigeration.

So the reason this is interesting to me is because, if you look at the harvesting of ice and you look at the warehouse-level manufacturer of ice and then you look at the sort of distributing home appliances to make ice so that anybody can make ice, not one company made the transition. None of the shippers became warehouse companies; none of the warehouse companies became appliance companies. Although they were providing the same service for their audiences, nobody was able to make that transition.

Now, let me tell you a second story about some companies that were. Not far from here, on the South Fork of the American River, a man named James Marshall knelt down at that spot and discovered, in 1848, gold. He didn’t tell very many people, but they didn’t tell very many people, and eventually sort of the Gold Rush started, and everybody came here to San Francisco to get up into the hills to go get this gold. It was crazy what happened to the city of San Francisco. It doubled something like every six weeks for a number of years.

But to get here, it was difficult, right? Here’s a bill saying there’s a steamship called the Nicaragua, and it takes something like – I don’t know where – 35 days, right? You had to go all the way under to get here from the East Coast to California, or try the treacherous journey across. And for some reason, they’re billing that 200 jackasses are gonna come with you on the ship. I don’t know why –

[Audience laughter]

I don’t know why that’s a good idea, some kinda asset here or something.

So the Gold Rush actually worked a lot like how the venture-capital community here in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley works in that rich people in New York, where all the center of wealth was, would sign up people to go to California and fund them in exchange for getting a percentage back, right?

And so getting the people there was fine, but getting the money back was just way more important to these capitalists, right? They had to go all the way under, and it was a treacherous trip, and there were pirates and shipwrecks and all that kinda stuff. It was bad for their returns on their investment.

And so they started looking for ways across to do it as quickly as possible. That sort of resulted in what we ended up calling the Pony Express. There were a couple companies that did this. One was American Express; they started this way. The other was a company called Wells Fargo, which is a bank that’s based here in California.

They actually kinda forged the route and cut the roads through the mountains and that kinda stuff to make this possible, turning themselves into shipping companies, but really, in effect turning themselves into kind of these first cross-country banks because they would have the money on both sides. Now, of course, again, technology moving, once you have the roads all the way through, started stringing wires across that to bring the first telegraph service and creating what we often refer to as this Victorian Internet the first time we sort of strung up the world, so we could communicate with one another.

What’s really interesting about this is that Wells Fargo saw that coming. They were like, “We’re shipping gold with a guy sitting on top of a stagecoach with a gun, and we don’t have to do that once the wires are connected. Once the wires are connected, we can keep all the gold here in San Francisco and just tell them in New York. We can send some information to New York saying, ‘This is your money now,’ and they can have that money.” And they turned the wealth into information. We’re able to do this in absolutely no time, whereas before it still took weeks.

The amount of time that it took Wells Fargo to shift from stagecoaches with gold bars in them to the telegraph wires, once the first telegraph was sent from San Francisco to New York, was two days. They were like, “That’s it. This is our new business. We’re in it. We’re done.” And they stopped the horses.

Keeping all the gold in San Francisco may not have been the best idea. That’s the same building in 1906. They got the gold out, so that was fine. But Wells Fargo persisted and even made it through the financial crisis pretty well intact – in fact, acquired a few companies.

So how did they make it, and how did American Express make it, and how did the ice companies not, right? You see this happening all the time. It’s a deep and profound understanding of the business that you’re in and matching the user needs here, right? Matching the user needs regardless of how you are matching them now and how technological disruption and innovation changes that, and being able to respond to that all the time.

So loads of examples of that happening today on the Web. Let’s just look at a couple, right? There was a connection of technology that happened back in the ’90s, where computers started shipping with CD-ROMs. Broadband happened, especially on college campuses. New compression technologies came out. You put those three things together, and you have MP3s and Napster, right? And that fundamentally changed who was winning in the electronics game, as well as a lot of our notions of what intellectual property really is. Five years later, bandwidth increased five times. Flash – Adobe started putting video codecs into the Flash Player, and the result is the 24-hour Peter Merholz channel. Look at that.

[Audience laughter]

But fundamentally different models start emerging when that happens.

I’ve been working on this now for about two years with the company, Typekit, that we founded, based on concepts – 100 years of typographic history that fundamentally changed when the Web started and literally had no control over fonts.

Over the course of the 15 years that we’ve been doing Web design, we got control of a few fonts, because we kind of were able to assume that our audience had that. But the W3C had been working on technologies or specifications for how you could link to a font and send that font with the page and let the user see it, right? Something as simple as that.

There was a lot of talk about it about two years ago, saying, “All right, we should really do this now.” And then there was browser implementations. Opera started first, but then it was built into Safari, it was built into Firefox, it was built into Chrome, and surprisingly, it even works in Internet Explorer.

[Audience laughter]

In a traditional sort of Microsoft way in which they use a completely proprietary font format, but it still works, so that’s good.

And the results now – we’ve seen all this amazing new creativity. Like, this is just text, right? Like with CSS gradients put on it. That’s like an h1 that you can select and translate, it’s searchable, and all that kinda stuff. It’s fantastic. We’ve seen blogs start expressing themselves in much more stripped-down designs based on the beauty of the typography, and even large brands are now taking some of the assets that they’ve had for years, finally able to use them online.

But of course, this is disruptive, right? Because it’s putting the assets of the people who make these things right on the Web, right? The font developers. So, many of the foundries opposed it at first. They were worried. And it’s a little bit different, actually, than the recording industry, where an MP3 is a representation of a bunch of work. In the font world, a font is literally the entire source code. Every bit that they have put into creating that font is distributed over the Web.

So that was the sort of environment in which we were working when we created Typekit to work with foundries and to work with Web designers and to hook ‘em all together and to find a way through so that it was more like gold and less like ice, right? So if we’d take a step back and look at that, we can see, right? Whereas ice was at first thought it was about shipping and then about warehouses and finally about appliances, the reality was it was about people’s health. It was about their quality of life, and being able to provide that for people was the thing that was actually, in the end, the most successful. Just like gold was not about shipping bars of gold around, but in fact it was about communication, turning wealth into data, being able to speed up the financial markets that way.

And media, right? Like, all the MP3s and video and all the stuff that’s flying around the Web now is not about the disks and the way in which it was distributed in the past, but it’s really now about attention, right? It’s about the fact that, if something is popular, you might not be able to sell that thing, but you’ll have people’s attention while they’re engaging with it, and you can do something with that that might actually result in some money. Shifting all of these rules.

So I wanna look now at how that could really apply to what we do on the Web today, and I wanna look at one principle in particular that I’ve seen sort of emerge from the beginning of the Web, but really taking steam lately. We’ll talk about a couple others as well if we have some time.

But my thesis, like I said at the beginning, is I believe that the qualities that contribute to the success of the Web are also the qualities that will make us successful too, if we can embody them, if we can profoundly understand them and use them in our work all the time.

I call this being native to the Web, right? That means that we fundamentally understand the Web, deep down, internally get it, so that when we are advocating for doing the right thing in our organizations or with our clients, we are arguing from a position of “I know what’s right for the Web; it will be right for our users; it’s what’s right for our organization.”

So let me show you a little bit about how the Web has been created. There’s a couple of standards bodies. One is called the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force. Another is called – you’re probably familiar with the W3C. The IETF, real low-level stuff, like SMTP for e-mail and Ethernet, right? That’s where those standards come from. But the W3C – HTML, CSS, that kinda stuff. And also, I wonder why standards bodies have logos that are so pointy all the time, and I think any designers here wanna do a pro bono project, it would be much appreciated to fix some of that.

But the way they get this work done is fascinating. I did a bunch of it in the ’90s. I was on the HTML4 and CSS2 working groups as part of what I did for Wired magazine. And this is what it looks like. This is how the Web is made, right here. You go sit in some dreary conference room in a hotel somewhere, and one guy stands in the front and kinda moderates, and then people stand up and disagree with each other.

And it is – well, it’s awful, to be perfectly honest. It’s the most boring thing in the world. Incredibly important, and in retrospect, I’m so glad I got experience, but just the mind-numbing minutiae of what happens here is crazy.

Everybody in this room, by default, disagrees with one another, because they’re competitors, right? Microsoft and Netscape and HP and Apple, and they’re all sitting in this room, representatives from them are sitting here. But they all know that they want the same thing, right?

So in the case of CSS, we all sort of knew that there should be some language to help describe the style of a page, and it should be separate from that page. And that was gonna be kinda how the Web was gonna evolve, right? And this is 1996 or something like that. The Web will evolve that way.

So the guy from Netscape stands up and said, “We’ve thought about this. Our latest browser just shipped, and it’s got a thing in it called JavaScript, and it’s really taking off. People like JavaScript. They’re using it. It’s a procedural way of controlling kinda how a Web page behaves. So we think we should do the same for style, and so our proposal is JavaScript-based style sheets.” And that’s what they proposed to the working group at the W3C.

And half of the room was like, “Well, I write code, make code, make stuff. It’s great. It’s just gonna look like this, right? So if color red, make it bold, and stuff like that, perfect. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll get an error and you can debug, and that’s how you’ll do design.” Other half of the room where I was sitting were like, “Wait a minute. No, this is not how we do design, right? And this is gonna require a set of skills that’s not embodied in a lot of designers. Maybe there’s a simpler, more declarative way that we can do that.” And the argument starts happening, back and forth, back and forth. You don’t get anywhere with it, really, except for everybody kinda understanding both sides of the problem.

Later that night, as we do things like this, you go out for dinner with everybody and then end up in the pub. And I remember looking over at a booth and seeing the guy from Microsoft and the guy from Netscape with these giant early laptop computers, and they’re doing stuff and drinking beer and typing. And I’m like, “Wow, what are those guys doing? It’s, like, midnight.”

The next morning we get back in that dreadful room, and the two guys stand up from Microsoft and Netscape, and they say, “We both have builds of our browsers now. We’d like to distribute them all. We’ve come to sort of this middle ground. It’s kind of declarative, and there’s a language, a syntax, and everybody try it.”

And we all get the software and try it out, and it was tangible. You could see, like, “I can write some stuff. I don’t have to just think and take an ideological position. I can see which works better, what works better.” And that really, really is how all of this happens in the W3C, right? There is some consensus that needs to happen, and then you can get a green, and things like the standard can come out, like it did years later.

That’s a principle for how the Web works, how the Web was built. It’s called rough consensus and running code. Those are the two things you need. Nobody’s gonna agree, but we did all have consensus that we needed style. The way in which consensus turned into agreement was by getting essentially prototypes into people’s hands, the running code. You could use it, and once you could use it, it was tangible. You could make stuff.

I’ll give you another quick early history of the Web. This comes from Mark Pilgrim, who wrote Dive Into Python, Dive Into HTML5. He’s at Google now. Fantastic writer. He did some archaeology, some digital archaeology of the W3C mailing list – or actually, the Web mailing list from the early 1990s.

This is from February 25 of 1993. Some college kid in Illinois proposing something for a browser that he’s working on that’s gonna be called Mosaic. His name is Marc Andreessen; maybe you’ve heard of him. He said, “I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag called ‘image.’ The required argument is ‘source=URL.’”

And we didn’t have images at the time on the Web. Literally. You could link to one; it would open in some viewer, but you couldn’t put an image on a Web page. And he’s proposing that we should do this. This college kid: “If you have a better idea than what I’m presenting now, please let me know.” He’s like 19, right?

So then Tony Johnson, who’s over at Stanford, writes back and says, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about this too. My browser’s called Midas, and I’ve got ‘icon’ with an href.” And then Tim Berners-Lee, ’cause this is the Web mailing list, and Tim Berners-Lee isn’t a famous guy yet in 1993. But he’s on that list, and he says, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been thinking about images as well, but I hadn’t wanted a special tag,” and he makes some other proposal. So clearly, there’s consensus, right? It’s rough consensus. We wanna do images somehow, but nobody can agree how.

So then, about six weeks later, Mark Andreessen posts back to the list and says, “I’m getting close to releasing the first version of the Mosaic, which is gonna support inline images. So we’re probably gonna go with what I proposed.”

[Audience laughter]

So the sorta debate kinda went on for what would be the best thing to do, and eventually he wins, right? Because he ships some code, and it gets into people’s hands, and they’re like, “Oh, all right, I see how this works.” It could be better. You could abstract it, make it “object,” and anything could be inline. But we went with this because it was simple and he shipped it first and literally made history. A few weeks later, he shipped the Mosaic browser and literally made history. There’s a plaque that says “The first Web browser was made here.”

[Audience laughter]

So rough consensus, running code, a fundamental principle for how the Web works, but also a great way for us to do product development.

So let me give you a very brief – like, the first few weeks when we were working on Typekit earlier last year, where we were gonna sort of embody this principle. We had this idea that it could work, right? You could actually make a service that did fonts on the Web and get some of the foundries to go together.

And so literally, the first few days we, like, talked about it in very big picture, and we sketched up a bunch of ideas. These are pages from Jason Santa Maria, our creative director, his notebook. This is not my work. I could never do such a thing.

But literally by the end of the first week, we had visualized kinda what it could look like, right? All right, so we could have – this is how we would explain it to people. This is maybe how it would start to function, and these were some of my chicken scratches. But this would – maybe this would be how it worked. All right, let’s get it into Photoshop. So we, too, we sorta make it into Photoshop.

And immediately as we have these, we start sending them around, and I get on the phone with Web designers that I know all over the place, like “Hey, here. If you saw this, what would you think? If you saw this, how would you use it?” We even mocked up in Photoshop our business model: “How about this?” And shared that with everybody.

We had not written any code yet. We just had, like, this sense that, you know what, if we could make this tangible, there was lots and lots of consensus in the world that fonts were gonna work on the Web. We wanted to get there first, so we went really fast and just made some prototypes, showed it to people, and then did something we’d never done before, which was we just wrote a blog post about it and kinda put it out on Twitter and said, “Here’s everything we’re gonna do.” Still hadn’t written any code yet, but wanted to see, is this a good idea? And it turns out it was, right? We were a trending topic on Twitter that day, which kinda blew our minds that Web fonts would be that cool, but also Susan Boyle and “three words after sex” are also trending topics, so…

[Audience laughter]

Like, get a hold of the ego, right?

But what happened is we got a tremendous amount of feedback, half of it saying “best idea in the world,” the other half “doomed to fail.” So that made me feel good as well, because if it was all in the middle, it wouldn’t have been as exciting at all.

But basically, everybody who thought we were gonna fail gave us a list of things that we would have to do, so we had our marching orders, and that was great. And Twitter is an amazing place for this. Like, I literally spend an hour every morning reading all the tweets that mention Typekit, so if you want my attention, that’s a great way to do it. But I do every day, because it is real-time, honest-to-goodness customer feedback, as blatant as possible, either good or bad, because you only have 140 characters to do it.

So we went fast, and we iterated it as fast as we could and literally launched with the minimal viable product that we could, as the simplest thing that we could, and then continued to iterate after that.

I love this quote: “If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long.” That’s from Reid Hoffman. Reid Hoffman is the CEO of – or he was the CEO of LinkedIn. And it’s true, right? Now, I know this really quick iteration – it’s easy for you to say, “Oh, yeah, great, Mr. Startup, but I work at this big company. We have all this process and all that kinda stuff.”

But look at these other giant Internet brands when they got started. Like, Google literally was apologizing, right? Like, “We have 25 million pages, but soon we’re gonna be much bigger,” right?

You saw a version of – this is Facebook four, five years ago. We saw a version of this earlier today, but literally only worked in Harvard, and then a couple more colleges before they ran out, so really the minimum viable thing. This is the homepage of Amazon when they launched.

[Audience laughter]

What’s missing here? Books. I know.

[Audience laughter]

Not many books.

I love this little joke. This is the Apple Lisa homepage, at Apple back in 1989 – or ’83. I found this on Flickr. I thought it was funny. Not really their first homepage, but it’s hilarious, like “Look, preorder the iPhone.” That’s pretty cool, this thing.

[Audience laughter]

But look at this quote here. I’m running a little outta time, so I’m going a little fast here, but the velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software. Responsiveness, velocity, right? More than any single release ever could, and that’s what you have to get good at, says Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror.

I mean, Twitter is fantastic at this, right? They have looked for patterns in what their users are doing, and built features that literally lay right on top of them. Like, here’s the tweet where the hashtag was first introduced by Chris Messina. They turned that into a feature. “At” replies. Exactly, right? People are using this behavior. We’re gonna go on top of that. Retweets, the same thing.

The reality is – I believe this fundamentally – the speed of iteration beats the quality of iteration. The faster that we can go and do product development with tangible code that we can show to our users, the more successful we’re going to be, because we can learn so much faster, right? And that’s that idea of rough consensus, right? We generally have an idea. We’ve done some user research. We know what the market wants. Right? We’re gonna put that into this sort of process of running code as quickly as possible.

There are tons and tons of other principles I wish we had more time to talk about. I could talk about ‘em all day. But look at this, for example, which is an RFC from the early days of the Internet that embodies a fantastic principle for the Web, in that we should be liberal in what we accept and conservative in what we send. It’s how they built the fundamental protocols of the Web. It’s the robustness principle from Jon Postel, right? It’s an amazing principle. It’s fundamental to how the Web works.

How about small pieces loosely joined, right? That’s how Unix works. That’s how the Web works. That’s why we have APIs, right?

How about this? Information wants to be free. Another amazing principle that came from Stewart Brand, but predates him, even. It goes on and on.

All of this, right? All of these principles, if you dig in and read about any one of them and internalize them, make us better at what we do at building the Web. And I think the Web – I think this is pretty important, right? I said from the beginning, like, I’ve dedicated my career to the Web, and it’s not just like this is a new thing that we’re gonna do with our business now, and we’re gonna try to be a little more engaged with our customers. I think the Web is pretty fundamental to kinda human culture now. And I know that it can sound like hyperbole, but I really believe that we are kinda finding a new way of not replacing the relationships that we have between each other and the intimacy that we have, but amplifying it, right? And it is really kinda fundamentally changing a lot of human culture.

The Web is the place where our most precious memories and experiences are recorded now. We don’t have physical representations of stuff anymore; we put it on the Web, right? And it’s all there, and we trust that it’ll always be there. We are writing human history collaboratively, kinda for the first time ever, right? And we’re doing it on the Web, right? And the Web is about to spill out, right? Spill out of our browsers and our phones and stuff, and into the real world, right? And the Web is gonna be – this data is gonna be all around us and overlaying us everywhere.

So I believe the Web is a pretty fundamentally different thing. And I think, actually, that it’s so fundamentally different that the people who make the Web, the people like all of us at a conference like this, have a responsibility to sort of protect the Web from the kinds of bad decisions and bad ideas that bombard it every day, the threats to the Web. I mean, Wired magazine just this month is proclaiming the Web to be dead, right? I think Chris Anderson couldn’t be farther off this time. It’s ridiculous.

But it’s a meme, right? And they’re replacing it with not an open and free and accessible Web, but a closed Web. Walled gardens, places where the Web can be safe and we can warn people to be careful of what’s out there. Stay inside, where it’s safe here.

Or handing people a business model, right? As long as you use the right coding language and submit to essentially a censorship process, we’ll give you a business model. And you don’t have to worry about the Web anymore; this is the way we’ll deliver everything. Right?

There’s also – I mean, it’s a fundamental shift in how power and wealth is being distributed in the world, and there’s people that want it to be like it was in the 20th century, and say, “No, these changes, I’m not gonna let ‘em happen, and I think I’m still powerful enough to get it done.” And that’s what Rupert wants to do, and a lot of people like him wanna do that. And then there’s just other companies that, frankly, don’t give a shit that if the memories, the stuff, those connections that are so valuable to us, if they don’t meet the bottom line and we can’t afford the servers anymore, shut it all off. What could matter?

So I think every time you make a decision, that you’re faced with some decision in your organization where you’re thinking “Which way do we go? Do we follow one of these paths that doesn’t seem to resonate with how the Web works, or do we do it the right way? Do we serve our users in a way that’s fundamental, that is native to the Web?” Whether it is in a business development negotiations, whether it’s choosing to use Web standards or some other technology, whether it’s doing user research or simply going the way we always have, it’s our responsibility to do this.

I’ve dedicated my career to the Web, and I love the Web, and I really hope you guys do too, ’cause we have so much of it left to build.

Thank you very much.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Iain Roberts: Thank you for having us today. It’s been a great day so far, really a varied ton of work that we’ve seen. And hopefully this is gonna be something a little bit different.

We in Chicago have a pretty strong digital, physical, kind of integrated user experience team, and so we’re gonna try and tell a story literally of a project that we did back in 2007. So it’s interesting that we’ve been talking today a lot about the iPad, and when we actually began this program, the iPhone didn’t exist. And we were having lunch with Gary Braddock, who’s one of our clients from Ford here today, and he was saying, “I remember you guys telling us about this mythical tablet-like handheld device that Apple’s gonna produce.” And lo and behold, six months later it came out.

There’s actually a story of this of fairly resourceful project team. This is a slightly tongue-in-cheek starting slide. Imagine nine people stuck in a room for six months, working pretty much like 12- to 14-hour days, eight men, one woman: four interaction designers, one researcher, four mechanical engineers and industrial designers.

The Glade air freshener became jokingly referred to as the innovation spray, ’cause it smelled in there. It was bad. Every morning, Dario Buzzini, who’s actually now our lead interaction designer in Munich, would come in and say, “I think we need some innovation this morning,” but it would actually be lit up into space because we literally camped out and nobody saw us for many months.

So this is a program that Ford came to us back in the end of 2006 and said, “We think we need to do something in user experience, in car experiences.” The first program that we did was called Ford HAL. It was actually focused on defining the principles of an in-car experience, and we knew at this point that we were gonna be fundamentally delivering a platform experience that would ultimately be trickled across everything that they produced from 2011 onwards.

This is actually what’s called a property or a buck in the industry. This was actually the concept we delivered at the end of that first phase of work and was really just intended to inspire senior executives around what features and functions and experiences we could actually deliver to consumers in 2011.

So fast-forward, we’re gonna talk to you actually about the build phase of this program, where we actually went and designed the experience, not just the concept and the research but where we designed the experience. Ford 5 saw us move from fundamentally defining what are the right things to do, what things should Ford go after, what experiences should they deliver. And Ford HAL, the second project, was really focused on making sure we go back out into the world, evaluate our findings and our principles with people, to ensure we’re doing things right, that we deliver that right experience, that the concept – it’s not just a concept. It’s something that makes it to market in its full form.

This is the challenge – two major challenges, one and two, that we kinda came away with. If you look back, actually, to this buck, there were a lot of features and functions we put in here that were very, very different: a full LCD screen in the instrument panel, a very different-looking steering wheel, a completely different center stack, this idea of an enhanced content experience. Ford at this point were just getting into a partnership with Microsoft for SYNC, so we were really looking at an information layer on top of the car experience; it was very different.

As we moved forward with Ford HAL, we were focused on how do we actually present that experience to people in a safe manner, right? We’re driving a car, for god’s sake. Eyes on the road. We’re not trying to overload people. Cognitive overload is an issue here.

But this was the state of the art when we began, right? People were bringing Garmins into their cars, this didn’t exist, and they had iPods. People were bringing increasingly large amounts of their own stuff – we affectionately termed it their baggage – into the car with them, and it was affecting their driving experience. How can we deliver all of that in a safe manner that allows them to continue and focus on the driving experience but also deliver something that’s quite remarkable and allows ‘em to stay connected with their lives?

How do we take what was a standard in the industry referred to as a DIN radio – it’s that way for a reason, because the after-market dictates that you have to have it a certain size so that you can swap a radio out. How do we put a touch screen in the center of the car to deliver the right content, but do it in a way that actually puts the right information in there, that actually allows consumers to get the right experience that they want out of their vehicle?

We started, as we always do, focusing on people we knew, which was kinda interesting for us. Ford had a ton of quantitative market data. We’re doing a feature Ford and a fairly technology-advanced solution here, but the average car buyer’s 57, and Ford were very, very worried about the fact that, fundamentally, people were gonna be very tech-averse.

We went out – we knew this was gonna come out in the CUV market, the Ford Edge; the refresh is happening this year. And we went and looked at drivers of CUVs that spanned the range of everything, of consumer ages and the core consumer as well. And really open their eyes a little bit to the fact that demographics and market data can be deceiving, as we’ve heard again today. And then when we actually dig underneath it and understand that there are some drivers who may be 57 and fit your core target customer but they’re very advanced with regard to their understanding of technology, their use the technology, the fact that they’re integrating it seamlessly in their lives.

This wasn’t the interesting part of this early research study to me, though. This was actually more interesting. We affectionately refer to it as Mr. Potato Head. We took the buck from Phase 1 of the program and we drove home with a dashboard from Ford in the back of another car, and we assembled a research prop, for the sake of a better term, that was everything magnetic. And we would sit there and do research studies with people and allow the generative dynamic conversation to happen fluidly. So as they were talking about features and functions, they could move and they could change them, and they could design with us.

So it was kind of an interesting very early, super-simple prototype that allowed us to talk about what the right things are to do and allow them to have input, but the design cycle was minutes because we just simply added different things to the dashboard and we had different conversations.

I’m not gonna focus on the top here; I’m gonna focus on two elements for me that were most inspiring about our learnings here. The first is that we’re adding this digital layer to the vehicle so that people actually – I actually read this idea that people wanted – that people clustered things in this kinda traditional areas. More that, actually, people wanted a sense of familiarity, right? There’s a new experience that we’re delivering on top of the vehicle platform. We still need to ensure that there’s a familiar essence to getting inside that car. And you’ll see some of those elements in the final prototype we share today.

The second being this pink Post-It note, which I think is genius. As SYNC was bringing a connected service into the vehicle, we were talking a lot about this idea of enhanced content. Again, Yelp was barely on the radar at this point. What if Ford could actually provide recommendations to you as you’re driving as to what the best coffee shop is in your neighborhood? A lot of feedback from people. I trust Ford to get me from A to B; I don’t trust them to make a recommendation. Right?

[Audience laughter]

So how could they partner with services? And actually, they’ve done a tremendous job internally – hats off to them – with their connected services group that’s now going out and working with the likes of Pandora and bringing you the experiences you have on your smartphones, but bringing them to life in the dashboard of vehicles.

Great. You’re not supposed to be able to read this, by the way. That wasn’t the intent. As designers, we try to keep our head in the clouds and our feet on the ground. The first thing we did, knowing we had our first round of feedback from consumers, knowing really what we were trying to design, was “Okay, let’s get the constraints out of the way.” I often find, personally, constraints inspire me to do better work. Ignoring them, and we always fell foul of it towards the end of the program. Getting the constraints out first inspires us to really push and provoke in what we can do.

So we developed, with Gary and his team, a really comprehensive understanding of the information architecture. What were the features and functions that we need to be able to build into this thing? So these were always top of mind as we were going through the design process, even at a very early phase. Everything came back to having to be able to deliver all the features and functionalities that Ford advanced planning had asked for.

In typical IDEO style, prototyping was lo-fidelity early on. First thing we did, the team went into our shop, and I remember them building ten identical yellow foam steering wheels, and literally, prototyping was with anything that we had on hand. We’re trying to, at this point, prototype the tangible interface. The tangible interface, the things I’m gonna touch, the things I’m gonna actually interact with on the steering wheel. Trying to talk about, fundamentally, are we gonna go the direction of a multifunction controller that allows me to be fluid in my interactions in the content I’m consuming, or am I gonna go the direction of simply raising buttons to the higher level on the steering wheel?

What was interesting about this for me was the way in which the team worked together. As I said earlier, we were co-located in one space, and so the team worked in a more integrated manner than I’ve ever seen any team work before in my experience. Designers were talking about steering wheel designs, and literally talking about the interface at exactly the same time. And the interface would inspire and inform the steering wheel, and the steering wheel would inspire and inform the interface. And it literally went round in a reciprocal loop that was real-time, in a way that I haven’t seen it before, and allowed design iterations to just move supremely quickly from one space to the other.

That’s how the team worked probably the first six weeks of the program, is just making, literally in blue foam, yellow foam, and Post-It notes, to get to a point where we knew what the interface was gonna be, we knew what the functionality variations were that we wanted to test, because it was done super-quick, super-simple, and lo-fidelity early on.

At this point we knew, okay, we have a couple of design directions; we now need to go build them. And at that point, I’m gonna actually let Tasos explain a little bit more about actually how we went deep into building these experiences to get a better understanding of the cognitive load and the usability and the actual fundamental – whether or not these experiences were desirable for drivers.

Tasos Karahalios: So as Iain said, at this point we basically come to a point where we understand the overall architecture. We have our first thoughts about what might be the important features to have. But we’re really just trying to get our hands involved and our minds – kind of what’s the next step for us. And at IDEO, one of the most important steps for us really is prototyping.

So what you see here is basically the electrical engineers and the interaction designers on the team just decided “Well, let’s start opening catalogs and just ordering one of everything.” So they just started collecting electronic switches. And we knew that at some point the prototypes are gonna have to function; we knew that it was time for us to start interacting with things, ’cause that’s the only way we can kinda put the sort of theoretical architecture that we’re putting on paper in our hands and actually start believing in it. So this pile shows up on our desks, and then we just kinda use it as a playpen to start interacting with and building quick things and seeing what works and what doesn’t.

The outcome of this, actually, is some quick arduino prototypes. So I don’t know how familiar everybody is with prototyping kits with electronics, but these are simple boards that you can put together and program that then you embed in the prototypes, which enable you to have fairly sophisticated interactions and then give some reality to any prototype so that you can put ‘em in people’s hands. And then you can reprogram them based on if we decide “Hey, we need a different type of functionality” or “We want the prototype to behave somewhat differently.”

So the continuation of the prototyping effort was, as Iain was mentioning, now we had some electronics, we had some basic flows of what we thought we needed to do, and we were sort of now marrying the two with some forms. So you can see here, basically, we have the yellow foam steering wheels here that Iain was describing, and we’re starting to layer on what are the types of interactions, what are the actual physical buttons gonna be like, how are we actually gonna push and kind of manipulate the steering wheel and kind of send information between the different elements of the car.

So we decided upon two very distinct directions. So for one approach, we wanted information architectures to be what we were referring to as sort of like the tasky approach. So by this – and it’s kind of a difficult image to make out, so I’ll kind of highlight the important parts, but these are the types of sketches that actually people sit around and get inspired by and go, “Wait a minute, I see it. I see it; it’s in there somewhere.”

And so on tasky, it was all about having top-level buttons. So if you look along here, these are representing three main categories of buttons. And it was music; it was navigation; it was telephony, which would put you into one category of information. And then with tasky, the goal was really to be able to kinda scroll through large lists of information. So this here is actually representing a scroll wheel, which is hard to see. But the goal was to have one sort of very list-heavy way of navigating information.

And then the second approach that we were keen on we referred to as browsy, which – difficult to tell, so I’ll explain the sketch again. These are actually paddles that are on the sides of the steering wheels, which the goal here was to give you a different means altogether of actually interacting with the information. So by pushing in and out of the paddle, you actually went into levels of information, and then you could push up and down when you were in those different levels to select different activities or features that you wanted.

So, again, the goal here is really, we were trying to show two very distinct ways of navigating the information that you needed to handle, and then put these in front of users to see what did they actually like and what elements of each one could we kinda pull in together.

Iain Roberts: Yeah, it was – we kinda tried not to be right at this stage. We polarized on purpose, the effort being to try and make sure we learned as much as possible in our user testing, to really try and push almost sacrificial concepts to the point at which they broke, to really see what the moments were that worked for people and to learn as much as possible.

Tasos Karahalios: And another fun part in the project, then, is we’re always moving a little too quickly, so time is of the essence, so we decided, well, we need a prototype as fast as possible. What’s available? And sure enough, you go to Target and you find arcade controllers, right? Start hacking these apart, and you find components that are readily available, and you’ll see in another image, basically these are the guts of one of these. It’s a four-way switch, but it embeds real nicely into our prototype of a steering wheel for a paddle, which is actually, if you can tell in the image, it’s basically right here.

So now you can start seeing how it’s all coming together. We have the artevino components here. We have the guts of whatever controllers we can find. And so these are our first pass at having paddle shifters on the actual steering wheel to enable you to have this type of interaction.

And so this was one of two steering wheels that we prototyped. The second one that I was describing before that was more scroll wheel-based, called tasky, started again in the shop with very basic prototyping techniques, right? This is literally two pieces of PVC tubing that somebody put on a dowel rod and said, “All right, I see something here. This is how it’s gonna work.” And so it starts the discussion about what the next type of prototype needs to look and behave like.

It starts becoming very realistic, or a lot more realistic, once you start embedding that little scroll wheel with some quick sketches that one of our industrial designers, our senior designer Jerry O’Leary, was actually putting together. And then we just started putting it all together on a foam-core steering wheel, put this in people’s hands, and you can start having a pretty in-depth conversation about how this is gonna behave. And, again, this is within days that you’re getting lots of prototypes out so you can actually see and have intelligent discussions about what you think might be compromises you need to make for the design and the information architecture.

Again, this is just a quick picture, so the scroll wheel prototype – again, embedded controllers, plenty of button interaction. And our ability to kind of take this quickly into this state means that you can put it back out, ’cause our whole goal here was really to put these prototypes back into the hand of users and let ‘em tell us what they like or they don’t like about them.

Now, one thing to kind of make a clear point about. So we have the hardware, and we’ve discussed kind of the electronics and everything, but married with each of these directions, sort of the tasky and the browsy prototype that I was describing, is a really rich layer of information in terms of what are the screens really gonna look like and how are you gonna navigate through each screen and what are you actually gonna see. So for each of these distinct steering wheel designs and information architectures, we had the team working on basically developing all the screen interfaces that you see as you go, for example, through cruise control. When I click on this button, what’s gonna pop up on screen? And when I go to this position, how’s that gonna look like? So this was no small task to develop all these actual screens and then figure out how we’re gonna embed ‘em into a prototype.

So this is a close-in view of the prototype that I’ll show you in a second, but as we’re basically creating this interaction, we needed to define specific tasks. So this prototype was gonna enable you to do things like respond to somebody calling you. So you’d have to pick up the phone with the prototype. For example, there might be a need to navigate to mom’s house. So there was very predefined tasks that we decided to put some depth into, and that would enable us to kind of give users the opportunity to sort of go through a series of interactions to sort of figure out how to do this. So it was basically a learning experience for the users.

And this was – well, all right, we have the steering wheels. We have the information architecture. We’re trying to put all the pieces together. But we realized that it’s really important to create an environment. So this was our makeshift – this was basically in the basement of our office. We had to make a makeshift, basically, simulator.

And so the way this happened is we repurposed the previous buck that Iain had shown you before that was a Mr. Potato Head. And we said, “All right, what else can we do with this?” And we started laying in components, like an LCD screen, behind the cockpit in here. Might be hard to tell, but we actually wired up through the steering column. So essentially, this became a plug-and-play toy, where we could take the two steering wheels and any other versions that we came up with, plug ‘em right in. We could have the visual screens that we were developing come on at the appropriate times within the cockpit, and we could also have another touch-screen display, which was here in the center console.

So as the other key point that I’ll kinda emphasize later as well is, we needed to create an environment that felt realistic, and it’s kind of funny to think of a PlayStation Gran Turismo 3 game as making things realistic. But once we put the projector screen in front and we gave people tasks to do, one of the instructions we gave them ism “Whatever we tell you to do, make sure you don’t fall off the road, and you have to continue driving.” And it made a significant difference in how actually people interacted with things and how they described sort of the effectiveness of certain types of techniques to navigate through tasks.

So the way to actually do that for us was hacking together a PlayStation 3 underneath here, which was a lot of fun. This is just a simple steering wheel controller that you would purchase, or maybe one of your kids or yourselves have at home, but basically we hacked it apart a little bit, tied the steering column into it, and at this point it became sort of a – basically a very fun, adult, large-scale game console. [Laughter]

Iain Roberts: I mean, yeah, it was force feedback as well, right?

Tasos Karahalios: Yeah.

Iain Roberts: It was fun.

Tasos Karahalios: And it was great ’cause it kept people late at night working, ’cause they wanted just play games on this anyway.

[Audience laughter]

So it’s a good way to keep the team going around the clock.

Now, the testing environment, at this point we’re bringing in users again. We had approximately eight people coming in, and as I was describing, we had one of our researchers standing right next to them, sitting basically in the passenger seat, and instructing them on certain tasks that they wanted them to perform. We also had random events, so as they were driving and trying to stay on the road and not fall off the cliff, they had to answer the phone; they had to figure out how to navigate to mom’s house.

And the interesting thing was, initially, when we had ‘em go through these tasks, everybody was just looking at the center console, which was in the larger top screen. You could perform certain tasks there very easily. And as soon as you said, “Don’t fall off the road; pay attention,” you could immediately tell which interactions needed to stay on the steering wheel, which ones were not distracting enough to enable them to go on the console. So it gave the sense of realism in a very sort of lo-fidelity simulator environment that we actually thought was instrumental in sort of defining the types of behaviors and the types of interactions we wanted from people.

Iain Roberts: On the right here is – three floors above this, we actually had the entire team watching all these sessions, live video feed. And so, again, it allowed us, in the same way that the magnetic dashboard allowed us to make changes on the fly, this kinda feedback loop – one kind of opened the Ford teams’ eyes to what was going on and to what was working and what wasn’t working, into a completely new process.

I mean, these guys have multimillion-dollar vehicle simulators, right? But the waiting list to get in one of those is months. Right? You have to have a – we would’ve been laughed off the property if we turned up with a Gran Turismo game and this heap of whatever, right? To go in their driving simulators.

We had to create one, and we had to open their eyes to actually this way of rapid prototyping and rapid working that allowed us to effect change really quickly as well. Even in the testing protocol that we were using, we could see things that weren’t working, and the feedback was immediate to go down for the next test participant.

Tasos Karahalios: And so the outcome of that work was actually understanding what are the kinda key elements that people liked of the two different information architectures. And then we pulled all that information back together into a final version now. It doesn’t look that much different, because this was a stage of refinement. But at this stage, we were basically saying, well, there were certain types of interactions and behaviors that worked well from tasky, as I was describing before, and certain types of interactions and behaviors that were working well from browsy, which was the other type of interaction. And we decided to kind of figure out what’s the best way to create a hybrid, and what are the elements that make sense to sort of take from each type of interaction and pull ‘em into one final direction.

So this was a final round of testing where, again, we had users sit down with functional buck, go through all sorts of screen layouts, go through all sorts of interactions, and describe to us as a final pass what was working and what wasn’t. And so this buck that started off as Mr. Potato Head got used at least three or four times with – by the end of the day, it was probably 30 user interviews and countless that we as a team performed on our own to kind of understand what we needed to change.

Iain Roberts: I think in a 20-week program, we actually went through four major research iterations, from the Mr. Potato Head to the fully immersive experience to a refined experience to a final experience. And that kind of speed of process was actually just critical to actually getting this done in time.

Tasos Karahalios: Yeah. And the end result is – one glimpse of it is here – was doing a refined buck that had all the levels of interaction that we thought were appropriate. And, again, what was key here was to preserve sort of what are the key elements from an interaction point of view, so of course we weren’t able to program every level of detail in, but we selected out a few specific tasks and said, “All right, what does cruise control look like when you interact with cruise control? What does navigating through my music library look like?” And so by putting those elements into a refined buck, we were able to give Ford and talk with Ford about what are the key elements that then you would kind of take on to any other interactions that might evolve from that point on.

Iain Roberts: Yeah. Right.

Tasos Karahalios: So yup.

Iain Roberts: So I mean, if you – we can walk through some of the details of this, but this final prototype – a lot of the questions we get is, “Well, why didn’t the final product have, like, the production solution?” Because we didn’t design the production solution. This is almost the information architecture design principles embedded in a physical thing that we can show to executives to get them excited about the fact they’re gonna go away and make this. This is a real thing that’s gonna require multiple millions of dollars’ worth of investment. And, again, this is a platform, a platform that is gonna go – starts with the 2011 Ford Edge this year, and then will go across every single vehicle that Ford makes. I think it was about 80 percent of their fleet from here on in will have this interface in it. Big investment, requires us to create something that’s gonna generate buzz.

If you look at the details, they’re really simple things, right? Right-hand side of the steering wheel is my stuff. Right-hand side of the steering wheel refers to my telephone, my navigation, my media, my communication, with some very high-level buttons that allow me to control master switches such as volume, but super-simple and multifunctional controller that ultimately has gone from a paddle to a four-way controller. Left-hand side of the vehicle – steering wheel – is my car stuff. Right? Cruise control, vehicle information, trip odometer, things like that.

This spatial mapping allows people to do one thing really, really effectively. This maps to the information on the interim panel above it, and it allows people with some very simple and nuanced color coding in the final implementation to fundamentally keep their eyes on the road and see what they’re doing using peripheral vision.

We actually tested the final prototype in New York earlier this year, which was an interesting situation, ’cause exactly what we saw in that test that Tasos outlined, people using the center console because it looks rich and glossy and iPad-esque. And then as soon as they’re asked to drive, they have to use this, and their eyes go to this. And this thing is a godsend in terms of having this really simple information architecture that allows me to answer the phone, that allows me to play whatever song I want on my iPod or on my central – on the server on the car, that allows me to set cruise control in a way that’s simple and understandable. And, again, similar to the center console.

Interestingly, here we were recommending – and, again, we kinda dialed up the contrast here, no pun intended, but old-school switches, right? This is harking back, us trying to make the point that people are looking for some level of tangibility in the final thing. You could, because you have a screen in the car, put all of the functionality into it, but you need to leave some things out that make it familiar and understandable when they get into the vehicle. We didn’t anticipate that Ford would create rotary dials or use rotary dials, which they haven’t, but they have kind of leveled off and made sure that there’s tangibility in the vehicle, and they kinda balance that tangible and digital experience really well.

So as I said, this was a prototype. It was almost a delivery mechanism for our principles, and on top of that, we’ve clearly delivered a 400-page guidelines documentation, as we were intending to do, and design principles to keep ‘em true and honest, which now populate design studios within Ford. But, again, really, that 400-page book isn’t gonna light anybody up. It tells you what to do once you’re doing the project; the prototype is there to really allow them to get behind the idea.

So this was the final thing that we delivered. Pretty simplified on presentation. It was an amazing experience. It was one of the experiences I will probably remember from my career at IDEO is this – the purposefulness and the resourcefulness that this team used to pull this together in such a period of time.

And then this is the final implementation. As you can see, looks different, but fundamentally the underlying information architecture is the same. The way in which the switches are being used on the steering wheel is the same; the color coding is the same. There are a lot of the principles that are here and resident in it, and we did an interview this morning and were demonstrating the system in the parking lot. It works great. Right?

And so this will be available on the Ford Edge 2011 at the end of this year, and on the Lincoln MKX. It’s going to production. Thank you.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Thanks so much for having me here today. I’m really excited to be here. And although I’m onstage, I wanna say thanks to the folks in the mixed-methods workshop yesterday, ’cause we had a great conversation, and we’re gonna hopefully keep that conversation going.

And so what I’m gonna talk a little bit about today is some of the ways one can understand what people are up to with the Internet and some of the results of that. So I always like big numbers. Like anybody, it’s like, “Whoa, 28.7 of the world’s population is on the Internet as of a couple of months ago.” And if you see from the March 2009 statistic, it’s growing.

And I think we’re all, especially in the Internet world, obsessed with how many people are doing this, how many people are online. And the opening talk this morning was talking about the view counts and how numbers are so important to us.

Here’s how it starts to break down in terms of percentage of people online in numbers. And the reason I wanted to put this up is because I’m really interested, like many of the folks in the audience and the speakers, in particular cultural contexts for the uptake in use of the Internet. And I mean cultures by, like, nation cultures, but also personal cultures, like am I an adolescent, what’s my demographic, what is it that I’m trying to do right now.

And I definitely – I’m of the opinion – I don’t think many people would argue with this, but that we have many different faces that we put on for different people. And so I have a culture of work, where I have a particular presentation of self, and then there’s the culture at home, where I have a different presentation of self. So I’m interested in that notion of culture more broadly.

And I just put up – I’ve bolded places where I’ve done ethnographic fieldwork and where I’ve actually done design work with excellent design teams: U.S., U.K., Spain, and Japan. And I think that the places that we work also inform and affect how we think about other people and our relationship to other people and to technologies, and how those technologies transform those relationships. So I’m very much of the opinion that we should get out and go out and see other things and really be observant about how other people are using things, because that changes the way we might view ourselves and think about design in the future.

So what are all these people doing? Now, I’m a psychologist originally, and so the large aggregate numbers are very exciting to me, but I cannot help but have the next question be: So who are they, and what are they up to? What are they doing, and why are they doing it? And what would they do differently if we gave them different tools, if they were in different circumstances?

So there are many different ways of understanding experience, and this group is more educated than most, I suspect, about some of these methods. We, as I say, had a great set of conversations, and I heard about whole new slew of methods that are being developed out there yesterday in the workshop.

But these are some of the things that my group at Yahoo do. We do field studies, and we do interviews in situ, but we actually do go and shadow people and run around after them. And I’ve just been working with a student to come up with a set of sensor-based technologies so we can kind of augment the person, more for fun right now, to see how we can get different kinds of data about what people are up to. That’s in a study about how people go shopping. And we have an instrumented shopping bag so that we have the point of view of the shopping bag, to see how the shopping bag gets on the shopping exercise.

We have prototypes that we put out there, and those could be anything from mock-ups through to full-blown prototypes. I’m gonna show you a couple today. We do activity/love analysis, so instrumentation of those prototypes is paramount.

And one of the things I think that’s really interesting is, when one is cast as someone in the design space, often one is put in the position of, like, where you do the front-end piece, and that’s so not true, as I’m sure most of us know here. It’s not just – and I use the word “just” specifically – the front-end piece. But also, if you actually want to do some real analysis of what’s going on, we think very deeply about how you do an evaluation of what you’ve put out there.

So understanding the back end and how instrumentation works is absolutely crucial, and my team is very strong at thinking about that and working with engineers to say, what’s gonna get started in the database? Will it slow down performance? How will I get those logs out? What am I gonna do with the analyses?

We do a lot of surveys, and we do a lot of data mining and visualization. I’m gonna show you an example of the data we gather.

We are what I called yesterday methodological mutts. We draw from psychology, anthropology, design research, sociology, computer science, to try and understand what are good new ways that we can develop, and old ways we can borrow and modify to understand what people are up to.

Here are some of the ways that people talk about people. Right? People: the users, their groups, their networks. And here are some of the methods that typically I talk about most days. Oh, unique visitors; page views; visits; return visits – I’m gonna go back to bounce rate – time spent per session; relevant actions taken, where relevance is often predetermined by what we think people should do or could do or would do; network centrality. We’ve heard about Twitter. We’ve been doing a lot of studies in my group about network centrality. Inbound links and outbound links.

Bounce rate is really important because everyone says, “Oh, what happened? They bounced off. Are they happy? Are they sad?” And I always think about these kinds of measures. I feel like I’m in a séance. I’m getting all of this sort of signal, but I don’t really know what’s happening out there, ’cause often I’m looking at the data later, after the person’s gone, and trying to make sense of what on earth were they doing to leave these traces behind.

So it’s kind of like an archaeological experiment half the time, and I’m really interested in the ways in which – when I talk to people, depending on their focus, I say, “Yeah, but those users are part of a network, and if you’re looking at centrality and you’ve got a node and a node, how do the nodes feel about each other? And what’s happening between that connection?” And sure, it’s important that we have more people connected than ever before, but what are they doing, and how is it changing their relationships? We’ve had – a couple of the speakers have already brought that up today.

So what is this thing about meaning, feeling? What does it mean to be connected? And I think that Christian talked about services and this idea that we’re building a long-term relationship with people. And the bounce rate matters ’cause they’re gonna come back, but we sort of need to be careful about their privacy and be concerned, but find other ways that are ethically and methodologically sound to understand why they went away, how they felt about it, and what would bring them back in a sort of service relationship.

So I’m really personally interested, and this talk is gonna focus on the sort of emotional connection. And I’m gonna show you a couple of applications which are really about the real-time Web. We were looking at YouTube videos earlier, and I’m really interested in the distinction between – the difference between asynchronous connection and synchronous, real-time connection. And I’m not talking so much about Chatroulette; I’m talking about – although that would be really fun to talk about. But I’m talking about what happens when people in real time work together.

And the takeaways, for those of you who are getting really hungry, ’cause I’m standing between you and lunch – so you can leave after this if you want to – words are tricky, and they have baggage. And when we talk about users or groups or networks, we’re talking about people and that it’s really important that the methods that we use, we don’t let them be myopic and push us to saying, “I only care about users, and I only care about what they’re doing on the page,” but to really start asking those questions and using methods and inventing methods about what does it mean for people to be there, ’cause that’s what’s gonna create a service that’s gonna grow with them as time goes on.

No one-size-fits-all measure. It’s a moving target. I teach at Berkeley, and I’ve taught in the past when I was in academia, and one of the things – I used to work with students a lot and say, “I know I’m teaching you experimental methods and statistics, but you have to know what your questions are and use the right method, and don’t be afraid – because you think of yourself as an experimental psychologist or you think of yourself as a computer scientist – to go and try and do a fieldwork study.” If you think yourself an anthropologist and you’ve always done qualitative work, think about doing quantitative work, ’cause the distinction between qualitative and quantitative are not as big as you think. You can make anything into numbers, and you can interpret anything for meaning.

So don’t just say, “I’m a network analyst, and I don’t really care about what’s happened with the nodes; I just wanna know they’re connected.” And I’m being extreme, but I think the baggage and the limitations often come in the way we perform who we think we are as researchers.

So here, think about the lure of numbers: “Ooh, how many people have we got on our service?” And don’t also just think about “I only look at the user.” So there’s the devils in the details, yes, but we should look at the big numbers. And the big numbers don’t tell you everything, so triangulate and always question your questions.

So hopefully I’m gonna show you a couple of things where we’ve tried to do that. But these are the sort of organizing principles that I try to go in when I’m doing a study or a project.

I’m gonna try and talk about a couple of these, but I just wanna give you a flavor for the kinds of studies that we’ve done in my group. The top one, we had – Yahoo had a service called Yahoo Live, which was a webcasting service, which I personally loved, and we had – people had channels.

And so you could have your Live up in the corner, top left. You’ve got a chat space, and these are webcams of people who are checking into your channel. The ferret channel was quite well traveled, surprisingly. It was literally a camera on some ferrets, but apparently lots of people came and clicked and viewed. Why, we don’t know, but they did. Well, they were quite cute, actually.

We studied DJs who were webcasting and doing live shows, to start to look at how does a person, a DJ, (a) use all of these different features, like view counts and chat and making eye contact with people in their little webcam boxes, in order to create a sense of audience and connection and to try out tracks that they’re doing and mixes that they’re doing, but also – because that’s a lot of work that they’re doing, right? So how could we help change the interface?

But also we went out and we interviewed people about where does this, as a performance space, sit into your other performance spaces? How are you reaching your primary constituencies, which are the people who listen to you, other DJs, and potential people who might get you deals? And so it was a bigger picture about what we could do with this tool, but also where could we design a service down the line to help people like DJs, but people who are like me, who might like to practice something, or educationalists, on how to use a technology like this.

The next one, I put “inclusion/exclusion.” That is a network diagram of people asking questions about Yahoo Pipes, which was a visual programming language that got released by Yahoo.

And so what we did was we did content analysis of the questions, but we also just did a network analysis of whose questions are getting answered and by whom. And you can’t see my little egg very well, but you can see there are some people who are answering a lot of questions and to whom questions are being essentially directed. And then there’s the poor people around the edges. That edge that you can see are people whose questions never got answered. Oh, they went away.

And when we looked at why those questions weren’t being answered, often it was because people didn’t know how to express the question. They were newbies. Now, the question I posed was, do we care about newbies, and do we wanna make them into experts? Do we want to understand what this means to them and help bring them along? In which case we might design a different service around a community involvement to help people learn language and learn how to ask questions that get answered.

But you wouldn’t have known that from just the – if I just talked to a few people, I wouldn’t have gotten the sense that there’s a lot of people out there in that outer ring not being answered. And if I just looked at that and hadn’t gone to actually talk to some of the people whose questions didn’t get answered, or done a content analysis on it, I might not have really understood that some number of those people weren’t just a bounce rate ’cause they didn’t care; they were a bounce because they did care but they didn’t know how to be included. They didn’t know how to get inculcated, invited to the community.

So I’m gonna go on and I’m gonna talk about the other two in a little bit more detail. But first I wanna tell you about my favorite thing, Flickr. So Flickr has over 40 million users in November 2009. I think it’s actually quite a bit more than that, but I was just trying to get some numbers for you, ’cause I want those big numbers, little ones.

And I love Flickr, and everyone’s “Ooh, you know, we’ve got loads of people on Flickr, and it’s all very exciting, and they’re sharing photos.” Great. But they’re also doing a whole lot of other things. So I did a site analysis where I spent – and I kind of spending time – it’s very hard for me to do participant observation on Flickr, because I love photos, and it was such a pain but I did it.

People document and they have personal and collective memories. We know that people upload a lot of pictures that never get made public, that never get any kind of information change on them at all. They’re archiving.

So it’s not just a public sharing space. They’ve got their collective memories. They’re archiving and putting things into groups and sets for other people for whom they believe – with whom they believe these shared artifacts create meanings, and let relationships continue despite distance and time.

There’s a lot of people competing. They wanna be in the top interesting category; they want to be the best in their class or better than their friends at photography or at whatever it might be, telling stories with photos.

People want to belong. People come there for affiliation. It’s like, “Well, you know, I started taking photos, and I’m a stay-at-home mom, and I don’t get out very much. But I reach out to all of my friends through Flickr, and I’ve met this new moms’ group online, and I’m really making new connections there.” This is not different from other Internet sites. I just – I’m really interested in how it manifests in Flickr.

People learn. There are loads of educational groups. People informally learning or formally learning. And there’s this awareness near and far that I alluded to earlier of “I know what you’re up to, but I’m away,” and it’s a very light touch. We hear about touch points. This is an emotional touch point space for a lot of people.

And there’s also vanity and voyeurism: Who’s looking at my stuff, and what are they doing? And there’s a huge amount of browsing around. We know from logs that people often just hit on friends of friends of friends of friends and bounce around and spend time just browsing.

And we did a study where we looked at people and we characterized them as, you know, butterflies or self-presenters or whatever. We had a series of categories, and one person could have many roles. And people were partitioning who had access to pictures, and sometimes having multiple accounts in order to have these different roles, those faces I mentioned at the beginning, the different faces that we put to different people.

So it’s not just a big lot of numbers. It’s actually a lot of people finding meaning and behaving and expressing themselves in different ways. Oh, what did I do? I hit the wrong one. Woo, that was a bit shocking.

And this, I wanna show you about this. So one of the things I’m really obsessed about is access control, ’cause as someone who talks consistently about having different faces to different publics and being socially appropriate – I don’t think it’s just a British trait – I’m very worried or concerned or interested in how people manage their online identities. And I’ve been working on some of that with my colleague, Shelly Farnham, about this notion of faceted identity, which is something that also Dana Boyd talks about a lot, another friend.

Anyway, so this is old work, but I did wanna share it with you because I think it shows – it illustrates the relationship or the power of the aggregate to the individual in doing both.

So what we did was, these old data, 2005, I want you to take away the message of the method, not the specific data. We just visualized where people’s self-reported location in the world and what they’ve done with their access-control privileges on Flickr. We took people who had more than, I think at the time, like 25, 30 pictures and who were active, and we just sampled. Now, this is self-reported location. We did not do any tracking of anybody. All we did – we didn’t look at the pictures – was “Did you change your access-control privileges?”

Now, there’s an old myth in the human/computer interaction literature that nobody ever changes the defaults. So I wanna tell you that the defaults were public at this time, and what you’re seeing here is, if most of your pictures are private, it’s red; if most of your pictures are public, it’s green. Now, if I had just done an aggregate the whole of Flickr and hadn’t thought about “You know, there’s cultural differences. I wonder…” And we just visualized it, and this doesn’t really tell you anything except there’s something going on. Something’s going on.

So we followed this up, and we did a survey. We contacted people on Flickr who were friends of friends of friends, using a snowball method. We phoned people where we couldn’t actually go and do field interviews, and talked to people in Scandinavia or in the U.K., and just started to find out – we recorded everything that people said and did a discourse analysis around people’s awareness of being public or private.

And it turned out that people in the U.K. and Scandinavia were much more likely to talk about things like you never know who’s looking; data privacy is a really important issue. It’s not just about keeping yourself safe; it’s about putting things up that I don’t want to have offend anybody else.

Folks we talked to in the Bay Area were like, “Yeah, I don’t care. Just stick it up there. It’ll be fine. Nobody’s gonna be interested in me.” And I mean, it was just really fascinating.

The other thing we found, and we did this – we did a data check for this as well for self-reported age and the number of people you knew. As you get older, you tend to have more things private. But it turned out that most people weren’t worried about themselves; they were like, “Well, there’s pictures of my kids on there now. And so I would’ve had everything public for me.” Now, this might not surprise any of us, but it was not in the data as they were just laid out; we had to go and ask people. “We bought a house. I don’t wanna show everybody everything.”

People who had more than 12 friends were more likely to have more things public. People who had fewer than 3 friends were more likely to have more things public. People in the middle tended to have smaller groups, and they tended to keep more things private.

Now, these numbers are all over the place now, but it was just an interesting set of things that led us to design a series of access-control privilege – things that you could do with pictures, access control on pictures and so forth, and this was before sets could be private, which could have led to a series of patents and so forth. As far as I’m aware, none of those have actually come out, which is another story about doing design, ’cause there’s a whole other context of how things get taken up in the business world. But I think that it’s an illustration of how we understand a lot more deeply that cultural difference matters.

So I now wanna talk about trust. I’m staying with sort of emotion and one of my favorite topics, dating. I did this work with Elizabeth Goodman, who has worked with me a few times as an intern; she’s a student at UC Berkeley. And we studied dating, and we were really interested – the person who was the product manager at the time invited us to come and just think about dating.

And so at that time, I can’t remember how many, but I just looked up some numbers for you a couple days ago. There’s about 94.9 million Americans, 31 percent of Americans, people here have been online dating. People seldom admit it these days. I don’t know why, but they have. Twenty million people a month visit online dating services. So it’s big business, big numbers.

So what’s going on? How are those people feeling? I’ve got scads of data on this, but I’m gonna just go quick.

I’m interested in the metrics, remember? Page views, etc., etc., data mining. We did data mining. We did comparative and competitive site analysis. We did a survey of 600 people. We followed up with phone interviews with about 50 people, and then we went out and did field interviews with – I think it ended up being about 26 people. And we asked them if we could interview them at home or go to their favorite first-date location.

And we focused on people who are in their 30s, mostly, and who have other priorities. And the reason for that – there were two reasons. One is that the demographic for Yahoo Personals tend to skew a little older. Most people who want a quick hookup go to PlentyofFish or other places. There are many other places out there. I can give you a list of ‘em. If anyone’s interested, tell me your proclivities and I will make some recommendations.

[Audience laughter]

We also – I’m personally fascinated by how people manage time and space and build relationships with other people, so I wanted people who were sort of serious about finding somebody and had to navigate schedules and calendars.

The thing we found, out of all of these numbers – oh, I’ve got a little statistic for you, a little tidbit for you. So when we were doing the data mining, it turns out that blokes tend to go online, and their strategy is “You know, those 200 women, they might be interested in me. I’m sending every single one of them a wink. Pfft.” Women are like, “Hmm, he looks nice. What do you think? Should I send him a message?” So the women come home from work and they’re, like, looking at their results, and they’re like, “Holy – no. No way. I can’t see this. I can’t see the wood for the trees here.” And the guys are like, “Where’s the action? Why is no one getting back to me?”

Now, those are very different strategies that may well be rooted in a particular kind of dating strategy that we might say would be gendered or cultured. But it has a very significant consequence for the back-end algorithms of how you match and present and make sure that people feel like they’re getting a service from your service, okay? It really matters.

And aside from that tidbit, I’m gonna talk about anxiety. Remember, I’m a psychologist. So these forms. I’m sure many of you have filled out these forms. It’s like, how do you turn yourself into a list of attributes? Remember the faces to different public whatevers? When I’m with my triathlete friend, I am an unfit slob, right? Unfit slob. I come home, unfit slob. Where’s that?

[Audience laughter]

But yesterday I spent the day with my beer-swilling British friend who I think the last time he exercised was possibly – was not this millennium. And I was like, “I am rockin’ sporty, I’m super-sexy, and I like to go out, and I don’t drink much.” Right? So there’s this huge anxiety and this presentation of self which is really difficult. Now, we need it for the algorithms, right? ‘Cause that’s how our algorithms work.

But people are looking at this, and then they’re like, “Well, I didn’t get any results. Well, I’ll just pretend I’m actually 39, ’cause maybe the algorithm will work better for me that way.” And then you show up. You show up on your first date, and everybody looks – “You said you were sporty, and you’re a beer-swilling slob. And you said you were 39.” It’s like, “I wasn’t lying to you. I wasn’t lying to you; I was lying to the algorithm.”

[Audience laughter]

And I just think that that’s an interesting – because we think of us as a service provider putting two people together who want a relationship, and we think we’re invisible. We’re not. People are not that disinterested. They are having a conversation with us and with the algorithms. I think we were talking earlier about personalization, and if you wanna have a different result from Google, do something different. That’s a relationship with an algorithm.

There’s also people here who said to us, “Do you people, like, read my messages? Because, you know, I didn’t get this guy recommended yesterday, but he’s showing up today. And I only put yesterday – I said that I like to play mandolin, and he showed up. Did you read that?” No. I can tell you, we’ve got a lot of users. We’re not reading every message. But it’s an interesting way of understanding the world and building a relationship with this world.

One other thing we found was this notion of intensities of effort. So one of the little things you can have is, you drop down; you say, “I want to only date somebody who is approximately three feet away from me” all the way up to “the globe.” And it turned out that people – and we had a sort of model that casual daters wouldn’t put a lot of effort in, but serious daters would.

And actually, we talked to people who – one person in particular who really wants a relationship and will not go further than the corner, because it’s like, “If they don’t like me as I am, they don’t – not involved.” Another person who was completely – “I’m totally casual, but I’m gonna fly to D.C. this weekend to meet this guy.”

And I mean, I’m not saying that that’s the right answer either. What I’m saying is that it’s more nuanced than that set of assumptions around behavior and what it has as meaning for those individuals. And so one of the things we were really interested in just like breaking out – so what does these sites do? What is their service? Well, they work here. Make a profile, match and select. Highly computational.

What we don’t do is have an explicit conversation or provide tools to allow people to have explicit conversations with us and with each other. A date diary might be one. A calendar of dating might be another. Recommending certain kinds of events that you might like to do would be another, where we see whether you like them or not, and if you don’t, then we have a different picture of you. There are lots of ways to do this, and we designed a whole slew of them.

But the one I wanna just talk about right now is this idea of planning the date, ’cause one of the things we found really interesting is, okay, we’ve matched you up; now fly free, help yourselves, find yourselves, whatever. Now, we have a set of services at Yahoo, like maps and recommendations for things to do. And so what Liz and I thought was, well, why don’t we bring together maps and recommendations from various sources in a mash-up. So now you found somebody that you want to date; let’s help you plan that first date.

Now, this came specifically from an observation that people said, you know, “I’m on the phone, and then he said this” or “then she said that.” And then we sent an e-mail, and now he’s sent me four e-mails, and I don’t have to time to –” So we haven’t even met yet, and we’re like, is this guy – and he’s thinking, “I really wanna give her lots of choices,” and she’s thinking, “Will he stop already? I don’t know.”

And, you know, it was actually not even that people – they’re emotional and anxious already, right? So remember that I talked about real-time communication? I was like, well, why don’t we let them plan it together? Why don’t we just say, “Okay, here you are. On the left, you’ve got the results from Yahoo Locals. You’ve put something in. Down here you’ve got a chat space.” You can see I’m never gonna get a date, ’cause I put in the stinking rose.

[Audience laughter]

It’s gonna end instantly. [Laughter] That is a live chat space where you can literally go to a point on the map, you click on it, and it opens up, and I can leave a little note there. So if you are online right now, you can see me type, and I can go, “Look, this is where I think we should go,” which is like pointing to a page. If you’re not online, it stays there as a little bookmark or a little notelet for you to look at later. And it’s just sort of step through some of these.

We have a picture-in-picture on the map, and this is really important because if you let me see where you’re searching – so imagine we’re both, real time, sharing this live map, right? In real time. We’re seeing the same thing. We’ve got chat space going. You take off to Berkeley while I’m still in San Francisco, ’cause they’re loosely coupled, these maps. You’re not controlling it. It’s loosely coupled.

I see a picture-in-picture of the fact that you’ve hopped off to Berkeley, so I might get a clue without having to explicitly ask you, “Ooh, maybe you wanna be in Berkeley.” ‘Cause a lot of human relationships are about sending subtle cues through our behavior, which are completely missing when you’re like, “Do you wanna go to Berkeley or what?” You know? I didn’t have to say anything. I just went to Berkeley on the map, and you saw me do that.

The live chat – oh, British food. I’m still not gonna get a date.

[Audience laughter]

This is a live link, because when I made that thing up there, the chat space, the chat from there also appears here in the log with the live link back. What we tried to do was give lots of hyperlinks that you could move between different communication spaces.

You’ve got your contacts – I’m gonna come back to contacts in a second – got your search results, and you’ve got your bundled favorites. So imagine that I have decided the perfect date is gonna be five or six little things that we do. I haven’t invited you yet. So I say, “We’re gonna go to Fisherman’s Wharf, and then we’re gonna go and eat fish and chips, and then we’re gonna go and watch a film about fish and chips.” And I send that off to you, and I bundle it all up, and I send it off, and I say, [Imitates French accent] “I planned the day. Would you like to join me?” All right, so you come in. I don’t know why I got French. That was very French. It’s ’cause the British are actually jealous of the French. [Laughter]

But, you know, “I’ve planned my day, and I’d love you to come and join me.” And so you come in, and you have a look, and actually, you’ve decided that because of my fish and chips fetish, you’re really not interested in me. No worry, ’cause I’ve bundled my favorites and so I can go, “So, Johnny, would you like to come on my date?”

[Audience laughter]

So you’ve bundled it all around, right? And I kinda figured there was a whole service model where we could get the Don Juans or Don Juanitas of the world to make us the ideal date and bundle them up and sell them, and then import them to map chat and look like we’re really cool.

The other thing we did was, you can make the searches that you’re doing – remember loosely coupled? You can make the searches that you’re doing private or public. So I’m over here searching away fish and chips, or steak. And you’re over there, and I look at your searches, which you’ve let me see. But remember, it’s a subtle cue. You don’t know that I’m looking, but it is available. And you’ve put “vegan” in. That might give me a clue without having to say, “Do you eat meat?” and then the vegan going, “Oh, no. No way, I can’t date you.” So I can sort of subtly start searching for vegan to impress you.

[Audience laughter]

It doesn’t have to be on; you can turn it off. I’ve told you about the picture-in-picture zoom.

Anyway, so it all comes together. There it is. And what I wanna say is that that back-end algorithm stuff – I work for a company that’s interested in advertising. I personally shop constantly, so advertising is fine for me as long as it’s not cellulite or yellow teeth. Anything else, send it my way; I might be interested.

So one of the things that we did was we actually mined what was being chatted about and what was being selected, and we’ve got your location. Now, remember, this is a prototype, so we instrumented it, and anybody who used it had signed up to let us use the data ’cause they knew what we were going to do. One would have to be more careful if this were actually put out there for real. But we started to mine what people were talking about and where they were talking about it, and we just did this sort of social opinion mining and made recommendations.

Now, why this matters is because I might be talking to my work friends about a day out for work, and the things I’m gonna be looking for might be very different. And so that conversation for a social group would require a different set of recommendations for ads than if I’m with my potential date. So I don’t want the same things, like, you know, T.G.I. Friday’s or whatever. I want French Laundry so that I’m, like, you know, getting posh things.

And so what we’re trying to do here is make those recommendations of value to you – not personalization, but a value to you in the social context you currently have, with the current face you have on. Because if I talk to Ben – fellow Brit – about Wimbledon, he probably – he would think, “Does she mean the tube station, or does she mean tennis?” If I talk to my American friends about Wimbledon, they know I mean tennis because there’s no reason why I’d be talking to them about the tube station. So different recommendations for different social faces, for ambiguous words.

We actually tested this out, and the algorithms are – our back-end stuff is not – ’cause it’s a prototype – not completely right. But I remember writing somebody, “Yeah, I will do that. That’s excellent.” And all of the recommendations I got were for last will and testament. So you have to be a little careful how you implement that. That’s the prototype.

One last project. We have a few minutes here. This notion of synchronous real time and how that buys you a different emotional relationship to each other, that you’re doing something together, sharing an experience. We’ve talked about sharing videos before. And a lot of this is like, “Oh, I don’t know that you’re there at the same time.” So if I knew that you were watching at the same time, maybe I’d chat with you about it. ‘Cause things are separate. We’ve certainly got social elements, but you could be there anytime.

So we built something. This is the brainchild of Ayman Shamma, who works with me. And we’re all obsessed with this same kind of synchronous get people talking to each other. It’s called Zync. It is available with Instant Messenger 9. I think it’s not even a plugin now; I think you just get it.

And what it lets you do is it lets you drop a URL to a video into an IM, and you can watch it at the same time as me. So here’s this dialogue. There’s the link. You click on it, and basically a button says “Watch with me,” and then it opens, and I’m watching at the same time as you.

And we talked to a few of the engineers about this. They said, “Yeah, but what about control?” And I said, “Let the social controls take place here. If you stop it, I’ve gotta type out, ‘Oy, what you doing? Why are you doing that?’” Right? If it got a little out of sync, which it can do with little lags – “Hey, hang on a minute.” If I stop it, if I start it, if I scrub it – we can talk about making that shared experience a shared experience.

So let me see if this works. So you can see here, we’re sort of like just chatting away. And what we did with this – we put it out. We tried it with a bunch of people, and we really kind of cast it as the insight that, if you’re sitting next to somebody on the sofa, you’re gonna be chatting in real time about something.

So what we’re trying to create here is that feeling of being on the sofa with somebody even when you’re far away. And looks like it’s just stopped. Which is my video, not it. Hello. Any idea why this might be doing this? Well, poo.

[Audience laughter]

Well, what would have happened – I’m gonna perform it for you now –

[Audience laughter]

– is there’s a screen here, and it was very loud. And it was an ad, actually. But it was two people arguing about whether they’d been to a place or not, and sharing it in real time.

And so back to the thing about instrumentation. We had all of these things. We had all of these data. Remember the meaning, feeling, connection, long-term value? And we had the data, so this was – the first part of that was released over there, and it’s gone up here, and we’ve got loads of these, and people like that. And we have about 400 million people a month. That right? No, 400,000 people, not million. Apologies. Four hundred thousand people a month, half a million using this.

But we wanted to instrument for experience and feeling, not just being present and using. So we’ve recorded the type of event. We’ve got an anonymous hash which identifies senders and receivers without any information about them at all. We have a URL to the shared video, time stamps. We’ve got the player time, number of characters and the number of words typed. We do not keep chat, but we can see how much you’ve chatted. Emoticons, we can keep because apparently that’s okay. I love emoticons ’cause, actually, it tells you a lot.

So here we’ve visualized percentage of actions over time, where it’s watching, chatting, playing, pausing, going back, rewind. Here we’ve got this really interesting “what’s happening,” so this is a chat activity. Stuff happening, stuff happening. The first time we visualized this, we stopped it there, and we were like, “Oh, god, look at that. Nobody’s doing anything. It’s dreadful. And what’s this stupid spike over here?” The stupid spike over there turns out to be the meaning. That’s where people start talking.

So remember the shadows and séances I talked about? If you’re on the other side and you think engagement is about clicks, and you haven’t got any clicks – “Oh, no. Nobody’s engaged with our product.” If you wait long enough, to the end of the video, you see everybody starts talking. If I’m really engaged in a movie, and you’re sitting next to me rabbiting at me on the sofa, I’m gonna go “Shut up.”

[Audience laughter]

“Talk to me later.”

So the instrumentation and the model of engagement here came from the understanding of the meaning and the practice of what it means to co-view something, to collaboratively view something.

We also looked at reciprocity, and we found that when it’s in real time like this, much more reciprocation occurs. And I have an explanation for that, which is if you send me a video, a link in e-mail, I can ignore it if it is another one of those cat videos. And I can go, “Oh, sorry, my e-mail was so full I didn’t see it.” If you’re online with me and we’re chatting about something and “I’ve got another cat video for you.” Like, “Oh, lord, I’m gonna have to watch it,” because I can’t tell you that I can’t stand those cat videos.

So there’s a social obligation and a relationship between people that we’re facilitating here that I think means that you sent me one of your cat videos, I am so sending you a dog video. My dog video will eat your cat video.

[Audience laughter]

So what we also did was a content analysis, and we looked at categories like nonprofit, technology, and shows, and everybody was sharing more, but mostly it’s music videos that people are sharing, short snippet music videos. And we’ve got a project this summer which is starting to look at music and comedy and how they get shared and at what temporal frames and why. So that’s just a hoof in that work now.

And so this is the project I told you about right at the beginning, and this is the one with the DJs. I’m gonna see if this video plays, because I just want you to watch what she’s doing while she’s doing this sort of asynchronous/synchronous trying to connect. And this is DJ Backside, who is awesome.

[Sound effects playing]

That’s not very exciting, is it? She’s actually doing hip-hop stuff. Maybe I can do that for you. [Laughter] I’ve got the wrong clothes. Oh, I’m sorry, the videos don’t seem to be working, but what I want you to take away from this – I’m gonna take that horrible noise off.

What she does is, she’s typing here, and then she turns at some point and looks at the audience and asks them something. Then she gets a question, and she’s doing this, and then she turns around and she answers the question and goes back. But the eye gaze – and she’s going from here to here and engaging people. You asked a question a couple of minutes ago: “Hey, you, you’re down there.” So she can see these. “Hey, welcome back, it was so nice to have you here.”

So when I was doing the participant observation and I was watching a chat called DJ Dulo, who’s from Oakland, and I was sitting here, boring, dull nerd in the corner, just like taking my notes. And he goes, “Ze Liz, yo.” I was like [Imitates gasping]. And suddenly I felt like all of these other people could see me, and he could see me, and there was a really visceral feeling of being part of something. And terrified, actually, ’cause I was so uncool. So what do I do next time I go on? I wear my nicer T-shirt, a little cap backwards.

[Audience laughter]

‘Cause I’m part of the group. But it was just a really interesting exercise, and the gathering of the data, which coupled with what was happening at the back end, in terms of the database and the looks and the temporal rhythms of when people come in and out, really sort of gave us a feeling for where this real-time sharing, real-time Web is going. And I’m personally super-excited because this idea that you can understand what people are doing by clicks is just not true, right? You really have to see how people are engaging with each other. So I think this sorta like brings this morning’s talk all the way folded back round. And this emotional connection is really important.

Words are tricky. They’re not users, groups, and networks; they’re people who may be part of those models. Methods can be myopic, so triangulate those methods and keep inventing new methods, and this is the audience where that’s going to happen. There’s the numbers, but there’s the details. Qualitative and quantitative are the same thing. It depends on how you interpret and write up what you gather. And always question your questions. Those are my takeaways.

I’m up here, and I’m very privileged to be here, so thank you again. But these are all of the folks with whom I’ve worked, and thanks again to the workshop folks yesterday. And enjoy your lunch, and I’d be happy to chat.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Hello, everybody. Make a noise of some kind if you like games. Just make a noise – clap, sound –

[Audience makes various noises]

All right. All right. I’m using a hashtag for Gamestorming. I’ll tell you a little bit about what that is. But the hashtag, if you wanna tweet about it, is Gamestorming, and my Twitter name is Dave Gray on Twitter.

So what is Gamestorming? What does it sound like, first of all? Anyone wanna throw –

[Inaudible audience responses]

What’s that? Yeah, brainstorming, but with games, right? That’s exactly what it is.

I’ve been a creative professional for most of my working life, or a manager of creative professionals, one or the other. Gamestorming is a term that we kind of put on top of something that’s been happening in Silicon Valley since the 1970s. This is a guy named David Sibbet. He’s still around doing visual thinking, visualization of complex ideas.

And what Gamestorming is about is the problem of creativity or the innovation problem. And I would describe it this way. If you are Nokia right now and you need to make the iPhone-killer, the next generation – you’re up against the iPhone. You need to come up with that next thing. There is no simple, repeatable process. There’s no business process. There’s no linear process, step by step. There’s no set of rules that’s gonna get you there. And this is a problem in business, right? We have to be creative. And we haven’t historically designed our businesses for creativity; we’ve designed them for efficiency.

Of course, we’ve always had design. People design cars. People design products. A lot of you – raise your hand if you’re a designer or have “design” in your title. Raise your hand if you have “design” in your title but you’re not sure if you’re a designer.

[Audience laughter]

There’s some of those. Design is, in a lot of companies, a black box. It’s walled off from the rest of the organization, right? Some of us live inside the black box. Some of us like to put stuff into the black box. We put in our requests, and the creative stuff comes out. A lot of business people don’t like to look into the box, though, ’cause you look in it, it’s messy. What are those people doing? It’s hard to tell. There’s paper all over their desks, etc.

Now, but as the world gets more complex, we need to start involving other people. The whole organization needs to be creative. I think we’ve heard some excellent speakers today talking about creativity and the importance of that, and the importance of getting other people to buy in and engage with the creative process.

This is a woman named Elizabeth Gould. She’s a researcher at Princeton. Raise your hand if you learned in school or from in childhood that brain cells don’t regenerate. I learned that. Well, in 1999, this Princeton researcher, who believed that, suddenly discovered that it was not true. Brain cells do regenerate. But how could we have been fooled for so long into thinking that they don’t?

It turns out that all the experiments that the scientists were doing that proved that brain cells didn’t regenerate were on laboratory animals that were kept in cages and fed. They weren’t stimulated. They had no reason to be creative. So their brain cells didn’t regenerate. Now, it turns out animals in their natural environment, out in the habitat, when they have to find their food and hunt it down and so forth, they are creative.

Now, does this picture remind you of anything, like at work?

[Audience laughter]

Okay. Yeah. So…

[Audience laughter]

And this is the way that we’ve designed our workplaces, right? If we had set out intentionally to stifle creativity, to make it as impossible as we could to be creative at work, we could not have done better than the modern office cubicle, which is designed not for creativity but for efficiency.

So we need to move from the factory way of working – if we wanna be creative, that is – we need to move from thinking about our workplaces as factories to thinking of them as collaboratories, or environments for collaboration, working together. We need to break down those walls.

We need work to look like this. Anyone recognize one of the people who’s been on stage today, from the back, in the baseball hat in this picture? This is what we want our work to be like, right? This is how we wanna feel at work. Raise your hand if you want more of this at work, more of this feeling in your work. Make a sound. [Laughter]

[Audience makes noises]

Yeah, feedback. I love it. All right, this is what we want our work to be like. If we wanna be creative, if we wanna do creative work, it needs to feel good. It needs to feel energizing. We need to feel creative. These are real people, not actors. [Laughter]

[Audience laughter]

All right. Again, so as I was working on this book last year, 2009, I was lucky enough to be able to convene a group of people together to my own personal laboratory, collaboratory, to work out some of these ideas and practice them and make sure that they all work. So this is a scene from that event. These people are Gamestorming, okay?

We pulled – we got 50 people together in Monterey, in this conference center, to work on we didn’t know what: design, creative thinking, work on our creativity, whatever. It was not designed in advance. I brought my Gamestorming toolkit, my set of collaboration ideas and principles, and we tested ‘em out.

One of the first things we did was a game that I called Poster Session, and that is, basically we took the 50 people. We had every single person take a flipchart and make a poster that was a proposal of something that they were excited about, that they had passion for, that they wanted to work on with some other people there.

This guy decided that he wanted to work on the problem of disposable coffee cups. There’s too many disposable coffee cups. We use ‘em all the time. We dispose of them. They fill landfills. They’re bad for the earth.

He had this business problem in mind. He thought, well, we know we can take a cup to Starbucks and refill our cup, but nobody does it. Why? So he thought, this is a design problem. I wanna fix this not by hammering people over the head, but by making it easier, right? Making it simpler, easier, more fun, as BJ Fogg was talking about this morning. Let’s take it as a design problem and fix this problem.

So people got together. This is a survey, all done with sticky notes, trying to get some ideas together. This is another episode from that environment, where we did something called bodystorming. You see these people prototyping an iPhone app, right? Can you see the iPhone?

[Audience laughter]

Can you see the user? Can you see the application elements? Okay, that’s what we’re doing here. This is Gamestorming.

So what this guy did – and his idea was Beta Cup. He said, “Okay, I’m just gonna call it Beta Cup. I don’t know what it is yet. Let’s design it.” So what they did was they used this technique, which is called bodystorming. They created a Starbucks within this room. So what you see here in this picture, you see this guy is the asshole. See? This is the line of people. This is the barista. We have the whole Starbucks setup.

And what they did was, as they were trying to understand this problem, they said, “Oh, we’ll just set up a Starbucks, and let’s prototype the experience. Let’s work through it and see what kinda problems we run into.”

So one of the problems was you’ve got the asshole in front of the line that’s holding up the whole line, ordering: “I don’t know what I had. It was last week. I really liked it. Remind me…” And they came up with this idea for a speedy cup, where there’s an RFID tag built in, and you wouldn’t have to stand in the line. You could skip the line, just take your cup up there. Your order was all embedded in it, so forth. This was their bodystorming idea.

Now, what they did was they – so all these people who were getting together were bloggers and people who like to socialize on the Web. So they put the bodystorming video – they put it up on the Web: “Well, look what we’re doing. We’re trying to design a better cup.” This is a story. It got tweeted around, and guess – so who’s reading? Who’s listening? Well, turns out Starbucks was listening.

So Starbucks says, “Wow, they’re getting people engaged.” Starbucks has a line out the door of people who have a idea for a better reusable cup, right? But what they didn’t have, what the people who were all designing the better reusable cup didn’t realize was that what Starbucks was really interested in was engaging the community around this problem. So it becomes a shared design problem more than coming up with a solution.

Now, as designers, this is something we need to get used to, that we’re used to having our process, and we do our thing, and we’re inside that black box, and we don’t wanna let other people in. We’ve gotta get used to sharing that process.

So what happened was, now there’s actually – it’s gone from being a guy’s idea in a room to – there was – they’ve already had a competition, there’s $20,000.00 prizes, and it’s moving forward, right?

Now, what’s interesting to me about this is that the design problem changed as the design process moved forward. It’s like agile. We talk about agile development. It started out being about the cup, and then the design process starts to move forward, and then it becomes the system in the Starbucks around the cup. And then we move it forward a little bit further, and suddenly it’s the social system around the system around the cup.

So the design problems – I mean, design problems aren’t static. They don’t hold still while you try and fix them, and that’s where Gamestorming helps us move faster towards the kind of results we wanna get as designers.

So Gamestorming. I think there falls – it’s really about getting better engagement and collaboration at work. It’s about getting other people involved in your creative process. It’s about opening up your creative process to them. Yeah, this is a good one to take pictures of if you want.

[Audience laughter]

I’m doing a workshop tomorrow, so you could have a whole day of it. There’s social games, which are about dialogue, asking questions, role-playing, storytelling, improvisation. There are sorting games, which we do a lot of in user experience design. We’ve got sticky notes, index cards, voting, moving things around. And then there are games about synthesis, which is about building prototypes, making models, sketching, making maps. And these are kinda the big bucket categories I think they fall into.

So we decided to write a book. I have two coauthors, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. And like I said, this is nothing new. It’s been going on since the ’70s. This is Xerox PARC, you know, people with blackboards, people standing around talking. This is how creative work is done, right? It’s social.

This is interesting because someone’s designing – this is MIT in the ’70s. They’re designing a computer chip, and they’re using sticky notes or paper, and the size of the paper relates to the size of the component. So it’s another – this is kind of what I would call a sorting game, where they’re trying to work out how these things fit together.

These are the Brothers Grimm. [Laughter] It’s a lot of history today too. My point with the Brothers Grimm is solely this: I don’t wanna come up here and say, “Oh, you know, my coauthors and I invented this.” We kind of put a name called Gamestorming on it, but really, we see this as more of a Brothers Grimm type of thing.

There’s a lot – there’s really no book that collected all of – that we could find that collected all of these collaboration work practices in one place. So we sort of set out like the Brothers Grimm did with fairy tales to try and create this collection of the best practices for workplace collaboration, and Gamestorming is just the title we came up with for it.

So design philosophy. We didn’t wanna make something that was complicated. We didn’t wanna make something that was hard. We wanted a book – again, to riff off of BJ – I don’t know if he’s here – simple, easy, fun. Just make it so easy and fun to use, simple and rugged. A Jeep goes anywhere. You just get in and you start driving, right? We wanted to do that for people at work. We wanted something that was simple, rugged, reliable, lightweight, a no-brainer.

So we decided only stuff you could find in your office supply cabinet. So it’s only stuff you can do with sticky notes, index cards, Sharpies, masking tape, flipcharts, the kinda stuff you’re gonna have in your workplace anyway, so you don’t have to spend any money.

And we didn’t wanna design for a perfect world, ’cause it’s not a perfect world. We wanted to design for total chaos, because that’s what your workplace is like. You’ve got a – the CEO walks into the room, and you didn’t know that the CEO was gonna walk into the room. You wanna be able to make this stuff happen on the fly quickly. So the book’s got some design principles but also some tactical stuff that you can practice on.

So what is the game? What do I mean by a game? Nicole, who’s coming up next, is gonna give you probably some deeper version, ’cause she’s probably got a – she’s got a much deeper history in games than I do. My stuff is more about work.

But think about The Game of Life. Raise your hand if you’ve played The Game of Life. That’s good. All right. It’s life, right? It’s just a simplified – one ideal version of what life is like, right?

Everything is a game, if you decide to approach it like a game. A game is a world. Think about a game world. You’ve got – think about any game. You can pick a game in your head. Monopoly, chess, checkers. It’s got boundaries in time and space. It happens over a period of time, and it happens in a prescribed space. Poker, it’s around a table. You’ve got a goal. You’ve got some kind of objective. It’s either an objective that’s shared by the players who are playing the game, or they might be in competition with each other.

You’ve got rules. Artifacts – these are like dice, the Monopoly cards, “Chance,” “Community Chest,” the pieces that you move around the board – that let you keep track of information so you can focus on the game and not focus on tracking all the ideas in your head. And players, which I chose to visualize as little puffy spacemen.

[Audience laughter]

A game’s a journey, so it’s a world, but it’s also a journey. It’s a way to get from A to B. What makes a game different from a business process in the traditional sense is, when we’re doing creative work, we don’t know what B looks like. A business process is designed to get you the same result every time, very reliable, very consistent, very repeatable. But a game – you have a million possible outcomes of a game, and that’s why a game can be considered a possibility generator, a creativity generator – a creative machine, if you will.

So in Gamestorming, we don’t have specific, concrete goals; we have fuzzy goals. And I like to think of – if you think about the Age of Exploration, right? You have these ships going off. What were they looking for? The Fountain of Youth. They thought they might find monsters. Columbus was looking for India. And according to my research, he refused to admit ever in his whole life that he didn’t find India. He was certain that it was India.

So fuzzy goals. We have to go off. Now, we’re gonna find something, but are we gonna find what we’re looking for? Maybe not. We have to be open to opportunities that we find along the way. Why did I put a blank slide? I don’t know.

All right, so we might start out with a fuzzy goal. We have an initial goal. We’re kind of aiming in this direction, and we circle around and we find something. Then we circle around and we think we’re in the right – can you see that? There we go. We think we’re in the right region, so we circle around. Nothing. Oh, shoot. Okay, so we have to widen our circle. Oh, now we find the rich vein, and now we circle in and we get somewhere. Okay? But it might not have been what we were looking for.

That’s the interesting thing about creative work, right? The guy who invented the sticky note, to speak about one of my favorite tools, it was just glue. It was just a bad glue that didn’t work very well, at first.

Okay. Some characteristics of fuzzy goals. They’re emotional. People have to be passionate; they have to be engaged. They’re sensory. They’re tangible. A fuzzy goal, even though it’s fuzzy, it’s blurry, you wanna make those ideas as concrete as you can. Steve Jobs launches the iPhone before anyone can touch an iPhone, but he has it, right? You can see him touching it; it’s tangible, sensory. And then the movement, as I pointed out, is progressive. You’re moving – you’re learning as you’re going. You’re learning as you’re moving along.

So a game is a world. It’s a journey. I also think we can think of a game as a play. The play’s the thing. A play, in three acts. You could think of it like – I think of it like a stubby pencil I could sharpen at both ends. You have a beginning; you have a tangible outcome, something that you want at the end of it, your goal, and it may be fuzzy. You have something that you want, but you wanna make it tangible or as concrete as you can.

You have the people and the resources and whatever that you’re putting into the game. So this is time running from left to right, getting from A to B. You’ve gotta open the game. You’ve gotta open by getting ideas on the table. You wanna set the stage, develop the themes, get ideas, get the information, get the stuff in. Just like opening the box. You’re reading the instructions. You’ve gotta set it up, get people to the table to focus.

Then you have this period where you explore. You’re in the game. You’re exploring this world that you created. You’re trying out various options, like the Starbucks scene that I described to you, right? They’re trying it out. Well, what happens if the line’s long? What happens if it’s short? What happens if we’re outta coffee? I don’t think that’s ever happened, but…

All right. We examine; we explore; we experiment. And then you close the game. You have to close the box. You have to be done. You have to know when it’s over. This is when you have to make conclusions. You make decisions. You’d figure out what your next steps are, and you get to your tangible outcome that you want.

This is another – you think of it as – the three acts as one. The opening act, where you want divergence, you want a lot of ideas. Then the second act, where you wanna really develop the themes and explore stuff, where you want to create an emergent space for ideas to – the good things to bubble up. And then you want a convergent, third act, where you’re closing things down and you’re coming to conclusions. It gives people a sense of satisfaction. You don’t wanna leave the movie hanging in the middle, right? You gotta have a – if you bring ‘em in for a meeting, whether it’s a half hour or three days, you wanna follow this basic idea.

Okay, so how to do it. I wanna be a little practical. Open, explore, and close – think of those as the three acts, right? Your opening act, your exploring act, and your closing act. So how to open. These are just some things that I’ve learned over several years of facilitating meetings and so forth. I’m assuming that you’re gonna facilitate, you wanna bring people in and get ‘em involved in your creative process.

Stay loose. You can’t control them. They do what they wanna do. Sometimes they come; sometimes they don’t. You wanna keep yourself loose enough to get a sense of who the people are and where they wanna go. You don’t wanna have your game so prescribed in the beginning that they can’t participate in its creation.

Get in touch with your ignorance. Someone said something today that really resonated with me about this. Be dumb. Oh, it was Kate Rutter when she was talking about the five-minute madness and questions. Get in touch with the things you don’t know. If you knew the answers, you wouldn’t need other people to help you, right? So focus on the things you don’t know, not the things you do know, and use – questions are a really good way to get that – to explore ideas with other people. This guy doesn’t look like he knows. He looks like he’s thinking, right? He’s got the questions.

Light a fire. If people aren’t – if people come to your meeting because they have to, like this – they open up their laptops – get ‘em outta there. They’re not gonna help you be creative. I mean, if it’s a creative meeting, you don’t need them, right? You have to light a fire. They have to be passionate and engaged. The more people who are passionate and engaged in your meeting, the better. This is what you want.

Explore. How to explore. Manage the altitude. So you gotta – if you’re too down in the details, you’re gonna lose people. If you’re too abstract and theoretical, you’re gonna lose people. This is a very simple feedback mechanism that I like. People have a red card and a green card. If they wanna go faster, they hold up the red card; if they wanna stop, ask a question, slow down, they hold – sorry, what did I say? Well, green is for go, and red is for stop. Anyway.

Watch the clock, which I’m doing right now. It’s right there. 7:04. It takes a certain amount of time to get those artifacts. People wanna leave with some object, some sense of accomplishment. They’re gonna go along with you, but if you get to where there’s five minutes left or ten minutes left and they haven’t made concrete progress and they don’t feel like they’re coming out of it with something, you’ve lost ‘em. So watch the clock. Get a sense of how long it’s gonna take to create the artifacts, the outcomes of the meeting, and make sure that you’ve got enough time built in for them to do that stuff and share it with each other.

Get physical. This is the bodystorming stuff. This is the thing I was talking about before with the iPhone. Get people up and moving. If people are just sitting around a table, all looking at each other, you’re engaging their minds but not their heart and not their body. You gotta get the whole person involved if you wanna keep their energy for any sustained period of time.

How to close. This is my weakest point. [Laughter] I’ll just tail out with you. Focus on artifacts. So, again, people wanna leave a meeting with a sense of accomplishment. They wanna feel like they got something done. Whatever it is, a poster, a picture, some code, something that’s been accomplished. Focus on getting those things – in the course of the meeting, getting those things out.

I know people who have these things that – they do these things called book sprints where they actually write a book in the course of a week or a weekend. And I asked him, “How did you – why did you start doing that?” He goes, “Well, I –” Someone told me they did book sprints, and I thought they said – and they actually did it over a month, and I thought they said a weekend, so I just didn’t know it wasn’t possible, so I did it.

[Audience laughter]

[Laughter] All right, so focus on the artifacts, those tangible objects, whatever they are.

Remember that the end is a stepping stone, right? There’s always something that comes next. So when you’re closing, you don’t just say, “Thank you, goodbye.” “Kthxbye” – I’ve seen that one on Twitter. No. Remember what comes next, and always remind people, what’s the next step? What’s the thing that comes next after this? They need to see where they are in a continuum. Right? There’s an end. But then there’s another beginning, then there’s another end, these progressive steps on our learning journey.

Remember that it’s their thing; it’s not your thing. If it’s your thing – now, I’m sort of contradicting what you said, Joe, about fight for your thing and make it happen. There are times to do that too, but if you’re involving other people in the creative process and you’re too tied to your thing and your solution, you’re not gonna get the best out of them. So obviously, this is their thing. You can tell. I’m the one sitting in the back there, just watching. It’s their thing.

Time up. I have four minutes. So I can take questions or I can…?

Response: Up to you.

I’m just gonna keep going. I have one more little thing. A story of Christopher Columbus. If you have questions, tweet ‘em and I’ll answer ‘em by Twitter.

So, Christopher Columbus, someone we all know. Either a criminal or a good guy, depending on your point of view. But the story, I think, is interesting.

So he started out in the Canary Islands, and his concept was “We’re gonna go to Japan. I wanna go to Japan.” Nobody knew how far it was. Contrary to popular opinion, everyone pretty much knew the world was round. It had been calculated in the year 300 BC, I think, by some Greek guy who calculated the circumference of the earth. But no one – so everyone knew the world was around, and most people knew how big it was; Columbus did not.

Okay. So you can see the map going off the end of the world. I have pictures of monsters just ’cause I like – I think these old maps look cool, and I wanted to share that. [Laughter] All right. I don’t know if they thought there were monsters out there or not.

So here’s a Columbus estimate of how far it was gonna be to get to Japan from the Canary Islands. Now, you can see by the size of my slide, you can probably see that actual is gonna be a little bit longer. This is the actual distance. This is the conventional idea, right? People thought the world – well, everyone knew the world was round, right? And they thought, “Well, this is Asia, and this is the ocean. So it’s just all ocean between here and there.” And this was what Columbus said; he said, “Well, actually, you know, the world’s smaller than we think it is, so there’s really less ocean there than we think.” He was totally wrong. Absolutely wrong. Everyone else was right.

In the actual fact, there is this North and South America in there that – nobody knew, okay? This is what we mean about fuzzy goals. You don’t know what you don’t know when you start a creative process. You just don’t know till you get out there and start doing something. You don’t know what you don’t know.

So a little spreadsheet of right and wrong. Size of the world: Columbus, wrong; everyone else, right. They thought he was – the reason that nobody gave him any money and the reason he had to keep going around asking for money and he finally had to go to Spain for a second time to get it is ’cause all the smart money was like, “This guy’s an idiot. He’s completely wrong. Don’t give him money.” And even when Queen Isabella did give him money, I think – she and King Ferdinand I think pretty much assumed, well, it’s fun money; it’s pin money. [Laughter] Maybe he’ll find something.

Okay, distance to India: Columbus was wrong; everyone else was right. But discover America: Columbus, yes; everyone else, no.

[Audience laughter]

So who’s laughing in the end? All right.

This is what I would call the paradox of discovery. You’re gonna find things that you’re not looking for, sometimes even when you’re not looking for ‘em. But if you’re not looking for something, then you’re not gonna find anything. And this, I think, ties into what Jeff Veen was saying earlier about being open to understanding that – not being too attached to your product or service as it stands. So don’t overthink it, is what I leave you with.

If you’re interested in Gamestorming, I’m doing a workshop tomorrow. There’s also a blog and a wiki where we’re sort of doing our Brothers Grimm thing, trying to collect all this stuff. And there’s a book. And I do have those cards like Ben showed that – from O’Reilly, if anyone wants. I think the card will give you a discount on the book, if you wanna buy it. So thank you very much.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Good morning. So as Peter said, I’m Christian Palino. I’m a design strategist at Adaptive Path. Since this is a short talk, and I like talks that kind of ask questions, this is gonna be one of those. It’s gonna be a bit of a hypothesis.

How many of you are service designers? Anybody raise their hand? Anybody? One, two – all right, there’s a few of you. Okay. Good.

So the place that this talk really starts for me is with coffee and the sort of service offering of coffee, and how, in particular, it’s very different here in America than it is in Italy, where I lived for some time. I’ll assume with this audience that we’ve all been to a Starbucks, a Peet’s Coffee, and we know what that experience is like a little bit.

How many of you here have been to Italy? Raise your hand if you’ve been to Italy. That’s a lot of people. Raise your other hand – raise both hands if you’ve been to Italy and drank a coffee there. Yeah, there you go. Okay. So a lot of you know what it’s like to drink a coffee there. I’m gonna put up a little video here, as well, of this.

Essentially, I think what’s interesting is that, in the two contexts, sort of the American one and the Italian one, all of the touch points are really pretty similar. In fact, some of them are downright identical. You know, payment, ordering, getting the coffee, putting the sugar in your coffee – all of those elements are really pretty identical. But the service offering itself is really, really different. The experience of that is really different.

Now, it would be really easy for me to think, “Oh, well, that’s just the way that Italians drink their coffee. They do it standing up at the bar.” But then I remember the grandmother of my wife, who always says this to me, which is [Recites a comment in Italian], which is “You drink your coffee sitting down or else you’re gonna be poor.” So it’s not so easy to just write it off and say that it’s the way it’s done in Italy.

So we’re gonna leave coffee for just a moment. I’m gonna come back there. Let’s start with service a little bit. I wanna provide just the working definition so that we know where we’re coming from.

I like the Sasser, Olsen, and Wyckoff definition, which is kind of old but, I think, really useful. There’s four points to that. The first is intangibility. The offering is largely or wholly intangible. Think of a savings account or a car rental service. The second is heterogeneity, which is gonna be really important for this talk. The offering’s different each time it’s consumed: the order of events, the touch points encountered, the decision making. Each time they tend to change. The third is inseparability. So production and consumption are inseparable. Delivery and consumption are all often simultaneous. Customers help shape the quality of that sort of delivery. The fourth is perishability, that the offering can’t be stored in inventory. It’s time-dependent and it’s time-important.

So these are the four that we’ll work with: intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, and perishability.

So like any practice, sometimes it’s really useful to sort of divide it into two parts. There’s plenty of examples of this. In service, there’s examples of this. Robert Glushko talks a lot about the front stage/back stage. Front stage represents interactions customers have with the service itself; back stage, those parts of the service value chain the consumer can’t see. There’s top-down/bottom-up. I’m gonna offer a different one that we’re gonna use for this talk, and that’s formal and informal, so the formal elements of the service and the informal elements of the service.

The formal, I think, are kind of – it’s rational. It runs on rules. And it operates on a program. And in many ways, it can be evaluated based on these things. The informal is where all the human aspects lie, so values, emotions, myths, expectations. This part of the service tends to be a lot less scripted and a lot less consistent. Again, these aren’t sort of – they don’t happen at separate times, but for thinking about them philosophically, we sort of parse them apart, these two.

And what I’m interested in this context is the informal ones, so thinking about how we might design for the informal as well as those formal ones. Let’s take a quick example: if we think about air travel. Some of the examples of formal parts of the service: searching for the flight, booking it, checking in, boarding, things you could probably script pretty well. The informal, we might think about evaluating flights, price anxiety, seat negotiation, all the sort of human parts of the service that happen that maybe we’re not designing necessarily touch points for. So just an example of thinking of these two parts.

Another example that will help us to think about informal, I think, is to sort of focus a little bit on the delivery of the service and use the example of hotels, which is pretty common to lots of service design examples, of where the service can be different. So the question is something like: the Best Western and the Four Seasons, what makes them different? At the sort of paper level, they look really similar, but in their delivery is where they really differentiate. The place where – essentially on paper, check-in, finding your room amenities, they all look the same, but it happens differently in these two different contexts.

So what we’re really talking about are the informal elements of the service, the ones that help to drive those moments of delivery, the space between those touch points, and how we essentially kind of operate in that space and inherently design for it.

Looking to sort of an alternative context, maybe outside service offerings could provide us another example. I often think about sports. In sports, a coach has his players; he’s got his plays; he understands the rules of the game, the field, all the tactics. But a really good coach also understands the variable of emotion. He can think about in a way – you can kind of categorize or account for the speed of the baseball, the position of the batter, his stance. But it’s really, really hard to categorize and account for what the bat feels like in the batter’s hands. And there’s a variable there that really has a lot to do with how that interaction plays out on the field.

So how can we design for the informal? How can we account for the human qualities in the service, the mental and the emotional variables that contribute to the experience, and the lasting impression of the service offering?

To think about this, let’s start with touch points, which are where a lot of us spend a lot of our time, designing touch points. I think designers really like the physicality of touch points. It’s easy to be seduced by them, and it’s sometimes even easier to sort of evaluate touch points. Touch points facilitate the interactions with the service offering. You can think about a savings account, right? The points of information-gathering, the transactions, how you deposit money and withdraw money, tools for monitoring it.

But the touch points themselves, they don’t really communicate the value of the service, not even in their collective sum, I don’t think. You can’t just take that group of touch points and go, “Well, there’s the service.” There’s a lot that happens between touch points that really can’t be considered just by designing those touch points themselves.

An example of this would be, how do you visualize an equity fund? You can’t just sort of draw a picture, right? If we sort of draw boxes and sort of envision that Web interface, it really doesn’t do justice to sort of communicating that that’s a service offering for an equity fund.

You could think about a customer journey. I think that what happens is that we tend to think about the customer journey in these sort of linear paths, right? We can sort of note a moment in the touch point and then where it goes, and then the next sort of boxes and arrows. But services are really, really terrible at following a linear progression. If we think back to our service definition, heterogeneity is one of those four qualities. Services are much better at being inconsistent than they are at being consistent.

So services aren’t like products, and they’re not like commodities, and they don’t follow that consistent narrative. So in many ways, it’s really hard to script a service, and especially to script a service just through the series of interactions with touch points. If one defines the touch points in a service and then connects them in the flow, what happens to the human variables? What happens to the emotions? What happens to the behaviors, the expectations that are there? And what happens when the service is used in unanticipated ways, unintended ways, sort of the idea of abuse scenarios?

So if services are different than products, if they’re intangible, if they’re ever-changing, if we’re sort of only able to have creation and consumption be separated and imperishable, the value of creating fixed plans for services can be, I think, kind of highly overrated. As Eisenhower was famous for saying about warfare, plans are worthless. But planning is really useful, and I think there’s something there for us.

So let’s come back a little bit to the question. Services, intangibility, heterogeneity, inseparability, perishability. But services, they don’t sit in a box, right? And they can’t be stacked on a shelf. So our design question is, how do we design for those informal qualities, right? We can design for the formal ones really well, but there’s those informal ones. Where can we look for inspiration?

And so, lately, I’ve been looking to cinema and to theater, and sort of more specifically, to this guy, to Eisenstein and to Soviet montage theory. Montage theory basically addresses the medium of film, its condensed nature, that ideas can essentially arise from the collision of independent shots. And I think that’s a bit of a model for thinking about touch points in those spaces.

What I’d like to do is take a quick look at an example of film montage. How many of you have seen The Godfather here? I’m guessing y’all have seen – hold on, raise your hand if you haven’t seen The Godfather. Andrew, where are you? Oh, there you are. Okay, all right. So for anybody who’s not familiar, we’re gonna see a little montage shot. There’s some classic 1970s violence in here. If that bothers you, you wanna look away. Just giving you fair warning. So let’s have a look at this.

[Video plays of the christening and multiple-assassination scene in The Godfather]

All right, so there’s our film clip, our example of montage. So we can think of the various shots in this scene as touch points: sort of the shot of the church, the firearm, the blessing, the mafia boss, the assassin, the shot of the baby being anointed. Each of these shots has its own inflection and its own meaning. But where these shots are assembled into a scene, the cuts between each shot, the mental and emotional space formed between the images provides a third meaning – a greater meaning, in this case.

So thinking about this, this is where we come back to coffee. So in a way, I was thinking about these touch points and the coffee experience and thinking that this is really the place where these things come together. I think that the meaning and the value of the service is present in the space that’s sort of between the touch points here: in the coffee, in the case of the shots in the film montage. So between ordering and receiving, between coffee and paying – those informal elements, those human elements, and the sort of mental leaps that you make between those touch points, that’s what really sort of shapes the offering and its impression.

So to design for this, we need to consider more than just, again, that string of touch points. We consider the space between. So if the service is different each time that it’s consumed, then the combined meaning of any two or more touch points is inherently more valuable than the touch points themselves.

In fact, were we to ask Eisenstein or one of his contemporaries, like David Mamet, they’d probably say that if you chose the right shots or the right touch points, you probably wouldn’t really need to design them too much. You might even be able to use the sort of archetypal example and be able to assemble them appropriately to get a better meaning.

So if montage can provide us a model for constructing the value in the service offering, what methods do we have to envision the service beyond touch points? We’re already using storyboards in service design, which come from film. But are there other things we can look for? How can we explore the space between those touch points?

So I think that cinema and the theatrical arts really provide a better starting point for designing for services than looking for how products and commodities are designed. So for example, if intangibility and heterogeneity are defining qualities of services; if, as Eisenhower said, planning is more valuable than the fixed plans, then perhaps we need to look at something more flexible, maybe like improvisation.

I’m not the only person to advocate for improvisation in design. There’s many people: Brenda Laurel, Eric Dishman, Kristian Simsarian, my former colleague Nathan Waterhouse. I think there’s really a lot of value in using improvisation to consider services and for really designing that space between them.

But design improvisation’s really seen very little adoption, and I think that’s likely because the nature of it being very intangible and that it’s hard to evaluate and hard to capture. Given that services are intangible, that lack of tangibility really shouldn’t be a barrier, but I think it is. And I think that’s probably linked to how we measure and evaluate services, but honestly, that’s a talk for a different time, a different issue.

I think improvisation is really about the value of, again, the sort of planning over the plans, developing the skills and the inputs, and the way the influences and the approaches to sort of respond on demand, to respond off script, as it may be.

So film gives us storyboards, and cinema can give us montage as a potential model for thinking about the value of service. What about structuring services? I think that cinema also has something there for us, and I really think that that’s in dramatic structure.

As David Mamet would advocate, dramatic structure is an organic codification, right? You’ve got a thesis, you’ve got antithesis, and you’ve got synthesis. It’s a structure that we seek out. If I ask you to tell me a story about the weather or about sports, you’d give it to me in a sort of dramatic way, and you’d probably give it to me with that dramatic structure. Yet when we think about services and these long narratives and how they play out in space and time, I think we tend to naturally avoid some of those tools that are right there for us, to think about how we might craft some of those arcs. So why not look to that structure?

So montage, storyboards, improvisation, dramatic structure – all examples of methods that we as designers could borrow to explore services, to explore designing for the unscripted, and for those human aspects, those informal aspects.

So to kinda summarize: services, they’re not like commodities or products. They’ve got intangibles that we need to design for. They can’t only be focused on – you can’t only focus on designing for the touch points, rather, ’cause those touch points don’t communicate the value of a service.

So a service value, I think, is defined in the space that comes between those touch points. And I really think that film is a place where we started to look for storyboards, and we could continue to look for some other inspiration and some other methods. That might get us further than designing like we design for products. Thank you.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Nathan Shedroff: Hi, I’m Nathan Shedroff, and I’m the program chair of the MBA in Design Strategy program at CCA, which is about three blocks that way, right behind me.

Chris Noessel: And I’m Chris Noessel, one of the principal designers at Cooper Interaction here in San Francisco.

Nathan Shedroff: And today we’re gonna give you a taste of some research that we’ve been doing for about three years. And by “research,” I mean we’ve been watching lots of science fiction for three years. We’re actually uniquely qualified to take on this subject ’cause we’ve been actually studying it for our entire lives.

[Audience laughter]

And this is all for a book that hopefully will be done in the spring or something like that.

Also, before we start, this is a really good time to tweet “Oh, my god, I’m so glad I stayed to the end. These were the best presentations of the conference.” And if you don’t like me now before saying that, then do it during Mark’s session.

[Audience laughter]

Okay, so let’s get going.

Chris Noessel: Excellent. So as Nathan said, we’re publishing a book. We do have some notes available, and I know URLs aren’t easy things to write down. We should tweet it.

Nathan Shedroff: Someone tweet it.

Chris Noessel: I’ll tweet it later.

[Inaudible audience comment]

Chris Noessel: Okay, thank you.

Nathan Shedroff: Thank you.

[Inaudible audience comments]

Nathan Shedroff: Tweet shout-outs to the audience. And so this is just a couple of the notes, but please don’t read them now, ’cause we’re much more entertaining live.

So as Peter introduced, our investigation is into the relationship between design and science fiction, but those are giant, monolithic words. And so – do I need to provide filler, or are we close? Rock on. So we should answer which design and which sci-fi, because they’re pretty big. For design specifically, we’re looking at a number of different things over the course of the research: interaction design, industrial design, and information design. But our focus is really on interface design in science fiction, although of course it bleeds out into all those other things since they’re not entirely easily separable.

Heading to the other side, I’m gonna talk about science fiction again. It’s a giant genre, so what specifically are we talking about? Since we’re looking primarily at interfaces, that means that we need visual science fiction, so there go all your favorite science fiction novels. Sorry about that. Since we’re also looking for interfaces, we need that visual representation to be moving, so there go all your favorite graphic novels. We also need it to be consistent from depiction to depiction, and so there go all your favorite hand-drawn animations, because it’s actually kinda easy to make a mistake about where this dial was or where that lever was.

And what that leaves us with is really screen science fiction, television and movies. And while we suspect that a lot of the research that we’re doing can sort of bleed out into other genres of sci-fi, we’re not focusing on it. So point one is, your favorite science fiction will not be part of this presentation.

It’s a danger when you present to geeks, like they’re gonna say, “Wait a minute, what about Episode 7…?” Okay.

[Audience laughter]

So what we’re gonna be presenting to you today is sort of a larger theoretical model underneath this notion of influence. The center ring that you can see here is about individual inspiration. Of course, design isn’t a big thing, and science fiction isn’t a big thing. It’s made up of people, and those people draw inspiration from the things they see in the world. People in Hollywood can take a look at something in the real world and go, “Oh, wait, I can totally use that.” Same thing, us designers can take a look at science fiction and say the exact same thing. But when we sort of back up and we take a look at the larger patterns, design influences science fiction by establishing the paradigms that science fiction extends. That’s pretty dense, so I’ll leave it hanging there for a second.

Then when we head down to the bottom of the model, we’re gonna be talking about three other sort of layers. The first is, science fiction influences design by setting audience expectations. Where’s my jetpack? It’s a fine question. A second way is by reminding us of the social context in which these things occur. Of course, science fiction is kinda all about technology evolving, but the humans involved in that are typically not any different than the humans who are watching it, and we need to be reminded of that sometimes. And then the final way is by actually proposing a paradigm. The people who sort of make science fiction are actually prototypers. But they’re just not aiming at something to be realized fully; they’re aiming to tell a story.

So now what we’re gonna do is sort of zoom into these things. And this first part we’re gonna talk about is that first notion I talked about, about establishing the actual paradigm. To do this, we’re gonna zoom all the way back to the beginning of science fiction.

Chris Noessel: Yeah, this is the first science fiction film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune. And we’re not gonna show you a clip here. In fact, we don’t have time to show you all the clips in even this presentation. But it’s worth noting here that there really are no interfaces, certainly as we’re accustomed to describing them. And that’s because this is actually the original direct manipulation. If you wanna open a door, you push on it; it opens, right? There’s not even knobs, usually, at this early age of science fiction. So it’s interesting to note that that’s sort of where things started, and keep that in mind as we show you what happens over time.

Nathan Shedroff: So now we’re gonna jump forward in time a little bit. Actually, there was this weird gap between Le Voyage Dans La Lune and the next film, which is Metropolis, Fritz Lang’s masterpiece from 1927. I’m gonna show you a little clip, and in this clip we’re going to see Joh Fredersen entering his office and checking this large, beautiful wall-mounted telecommunications device to call a fellow in the Lower City. I’m gonna call your attention – I mean, there’s loads to love about this clip. But I’m gonna call your attention specifically to the way that he selects the channel for the video.

[Video begins playing]

So he comes in. He checks messages by ticker tape. He comes and turns a weird dial to engage the visuals. And then he has to tune the channel. You can even see them sort of overlapping slightly, so he’s just getting the tuning correct. Then he picks up a handheld telephone, and we get to sort of meet this wonderfully hammy over-actor in the Lower City. And we’re gonna pause right there.

[Video pauses]

‘Cause he’s fantastic. So, clearly, what’s going on here is that the audience were coming in with a set of preconceived technological notions. They understood ticker tape, they understood radio, and they understood film. And so what we saw in the video there was, “Oh, it’s going to be like film, but you can tune it like a radio.” Weird concept to us now.

But we’re gonna jump ahead to the next sort of serious piece of science fiction, which occurs 25 years later. Buck Rogers in 1939 was a serial. And we’re gonna take a look at another interface of a similar nature, which is a large wall-mounted communications device. But pay attention again to the way that they change the channel.

[Video clip plays from Buck Rogers]

So I’m gonna pause you there, although we’re skipping a lovely part where they have to go into a different room to engage in radio contact.

Chris Noessel: The radio room, right?

Nathan Shedroff: Yeah.

Chris Noessel: ‘Cause that’s what people knew.

Nathan Shedroff: [Laughter] Radio room. So these were largely similar interfaces, but the controls were completely separate. Remember, you had to sort of tune the Metropolis interface, and you just turned a knob in order to change the channel in Buck Rogers.

What happened? Television happened in between. Suddenly a new paradigm was sort of let loose on us consuming public, and we didn’t have to tie our notions of the interface to radio. We could now just say, “Oh, it’s gonna be like a TV, but on my wall.” And these sorts of things happen all throughout sort of the chronological history that we’ve developed, where you can actually sort of see the influence of the real paradigm on science fiction.

Chris Noessel: And as technologically as we think we are today, this still happens. Here’s Jurassic Park in 1993 I guess it is, where if we were to play the whole clip, this is the famous scene where she sits down at the computer, and the velociraptors are trying to get into the lab. And she sits down and says, “This is Unix. I know this.” Right? But there’s all these shots to the keyboard, and especially the mouse, because they have to establish for the audience that “Oh, it’s a personal computer,” because personal computers are fairly new, not completely mainstream, and they have to have that touchstone so people know what’s going on.

Nathan Shedroff: Oh, zoom back. So, again, the sort of shorthand version of this talk, so that – trust us. Now we’ve established that design establishes the actual paradigm that science fiction extends, and we’re gonna go into that sort of lower ring now to talk about individual inspiration briefly.

With individual inspiration, we can see that individuals see something in the real world and they go, “Oh, I could totally use that in my science fiction.” This first example that we have is with the Visible Human Project, which was first started in 1989. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s fascinating and a little morbid, where people who’ve donated their bodies to science get frozen after they die and then sliced very thinly, and then the slices are put together as scans. And then there’s an online interface where you can get through on that little green rectangle and sort of zoom in and out and see all the sort of beautiful internal shapes within the body.

I think it’s pretty cool, and somebody at Fox Movies thought it was pretty cool too, because in X2, the second X-Men movie that was released in 2003, there is a scene where a guard is approaching Magneto’s plastic cage, and he gets scanned. And there’s some animation on the screen that that guard sees, and in the lower right-hand corner, you can actually see the Visible Human Project, just colored blue, so you know it’s science fiction.

[Audience laughter]

So we caught you, Fox, and we’re gonna call you out on it. And this doesn’t happen just sort of with technological devices. Damien Hirst’s sort of notorious for chopping up animals and then putting them in formaldehyde boxes. And this showed up in The Cell in 2000, but of course, science fiction, not content to replicate the real world, actually had those tissues sort of pumping, and it was kinda gory and beautiful. But we’re not gonna show those clips.

So that’s the upper arc and actually an interesting one I think mostly for sort of makers of science fiction, although we’re fascinated by it as well. But now we’re gonna go to this lower arc, which is more pertinent I think to us as designers.

The first ring we’re gonna go through is similar to the one we just saw: individual inspiration. And in this case, we’re gonna go back to the first X-Men, which was released in 2000. The reason we’re showing this movie is because a fellow by the name of Douglas Caldwell was successfully petitioned by his teenage son during the summer to go see this cool movie about superheroes. Douglas Caldwell is no fan of superheroes, but he wanted to bond with his son, so he went. But to his surprise, while sitting in the audience, he saw the solution to a 2,000-year-old problem.

[Video clip plays from X-Men]

So I’m gonna pause there. It looks like a ton of those pin boards you can sort of smash up against your face, but it’s computer-controlled and gives sorta this lovely narrative about what’s about to happen in the film.

The reason it was so intriguing for Douglas Caldwell is because he worked for the U.S. Army Topographic Department. His job was to send 3D maps out to field generals so that they could plan maneuvers in a 3D space. Turns out generals are really good about thinking in 3D, and kind of need to. But it was very error-prone. Things could break on the way. What if you sent the wrong map? You’d have to go back to sorta Step 1. And he saw here “Hey, all we could do is outfit those generals with a board like this, and then we’d just send them the data, and they could see any terrain that they happen to be around.”

So he used that idea, built an RFP, and within three years had a working demo called the Xenotran, built by a company named XenoVision. Here is an example of that very box. This is with the top that’s down. If you get a picture of that top open, you can see the array of pins, all right there, completely computer-controlled just like you saw in the movie, but they did it one better. What that top contains is a thin latex layer that then gets vacuum-sealed on top of the pins, and then it actually sort of gets this smooth surface that the pins provide, and they can actually project satellite imagery down.

So in our interview with Douglas, he actually said that he referenced the movie several times in the RFP, and during the course of the development of this device, he would reference it as well. It’s like not an accidental influence; it is a deliberate one. He’s like, “Yes, this is the thing I want to build.” And once they had it – and this is a video sort of panning across it – they were able to not just do terrain, but they have modeled tsunamis and the surface of Mars and all sorts of really beautiful stuff, and it’s a great example of this sort of individual inspiration.

Chris Noessel: Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about expectation. It’s probably no surprise to people in this room that when you put things out there, whether it’s a prototype or whether it’s a sort of speculative fiction, it sets up a lot of expectations. In fact, every time we go into user testing, we know that there are expectations that users bring because – and get triggered by what they see on the screen. In fact, often, the finer the resolution and the greater the finish, we know from user testing, the less people wanna comment on it ’cause they don’t wanna tell you it’s bad if it’s finished, right? And sometimes the rougher it looks, the better and in fact completely different kinds of feedback you get. Now, we’re gonna cross over robots because we’ve seen a lot of robots, and actually, they’re not as interesting in this context. We’re gonna go right to Star Wars.

Nathan Shedroff: Star Trek.

Chris Noessel: I’m sorry, Star Trek.

[Video clip plays from Star Trek]

Kirk gives it to IT.

[Audience laughter]

[Video continues, then ends]

See, they’re on AT&T as well.

[Audience laughter and applause]

Sorry. [Laughter] So what’s interesting about this – if you look at the date, this is 1966. This is about as popular and mainstream in science fiction as you could get at the time. And exactly 30 years later to the year, we see come out of the market these StarTAC flip phone –

Nathan Shedroff: Thinly veiled.

Chris Noessel: – from Motorola. And we’ve heard anecdotal evidence – we haven’t found anyone that will cop to it yet – that the scientists were actually referencing and they remembered their childhood of seeing this sort of flip phone, and that it would influence their expectations about what these devices should be. What’s interesting is it’s not just influencing the expectations of the audience about what’s acceptable and what’s possible; it’s also influencing, albeit over usually a larger timeframe, engineers and designers and projects leads and even funders, I’m sure, about what’s possible and what should be, because we’ve now established use cases even though they’re fictional.

So we’re gonna leave the realm of expectation a little bit and talk about the social context, because this is where science fiction – really good science fiction is really about a commentary on the present. It’s really about people, not so much the technology, and that’s just there as a sort of twist or a trigger to do things that you couldn’t necessarily do in other kinds of drama or comedy. And specifically, we’re gonna talk a little bit about anthropomorphism, because we see this over and over in science fiction, and of course, this is just a mechanism to talk about people and our relationship to each other and our relationship to technology. But because it’s science fiction, we can sort of play with the story and play with people’s emotions and make the characters do some things that otherwise just wouldn’t make sense at all.

I’m sure everyone here has – I didn’t hear any hisses, though – remember the prior attempts at anthropomorphizing things in the interface. We have Clippy, and we have whatever the Mac thing that I don’t even think had a name, and Bob. We see these things over and over. These happen to be from Microsoft, but lots of companies tried this. How many people have ever seen Ms. Dewey? Wow, more people than I would’ve expected. How many people think – how many people liked Ms. Dewey? Not a whole lot.

What was interesting – and this corresponds with Bob as well from Microsoft – is that they made some interesting choices. We don’t have a clip of this. Sadly, it’s no longer available, and we can’t get clips of this. But they chose to render Ms. Dewey first of all in this sort of slinky maid uniform. I’m not quite sure what it is.

[Audience laughter]

And she’s smiling here, but this is actually sort of a rare show of positive emotions. She used to sort of – most of her emotions, at least when I did searches, she’d walk around and sort of snit and be generally annoying, actually. And that was an interesting choice. And all of these examples – Bob and Ms. Dewey and Clippy, etc. – really point to the difficulty that if you’re gonna play this anthropomorphism game, you really have to play it correctly or else it doesn’t work; in fact, it can work disastrously.

This is a more positive example. This is Knowledge Navigator from ’87. This goes back a ways.

[Video plays of Knowledge Navigator]

Chris Noessel: So not only was Knowledge Navigator sort of heralded as a really good example of a corporate future-think release to the public done well, but one of the reasons why it was done well is that Phil doesn’t have too much emotion. He has agency, but he doesn’t have too much agency, and they sort of played this balance about how much anthropomorphism, how much likeness, how much behavior you want your computer – or, in this case, a computer – to exhibit, and how much you don’t, where it gets either annoying or in the way or silly or unbelievable.

One of the things to note about anthropomorphism – the examples we’ve seen so far are very visual examples of “Yes, that looks human.” And then we tend to think that anthropomorphism needs those visual representations. Turns out it’s not the case. Any kind of reference and any kind of sensation to humanness – or, in some cases, animal-ness – will still trigger these effects. And so here are examples where the anthropomorphism is carried entirely by voice.

[Video clip plays of Star Trek]

So aside from a commentary about voice recognition and voice synthesis and whether voice interfaces are appropriate or not, what happens when you use voice – certainly in science fiction, but also it applies as a lesson to other kinds of technical media – is that it telegraphs capabilities that may or may not be there. When we hear the computer respond in a natural way and respond in intelligent ways, or what we think are intelligent ways, we tend to forget that it’s programmatic. We tend to assume that there’s capabilities that are more humanlike, whether or not in fact that’s the case. And this is where anthropomorphism gets difficult, because we can imply capabilities and responses that may not be able to be realized, and therefore may be disappointing for either audiences or users.

This is a really great clip that I love as well.

[Video clip plays of R2D2 from Star Wars]

Okay, so R2D2 is one of the most beloved characters in Star Wars, and he doesn’t talk, right? Which is kinda weird because all the other robots in Star Wars can talk, but leaving that aside, one of the reasons why he is so beloved, besides the fact that he’s the best actor, is that –

[Audience laughter]

– he has these sort of humanlike traits, right? We know he’s afraid ’cause we hear these sort of whimpers. Well, he has no voice. He only has sound effects. And yet it’s telegraphing emotion, and it’s telegraphing intelligence; it’s telegraphing capabilities. So we don’t need a humanlike representation that’s visual. We can carry that anthropomorphism entirely in the sound channel as we like.

We have “Knight Rider.” We won’t go into that. We all remember him: KITT.

[Audience laughter]

So it turns out that even voice isn’t necessary to carry off this sort of anthropomorphized effects and all of the triggers that come with it. Sometimes just behavior is enough, and that’s what interaction design is all about.

So this is actually a fairly subtle example, but when you go into Amazon or any – or the Apple store, for that matter, ’cause it has a one-click interface, and it recognizes you, right? We have put on the rest of the page “Welcome back,” etc., and here’s all your recommendations. When you can just hit one button on a buy page and it takes care of everything else, essentially there’s an anthropomorphism that happens back there that says, “I know who you are. I trust you. I have agency, and I’ll take care of all the details for you.” It’s not unlike walking into your favorite bar and nodding at the bartender, and by the time you get up to the bar, he has your favorite drink ready, and by the way, he’s started a tab and you didn’t even have to pay for it right now. So all of this wraps up into behavior that is more humanlike than we’re used to in most kinds of systems. And that’s one of the interesting lessons that comes out of this work.

Going back to the visual issue of how the representation is carried visually, one of the things that we’re finding, of course – and let’s…

[Video begins playing]

Does anyone remember Until the End of the World?

[Video continues playing]

Okay, so this is Bounty Bear.

[Video continues playing, then ends]

All right, so “I’m searching, I’m searching.” This is a search interface. He’s actually searching the entire network. He’s basically tracing a call. But it’s anthropomorphized.

Well, so what does the anthropomorphism bring? It makes it kinda funny, to start with, but it also implies an intelligence and a capability that otherwise wouldn’t be there in a normal Google interface, or certainly back in 1991, what we would imagine probably a way search might look like. So we’re telegraphing – or the film producers are telegraphing capabilities that look futuristic.

Now, in terms of likeness, Bounty Bear is still pretty rough and probably good for computer animation of his day, but doesn’t look particularly real and humanlike, or, in this case, animal-like. He doesn’t get too close to the uncanny valley. But taking it all the way down the valley and back up again, we have The Matrix.

[Video clip plays from The Matrix]

Okay, so Agent Smith is a program. He’s an algorithm. He’s a set of code, right? But here he’s represented as a person, and he’s represented with just as much resolution and reality and likelihood as the other characters that we also know are human. Of course, we know on some level they’re all in this shared reality or shared fantasy, however you wanna describe it. And by putting him in a absolutely equivocal human likeness, that telegraphs more danger, more capability, more cunning, more – or at least equal abilities to a human, far surpassing what we really normally consider as capabilities of technology, even of this time, right?

So this helps audiences understand that this is real danger and a higher danger than if it was just a computer algorithm or a set of code. But it also telegraphs the power of this working in terms of what we could do in our own interfaces. I’m not saying that you should go out and put “agents” in incredible likeness in your interfaces, but realize that these anthropomorphic lessons are lessons that you can apply to your own work. This takes another – I’ll show one more clip here.

[Video clip plays from The Matrix]

Right, so the algorithm is difficult to believe that it can predict the future, and it has these sort of metaphysical traits, if it was just a set of code, if it was a screen-based, sort of keyboard-based computer. But when you represent it this way, both audiences, and therefore users, have a much easier time understanding and assuming that these capabilities are real and in fact powerful.

Nathan Shedroff: So going down to sorta the last arc of influence, if social context is really about the human side of the equation, the proposed paradigm is where we as designers can actually take a look at the interfaces in science fiction and sort of glean lessons from them.

Some of these are lessons that we all kind of know, but it’s nice to see written large, such as the lesson “constraints ease the learning curve for new users.” Like, we know that, but when you can sort of go up and see it on the screen, you’re like, “Ah, good reminder.” We have a positive example here where people from in The Fifth Element sort of figure out how to operate a millennium-old weapon without any instruction set. But what I’m gonna do is zip ahead to the negative example, which is a short film by Pixar called Lifted, in 2007, where a little alien gets to sorta learn the ropes of human abduction.

[Video clip plays from Lifted]

So poor little alien has zero constraints on this giant interface, and that’s sorta where all the comedy comes from. We all know this. Hey, look, it’s written up large, and now we can reference it and laugh at it. We don’t want our Ford steering wheel to look anything like Lifted’s interface. Which it doesn’t.

[Audience laughter]

A second sort of lesson that we can sort of glean from them are things that are known probably in the labs, but that we don’t really have a great deal of experience with. An example of this is that input should know the effective or the emotional states of their users in order to sort of really help them do what it is they’re really trying to do.

We have this – again, an example from The Fifth Element, which is a negative example where Zorg is choking on a cherry pit, and he begins to mash on this keyboard on his desk, and the interface doesn’t go, “Hmm, he probably needs security.” It actually tries to do what the little buttons that he’s pressing are telling him to do.

Instead, we can take a – actually, I’m gonna bypass this one as well for time. But in 2001, we see a positive example, where Dr. Floyd is talking to his young daughter, who’s down on Earth, from a space station, and he’s able to – I’m sorry, during the course of the call, she ends up sort of mashing keys. But the computer knows, “Oh, this is a little girl. Her attention is on her dad. We probably don’t need to – she’s probably not trying to influence the call,” and it actually ignores it. Nope, I’m gonna skip it.

I’m gonna show just two quick clips here about this last lesson, which are things that you can really only learn by prototyping in science fiction. The lesson here is that social hierarchy can be reflected in holography. And for purists, I put “holography” in quotes. And for this we go to Star Wars. You’ll remember the scene from Star Wars VI: The Empire Strikes Back. When Darth Vader sort of steps out of his little pod and addresses the emperor, there’s a very particular sense of scale to the hologram.

[Video clip plays from Star Wars VI: The Empire Strikes Back]

Nathan Shedroff: And there’s the master. And of course, he’s not talking to a giant; the emperor’s not huge. It’s just scaled large. But when we contrast that with the way that the Jedis are represented in holography – this is from Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, in 2005.

[Video clip plays from Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith]

You can see that they’ve taken pains to be equal in size. And it is this sort of notion that just passes you by while you’re watching the film, but on inspection you’re like, “Well, of course. The Empire is hierarchical, and Jedis are egalitarian.” And their media reflects that.

Chris Noessel: Right, so we’re gonna leave it at this, with this example. This is actually in a lesson that you can take directly into your interface design, right? So if you have a social interface, like iChat or FaceTime or Skype, etc., where people are represented, social hierarchy being reinforced or broken is a possible – is something that you can play with, right? So we’re finding many of these lessons in science fiction played out that have direct relationship to interaction design/interface design. If you go to the notes, the PDF that’s online that we showed you at the beginning of the talk, there’s all these lessons from these examples culled out, and hopefully we’ll be able to show the rest of them with you in the spring.

One of the major lessons, though – the last thing I wanna cover is that if it works for an audience in science fiction, it often works for a user. In fact, it almost always works for a user. And so that’s a really good way for you to watch and deconstruct the science fiction that you see. But there are exceptions to this, especially gesture control and voice control, breaks for users, even though it looks really cool and works really well for audiences. So with that, we’ll leave it there, and –

Nathan Shedroff: Bring Mark up.

Chris Noessel: – thank you very much.

Nathan Shedroff: Yeah, that’s it.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

Chris McCarthy: Did anybody else get teary during that ending presentation?

Christi Zuber: Yes, yes, yes.

Chris McCarthy: So I feel a little emotional right now. Which I think is really appropriate, actually, for the kinda work that we do, because we’re trying to bring humanity back into the workplace, getting away from mindless experiences and mindless work.

So we are from Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy, and we were founded in 2003 in a very experimental way. We weren’t sure if this kind of thinking could actually work in an old-fashioned industry like healthcare. So what we decided to do is to experiment in 2003 by really trying to get to understand the humans in our environment, which means patients, doctors, and nurses at Kaiser Permanente.

But let me tell you a little bit about Kaiser, for those of who are not familiar with our organization. We’re mostly based in California, although we’re in many other states. We service 9 million patients; 8 million of them are in California. We have 12,000 doctors. It’s the largest private practice in the world. We have over 400 clinics. We have 35 hospitals, 169,000 employees. So basically what we’re saying is we’re a big organization. And there’s only 3 of us to do that work. But we’re growing.

Christi Zuber: Small but mighty.

Chris McCarthy: Small but mighty. And what we hope to share with you over the next 30 minutes is our journey of trying to bring user experience into this kind of organization and some of the tips and tricks that we’ve learned along the way, some of the techniques that have really, really worked well for us, and then show you some of the output of some of that work.

So the first thing you should know is that the cornerstone of most industry is probably customer-centricness, and in healthcare, that means patient-centered. And since 1999, the Institute of Medicine has made this pretty much the cornerstone of all of improvement work in the workplace. But that creates a bit of a creative tension, because we are trying to do human-centered design. And the creative tension is that if you design just for the customer – or just, in our case, for the patient – you’re forgetting about all the other people that have to live in the environment, which are your doctors, your nurses, your staff that support all of those people.

So we kind of enjoy the creative tension because it really does allow us to think more critically about the kinds of experiences that we are designing. And once we explain that we’re not necessarily tossing the patient but really what we’re trying to do is optimize the relationships for people in our system, and we want our clinicians and our patients both to have the best experience that they can, utilizing our spaces, tools, roles, and processes at Kaiser Permanente.

So again, in 2003, it was an experiment. We were trying to figure out whether these methods could actually work. And one way that we knew it was working was from pictures like this. This is seven years ago. You can tell ’cause I don’t have gray hair. And there’s a few things that I love about this picture. One, you can clearly see some of our techniques all in action at the same time. Handmade constructions – you can see these props in the back that we quickly built. Enactment, where we’re actually acting out a scenario here, a workflow, a user experience, the intangible thing.

But what really stood out for us, why we knew we were on the right track, is that – look at this nurse’s face up there. You don’t see that when you do business process redesign. I mean, that is just a really boring thing. And traditionally, that’s how we created new workflow. That’s how we created new experiences was by going to a conference room and doing business process engineering. And, again, we never saw that kind of joy trying to build something new.

And so as a transformative exercise for us in our organization, it was powerful, and also it yielded something equally powerful, which is an innovation called the Journey Home Board. The Journey Home Board is a tool that’s in all of our hospitals at Kaiser Permanente now. It is a tool that allows – when a mom first has a baby, her and the dad and the family and the caregivers will see this board in the room, and they can use it to understand the things that a mom has to do to get out of the hospital and get to that rocking chair with her baby that she wants to be in, in the home. And so you can see there’s some checkmarks there, and the clinicians can flip over tasks as they get completed. So it’s a really wonderful communal tool for the care team, for the mom, for the dad, to create a common understanding.

This tool was developed in less than three months, and it went viral in our organization in less than a year. That also was transformative. That really helped us understand that this way of thinking, this way of co-designing, which is the foundation of our group – co-designing means having the patients and the doctors and the clinicians, along with us, work together every step of the process to come up with new experiences and innovations for Kaiser Permanente. That, along with this innovation, really set into motion our future as a design group.

So to take us through some of the process, I’m gonna turn this over to Christi.

Christi Zuber: So what Chris and I are going to do for the next 20 minutes is go through the main steps of our process that we take to design for the human interaction together. So these steps themselves probably won’t sound that different to you all. Some of the tools, we’ve heard different speakers mention over the past few days, which has been great. So what we’d like to share is how we use them and what we’ve gotten from them.

So first, we always start with understanding what’s really happening in those interactions. What are the needs of the people that we’re actually trying to serve?

So one of the really simple techniques that we’ll use is drawing exercises, so that will be – I remember when we first started trying this, Chris wasn’t the biggest supporter of this. It felt a little silly.

Chris McCarthy: Well, I did take the comment class yesterday, so I’m now a believer.

Christi Zuber: He’s a believer now. So basically, just going out to – these are actually drawings from our nurses. We also do the same thing with our patients. In this example – so we’ll tell you a little bit of a story about medications, giving medications.

So in the examples that we show, these are from a project that we did around reducing medication errors. So I mean, I know you all have heard about medication errors that happen various times in the news stories and things like that, and it is a significant problem.

So we wanted to – we were asked to tackle that issue, so a very serious issue that traditionally is tackled in extremely serious ways. But we decided to take a different spin on it and really start to understand as we’re talking about the interaction between the people and the processes and where that might be breaking down.

So we went into our hospitals and we were observing nurses when they get the medication, and they’re responsible for doing all the safety checks of the medications before they go to the patients. When you ask nurses, “How is that process for you?”, they say, “It’s frustrating, but it’s fine. I deal with it; it’s fine.” When you ask for them to actually draw what that experience is like for you, you get these pictures. So I don’t know about you all, but that doesn’t look very “fine” to me. You know, this whole frayed hair up on the end was the common theme that we saw out of probably 100 images that our nurses drew for us.

So what this does is it allows us to have a tool to then talk to them about that and say, “Tell me a little bit about – it says chaotic interruptions, unclear process. Tell me about what that means to you.” And then you can actually start to engage in a dialogue about really what’s deeper into the surface for them. So that’s a technique that we found is very, very simple but very, very powerful when you’re using it with people.

This next thing that we’re going to queue up is video ethnography. So we use video ethnography in a number of different ways. What we’re going to show you is a video of a patient’s caregiver in their home. So, again, video ethnography is yet another way to tell stories and to share stories among people.

When you’re beginning to try and co-design, what’s really, really important is that, one, you get the viewpoint of other people so that you start to see how other people are experiencing things. You rarely ever have the opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes. Video ethnography helps you to do that. So we’re gonna queue a little bit of a video that we took of a patient that was in one of our hospitals. And this is a video of his wife and what actually happens when she leaves and goes back home, and how she organizes her medications, which was very insightful for our clinicians. See what you think.

[Video begins playing]

Female: I took it to the clinic because the endocrinologist may have questions, but normally it stays right here, because I have it arranged – when he was discharged from the hospital, this is what they gave me. Amy, do you have the oxycodone? Yes, it stays on the stove.

Male: You do the same thing at lunch. You put it in the cup and –

Female: Yes.

Male: – have him –

Female: I always do it with a cup.

Male: Okay, got it.

Female: And it goes with his meal.

[Video ends]

Christi Zuber: So beyond the obvious – that she doesn’t cook; this is where she keeps her meds – I think part of the insight that our clinicians started to get from this is, “Wow, we don’t think about what happens when people actually go home from our hospitals. We have professional staff that are organizing all of those medications. When we send them home and they bring all their things home in a bag and they have to re-set up in their lives and make this work in their lives, that’s pretty powerful.” So from things like that, you can start to gain a deeper empathy and a deeper understanding in that connection.

So along that deeper empathy and deeper understanding, another really good tool for being able to show videos or be able to tell stories is a way that – if you’re going to co-design, one really significant thing about co-designing is one I’d mentioned, understanding other people’s viewpoints, but also feeling heard yourself, because if you can’t feel like someone understands where you are, it’s hard to design solutions that might change what your current state is.

So one of the things that we do actually – what you’ll see in this video – is this is a side-by-side. This is actually a photograph that we took every minute during a nurse’s shift, and we cut it down, so we’re not gonna show you the whole thing. But we took one photo every minute of what a nurse is doing during an eight-hour shift at the hospital. Then we also took a photo every minute of what the patient is seeing in their hospital room. And when we brought people together for a design session, we actually showed this to them so that the patients could see and the nurses could see what the differences or the similarities were in those worlds. So take a look at that and see what you think.

[Video plays, with music]

So it was really another big sort of “ah-ha” moment, one for our clinicians to say “Wow.” When our patients say, “Why aren’t you in here? Spend more time with me. I’ve got some more questions for you,” they didn’t realize the stillness in the world of a patient when you’re sitting in the hospital staring at a wall, hour after hour after hour. And when a nurse comes in there, you have so many questions. When another clinician comes in there, you have so many questions. You haven’t seen someone.

So bringing in that emotion to that – and also, on the flip side, for the patients that were designing solutions with the nurses, to say, “I had no idea all that was going on outside of my room. I think of them as chit-chatting with their colleagues, and why aren’t they taking care of me.” So there became this empathy in the two worlds together, so that they could look at, well, how can we design for those interactions between our worlds together.

So now we’re going to talk about what happens after we start to create this empathy, this understanding, look for these patterns that are happening, and begin to design solutions together.

Chris McCarthy: Right. So this is where our co-designers get very excited. This is where they get to bring out their dreams, their aspirations, and show us what these things are going to look like. And, again, you probably experienced some of these techniques over the past few days. I think in Gamestorming they did some of this stuff, and as designers, hopefully you’re familiar with some of these tools.

But, again, the key thing here is that these are co-designers, meaning temporary designers: nurses, doctors, and patients. So during the ideation and prototype phase for us is usually about two days at our innovation center, which is pictured up here. And what you see on the screen is some handmade construction, and you see an enactment going on, on that side of the screen.

And what they’re doing is demonstrating a few sets of ideas that they thought would make medications better in our hospital. And so this team tore apart a bed and created the “Ferrari of all med beds.” It had a microwave built in it. It had a refrigerator. It had I think a closet built in or remote-controlled television, including the toaster and the kitchen sink. But those are important things for them to quickly build out and show us what they’re doing through enactments, because often it’s not really the “Ferrari of med beds” that’s important; through the enactment, it’s demonstrating the needs of what having everything really at fingertip reach could do for that intangible thing called the workflow that we’re trying to change.

What I really love about this video – about this picture is that you’ll notice in the background this little woman circled. She had an incredible handmade construction. Her handmade construction was simply a smock with lettering on it that said “Leave me alone.” In her enactment, she had a doctor, and a patient in a bed, and she was demonstrating giving medications, and the doctor came to interrupt her. And she turned to the doctor and said, “Leave me alone.” It was very, very clear what her idea was, if you couldn’t tell from the vest. And we got a little bit of chuckling and a whole lot of “no ways.” People were just like, “This will never fly.” Usually those are indicators, when people are laughing or you get kind of like a lot of little grumbling going on, that there’s something special there. So that is a trigger for us to pay attention.

So we’ve heard over the past few days, people trying to do enactments and people in their own environments wondering how these things really work. So over the years, we’ve perfected our techniques of doing an enactment, and we call it video enactment. The first few years, we used to have folks build their handmade constructions and show us how these things worked. Well, I don’t know about in other industries, but in healthcare, folks are very, very serious, and when you give them the opportunity to play, sometimes they play a little too hard and the whole thing becomes a really big comedy routine. And although playfulness is really, really important, what we have found is, by doing video enactment – so asking them to perform for a video for two minutes – really gets them to still be playful but really focus in on what they’re trying to demonstrate as their new concepts. So it’s a really great technique that we started using just this past two years, so here’s an example.

[Video plays of enactment]

Male: Action.

Female: Hi, we tackle the issue of how might __________

Female: Hi Honey, How are you doing?

Male: Lousy

Female: What’s wrong?

Male: Well, I can’t get enough sleep. I don’t wanna be here. I didn’t wanna spend my vacation time ____________ earplugs.

Female: Well, see they’ve given us this readiness checklist that we can fill out together, and in fact they have that we can choose earplugs. How about we do that? We’ll choose the earplugs, and then look, it’s recyclable, and it’s also a “do not disturb” sign.

Male: ______________

Male: I’m the ____________ coordinator and I see that the patient in 348 needs earplugs. So I’m gonna write that on the request form.

Female: Well, I think we have a _____ malfunction.

Male: That’s fine.

Female: ________________________________ and I’ll go get you a new one. ___________________ and pick up _________________ Well, I see the status is ________ Great.

[Video pauses]

Chris McCarthy: Very sophisticated electronic medical board.

[Audience laughter]

[Video resumes]

Female: Oh, my gosh, I had so many discharges today; now I have another admission today.

[Video pauses]

Christi Zuber: She’s in character.

[Video resumes]

Female: Mrs. Jones, how are we doing this morning?

Female: __________________________________________________

Female: Mrs. Jones, how are you today?

Female: Hi, I’m the department manager here, and I’m thrilled with what the staff is coming up with in terms of making our department more ready for the next shift.

Female: And this is, we have an idea wish list that we work on at the end of every day and we work __________ideas. So the Concepts that we have discussed today have been Concept 5 ________request list, Concept 52 a broken supply _________, Concept 53 is clean your hands clean your mind, Concept 54 is ____________.

[Video ends]

Chris McCarthy: So in that enactment, the woman in pink was actually the CEO of a hospital. We had a patient, a doctor, a nurse, and almost everybody is playing a different role. They’re not playing their own roles.

Christi Zuber: Had an IT guy.

Chris McCarthy: And an IT guy. You can see there was a lot of handmade construction. There was a lot of interaction that we were trying to demonstrate through workflow redesign. But what was really special, of course, about the video enactment is that now this is a living artifact. So as we’re co-designing and field testing and trying ideas, we can always go back and take a look at some of the original enactments to really see what people were trying to get across from the original concept. It most certainly will not stick to that. But, again, it’s a really great way to check yourself to see “Am I staying true to at least some of the original ideas that was coming from this?” So with that, back to Christi.

Christi Zuber: All right. So we’ll pick back up the story with how then – so we’ve got ideas, so sort of following along, we went out and we understood what’s really happening. What are people struggling with? Where are they frustrated? Because, again, the title of this talk, “Don’t Forget the Humans,” this is about what the basic fundamental needs of people are. And not only understanding those needs, but engaging and involving those people to help create what the future state’s going to be.

So we’ve now brought them together. Chris walked you through how they’ve generated ideas. They’ve brainstormed. They’ve prototyped ideas. They’ve built them together. They’ve done some enactments. And now we’re at the point of saying, “Okay, let’s actually go back out into the field and begin to try ideas with them, get feedback, and see what actually happens from that.”

So remember this woman, the “leave me alone” woman? So after that was over, as Chris said, we were kind of intrigued. There were many – hundreds and hundreds of ideas that came from that design session. So we’ll just walk you through the example of one that’s a pretty tangible example to be able to tell the story of.

So the “leave me alone” woman, as she left, went back and started caring for patients in our hospitals. And within a couple days, we were able to run by Home Depot and decided let’s take her idea and let’s go buy a vest at Home Depot, and let’s try out this idea. Ten bucks, we can go and try out this idea.

So I think something that’s really key about this, as I start to tell you this journey, is this is all about really doing very small tests of change, not trying to think you’ve gotta solve for everything. Now, remember, we’re trying to solve for reducing medication errors. That’s a pretty gnarly problem, but we are starting with small tests of change. While we were trying this, we were trying many, many things, but trying things at a small scale so that you can fail – don’t think that once you have an idea, you can sit around in a conference room and come out with perfection. You’ll never have perfection, and being in a conference room certainly is not the way that you’re ever going to have perfection. So just try it. Throw it out to your users. Get feedback.

So we took what we would consider sort of an innovator and early adopter and said, “Hey, would you mind throwing this vest on while you’re working and caring for patients? During one time that you’re giving medications to your patients, would you wear this vest? And what happens is, when you wear this vest, no one should be interrupting you unless it’s an emergency.” Well, there clearly is no policy that says no one can interrupt her, so in order to try it really quickly, we became the policy, so we were sort of running around her like this, and she’s giving her medications – thank you, policy. As she’s giving medications, we were the policy around her saying, “I’m sorry, she can’t be interrupted now; she has her vest on. I’m sorry, she can’t be interrupted now; she’s giving medications.”

So what happened is she went through this whole process, and we said, “Okay, how did that feel? We just wanna know, what is that like?” And she said, “Well, first off, I wouldn’t wear this vest.” So, good to know. But she said, “But what’s interesting is a couple things. One, by the act of putting it on, I thought about giving medications differently. I was focused. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be multitasking. It was a trigger for me. So I knew I was supposed to be focused on something.” And she said, “And on top of that, I actually got all of my medications done on time because nobody was interrupting me, so that was really amazing.” She said, “I like this, but I wouldn’t wear this.”

So in our home-down way of actually trying to “Well, let’s try it out cheaply again,” we said, “What would you like? What do you think would be better?” And she said, “I’d like to – I think it’s a good idea to try it again, but something smaller.” So we came back with a sash, and the woman tried it quickly and got some of the same feedback about “It felt good trying this out, but I felt like I just won a beauty pageant.” Which she’s a lovely lady. She could’ve. And she said, “So something a little sleeker, a little sexier,” and we said, “How about red vinyl?”

So we brought back red vinyl and learned a couple really key things about this. So it was smaller; that was nice. But mainly, it could be cleaned, so we learned infection control. That’s really important. You’re going from room to room. You need something that can be cleaned. Cloth couldn’t be cleaned like that. We also, because we couldn’t sew the bottom of it, we connected it with a magnet and learned that’s actually an important design feature, because they need to be able to have it quickly removed in case a patient starts to fall to the floor and they try to grab them. So things like that. Never thought of that, but in trying things really quickly, we learned that. Finally, we settled on sort of this reflective sash. It’s reflective on both sides. You can see it at night. You could roll it up and put it in their pocket.

So a very tangible idea, and I know not all the ideas that we work on are like this. We work on workflows. We work on technology. We work on a number of things. But in this example, you can easily see how just getting things out there very quickly, starting to get feedback, not giving yourself time to fall in love with your ideas, doing very small tests of change, change with very willing innovators, is a great way of trying to iterate through your ideas and not giving yourself a chance to fall in love with them.

What this all actually resulted in is a process that we now call KP MedRite. It spread to, what, 24…?

Chris McCarthy: Twenty-five hospitals.

Christi Zuber: Twenty-five of our Kaiser hospitals, so that means thousands and thousands of people are doing this on a daily basis. There are a number of things that comprise what KP MedRite is. If you were a healthcare audience, I’m sure you’d be really intrigued to know. Since you’re not, I’ll spare you those details.

But I think what’s important is just knowing the impact of how we went through this, how we learned what the people in the system really need, not just the nurses, but what the patients also need. And we involved them in a process so that they could co-design their future state together.

And what resulted from that, actually, is, in this example, KP MedRite, which now has spread to many places, and it is – nurses are now interrupted less, which means they’re doing things in a more safe manner, and medication errors have gone down. So it’s very, very significant. We’ve actually already seen a 105 percent return on investment in the couple years that it’s been in place.

So a very powerful system. It’s not only spreading across Kaiser, but because we’re not-for-profit, all of these things are shared openly, so now it’s spreading to other places. And it’s really powerful knowing that these solutions were built by the people that are doing them. And we think something that’s incredibly important about that is, that means that these solutions will probably be more sustainable in the long run.

So quickly to sort of highlight some of the tools along the steps of the process. So understanding and looking for patterns, drawing your experience, video ethnography, time-lapse video – these are some really basic, really strong and powerful tools to tell the story and to understand. Ideate and prototype, so handmade constructions, getting in there, building out what your ideas are, getting very physical with them through building them and doing the enactments and starting to see how the tools, how the workflows, how all these things work together. Trying out ideas and getting them out there so that people can actually respond to them, doing very small tests of change, not giving yourself a chance to fall in love with your ideas, getting feedback very quickly, and not trying to go with the people who just don’t wanna do anything. Connect yourselves with those innovators and those early adopters, to really give it a chance to breathe a little bit of life into it and see if there’s some possibility behind those ideas.

Chris McCarthy: And the next, final slide. Great. So ultimately, we really see ourselves as trying to bring humanity back to the experiences in the healthcare system. Started off talking about mindless experiences and mindless work. And I think because of the techniques that we use, because of the way that we co-design with our patients and clinicians, we’ve been able to achieve a very large level of success. You can see across the top, those are the years going across, and we have some major innovations that have spread not only to all Kaiser Permanente hospitals but to other countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, of course many states within the United States.

And more and more healthcare organizations are starting to bring folks like us, designers, into – in house. So we’re seeing more and more replications of the kinda work that we do, budding out into other healthcare organizations. So we think this is a really important way of working. It’s an emerging field, and user experience in the live, human experience is a really important thing. So thank you. Want a hug?

[Audience applause]

Christi Zuber: [Laughter] Yeah. There, there. [Laughter]

Audience Member: There was a comment – I won’t say from whom, but Twitter will make it available to anybody who bothers to search on it – from one of the attendees who said, “I’m always a little suspicious when user-centered design gets too close to outsourcing design responsibility to users,” right? So involving the nurses, involving the folks in the design process. What is the role of the designer in crafting the solution versus just, like, “Well, have them figure it out” kinds of stuff? How do you strike that balance?

Christi Zuber: Yeah. I’ll take a crack, and then you can build on it. You know, I think that some of it – this has been a journey for us, and I think we’ve found a good balance between getting feedback and also seeing the bigger picture of what would be beneficial in the system.

So I think Chris at some point in the presentation had talked about when they were designing the Ferrari of beds, we didn’t take that literally and say, “Okay, the users say we need an amazing bed.” But we took that as, what they are looking for is things at their fingertips. So sometimes it’s not taking verbatim what the idea is, but understanding more deeply what is the need that’s surfacing that idea. So I think that’s where, as a designer, when you’re looking at trying to create solutions, you’ve gotta understand that and dig a little deeper to understand what the needs are, because sometimes the ideas they surface aren’t so much about the ideas, but they’re about the need behind the idea.

Chris McCarthy: And I would say, in 2003 when we started, I think we thought we were going to offload this onto our end users, that we would train people with the very basics of design, and they would be able to redesign their lives. And what we discovered over the years, that that indeed is not possible. And so the designer’s role on our teams is to lead the design.

But we have co-designers ’cause we know, in our system, that if they are not involved with every step of the way, the ideas almost always are rejected. So by having their DNA infused not only in the actual design but in the observation, in the field testing, and even in the piloting of some of these ideas, you’re not only creating better ideas, but you’re generating the will to want to implement these ideas. And then you’re generating champions who will carry these ideas to be spread in other environments. So we’re not just making them co-designers for the design process; we’re actually creating change agents through this work as a side benefit.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

So I’m gonna talk for precisely ten minutes – and the countdown’s started, so awesome – about being alone. So two things to say about that. The first thing is that it might seem like a bit of a strange topic for me to talk about in front of a room of hundreds of my peers. And the second thing is that it’s okay if you don’t like it, because it will be over really quickly.

So let’s start with a quote from, I think, America’s most famous seeker of solitude, and this is from J.D. Salinger from an interview he gave with the New York Times in 1980: “There is a marvelous peace in not publishing.” And he spent a large amount of his life deliberately not publishing.

But the problem is, now we’re all publishers, as Michael was talking about so eloquently earlier. We all publish, over multiple channels, and we publish all kinds of different things, more and more personal things about our lives. That has an effect on our culture, and that’s much discussed.

But the flip side of that is that we also have to consume all of this stuff too. All of this stuff that’s kind of like being pushed out and being published, we all have to consume. And I think that has tremendous effects on our internal worlds, on our internal psyche. And I think the ability to look away from this and to stop and disconnect is vitally important for us as human beings.

As designers, we also seem to be really, really comfortable with adding the network to everything we do. Everything we do, more often than not, we’re asked to consider how it connects to something else, whether that’s the Web, whether that’s another device. This is a typewriter that someone’s hacked so that it can tweet.

[Audience laughter]

So let’s look back into history for some lessons about why being alone – why solitude is so important for us as humans. First thing, regardless of how you feel about the historical accuracy of these various stories, there is a shared cultural history of being alone. Christ’s 40 days alone in the wilderness; the Buddha’s I think 47 days underneath the Bodhi tree, so he wins in the kind of religious figure solitude race. And then on the right, we have Muhammad, who would visit a cave and sit alone and meditate until he received visions from the angel Gabriel.

But there’s a slightly more secular story that’s also interesting for us to consider. So this is Michel de Montaigne, who lived in the 16th century in France, who was a – became – is known now for being an essayist. But how he got to being an essayist is the interesting story.

So he formed a very, very close and intimate relationship with another humanist judge, called Étienne de La Boétie, and the two of them would communicate with each other constantly. They found a soul mate in each other, and they would communicate and communicate and communicate. They would write; they would share their observations on the world.

Unfortunately, one day Étienne de La Boétie died, and de Montaigne was grief-stricken. How he dealt with this was, he had a – being landed gentry, he had a big chateau. He retreated to his very well-stocked library and announces to the world this very, very flowery statement, within which is contained this line that I really like: “retired to the bosom of the learned virgins.”

And he spent around ten years in his library, and he started to write. In the absence of his friend, he started to write about the world around him. He started to write about everything, from society to France at the time. But what actually he created was his essay, and that’s what he’s known for now. He basically invented short-form writing by shutting himself away from the world.

So I think the point that I wanna make there is that we might think of being alone and disconnecting as an abdication of activity, as something that pushes back the world and is a silent place. But I think what I’m trying to say is that solitude is in fact generative. It can be a place in which we find creative energy. And so that’s why it’s so important to design so that people can access that space.

And a modern essayist is getting in on the act as well. This is Alain de Botton and he says, “We have become such experts at being always in touch, informed, connected, now must relearn how to be silent, disconnected, alone.” The curious syntax of that statement may give you a clue as to the channel over which he published it: this is his Twitter feed. There it is. I favorited it. I’m sure the irony wasn’t lost on him, or perhaps it was, but he runs the University of Life in London, so what do I know?

If you prefer something a little bit baser, there’s too much stuff – we live in a stuffalanche, which is this rather great columnist who writes for a British newspaper called The Guardian, Charlie Brooker – both kind of expressing the same sentiment.

So let’s look at a few – well, this is like a solitude in the modern world, basically. A friend of mine, Sarah Pennington, performed a piece of research for this pan-European research project called the Equator Project, which was to basically look at the effects of what we in the old country call information/communication technology on our lives.

And so what Sarah did is she logged every interaction she had with a piece of technology. Most of it’s a phone, you can see the TV, whether she played PlayStation. And she found out that, over the course of a week, she spent a total of 25.47 hours interacting with some form of communications technology, which is a shocking discovery, or at least it’s interesting.

That was in 2002. Why that’s interesting is ’cause that’s before we started having all of these many channels to publish over, so that’s before Twitter, Flickr, Facebook became popular. So I wonder what would happen if Sarah did the same research now, how much more of her time would be taken up.

And the network that enables all of this communication keeps growing. That might be a matter for some conjecture. That network map, you may not believe it, but it does keep getting more blue. And there are things like the network permeates interspaces, which we never had it before, so onboard Wi-Fi and wireless access points in the middle of the Yukon. That green dot up there, I believe it’s a place called Betty’s Chicken Shack that has free publicly available Wi-Fi.

So I guess the question is, if we accept that solitude is a valuable state for us to enter into, how do we design for it? This is a Robinson Crusoe Lego figure. How do we recreate Montaigne’s library?

This may be a bit extreme. It takes a while before people realize what’s wrong with this image. Basically, the call answer buttons and the soft keys have been removed, and this is an artifact that Sarah created for her research.

But there are, like, elements of that in a product that I actually worked on. This very, very weird thing is a collaboration between Bang & Olufsen and Samsung. It was called the Serenata. It was a miserable failure.

But it had this feature, and the deal was that it was a music phone. It had this feature called Pure Music mode, and what happened is, when you slipped the speaker up, the phone would background any communications activity and just focus on playing music, so you could put it on the sideboard of your expensive Scandinavian log cabin and, like, hear the beautiful music from the actually quite nice speaker.

When you exit Pure Music mode, you would get a log of all of the communication activity that had happened whilst you were listening to music. So it wouldn’t answer the phone. The phone would ring. You wouldn’t get alerted to any incoming text messages until you actually made the decision to, like, reengage with the world.

Now, I know the idea of a phone that shuts off its communications capabilities simply by a physical action – maybe the way you hold it.

[Audience laughter]

Oh, right, yeah. Anyway, so there’s also things like OmmWriter, and I don’t know how many of you have used OmmWriter. It’s a fantastic piece of software that does the same thing: backgrounds all of the kind of activity and all the stuff that’s coming into your laptop, and it just lets you focus on the craft of writing.

And there’s also some inspiration to take from the way that people reestablish boundaries outside in the real world, so it’s a quiet car on an Amtrak train, or another train operator chain. How those rules are expressed and how they are respected by the community, because there’s something about stepping back and disconnecting – has to be – so it’s like it has to be a two-way thing. So you have to have some kind of permission from the community to disengage from it, so that people don’t kind of like worry when you suddenly disappear. And that’s something to think about.

Cornish, New Hampshire, was where Salinger lived, and those community rules were expected and enforced there. So people would come to Cornish looking for Salinger, and depending on how aggressive they were in their questioning, they would get sent on a wild-goose chase. So the more kind of annoying they were, the further they got sent.

Someone once taught me once that I should always end every talk with a quote from Charles Bukowski. I don’t think that was my mother, but anyway, so I’m gonna do that. And Bukowski has something to say on the subject, because he normally has something to say on every subject: “Without stopping entirely and doing nothing at all for great periods, you’re going to lose everything.” So let’s think about how do we help people to disconnect, to stop. Thanks.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

All right, thank you, Peter. Thanks very much for having me. This is fun. Good afternoon. You try going after the guy who invented giving a shit about design and the Web.

[Audience laughter]

So as Peter mentioned, I’ll talk a bit about data visualization. I spend a lot of time thinking about numbers and such.

I last lived in San Francisco in the Bay Area about 12 or 13 years ago, and was working as an interface designer at Netscape, may they rest in peace. And I basically had grown up interested in design and computer science as sort of separate things since being fairly young. And I figured that UI design was kinda the way to use those powers for good, sort of save people from these awful computers, and make software easier to use and more tractable and such.

I was at Netscape for a bit and then left, what, as they began imploding, and I went to the Media Lab at MIT. And one of my first projects when I got to MIT was actually looking at sorta UIs that actually hate people. So basically, as a cathartic way of kind of getting all this “try to help people” UI designer stuff outta my system, instead this painting software that each of the colors actually had a different behavior – sort of clear that. And then take an antagonistic painting program, so I’m trying to draw a line.

[Audience laughter]

You know, the yellow – it’s actually only gonna show me the mark before the mark that I’m drawing now.

[Audience laughter]

This one, we’re sort of upside-down, thank you very much.

[Audience laughter]

Or here we’re actually just erasing.

[Audience laughter]

Yes, thank you. As designers, you’ve always wanted to add this button to your software, I would assume.

[Audience laughter]

But this was very cathartic, and this was nice to kind of get out of my system.

As a designer, I began working sort of in design doing graphic design work. We do these information graphics, sort of tens and hundreds of data points, something you can actually sit down with Adobe Illustrator and lay out all by hand. And then moving – once you add code, it kinda becomes this data visualization thing of thousands and probably millions of data points that you’re trying to explain to people.

And so part of the wonderful job security in this is that we’ll never actually have less data, so there is no going back. Everyone talks about, like, there’s more data and more data, and we’re – you know, the average person has to deal with 16 thousand billion terabytes, petabytes, whatever, per day just in their newspaper, etc., etc. That’s not going backwards, and so it’s this magnificent job security for me.

But first, let’s begin with a story about sort of looking at data. So I really enjoy football. I actually really like football. And that’s not playing football, mind you. I’m not actually coordinated enough to throw, much less catch, a football. But a terrific sort of thing to watch because it’s basically – couldn’t be more opposite from any of the work that I do as far as thinking about numbers and images. I mean, look how much this guy is enjoying it. The ref right there, he’s just like – he’s ready to go.

One of the teams that I follow is this – is University of Michigan. I grew up in Ann Arbor. And they have this wide receiver, Mario Manningham. Just kind of an idiot, kind of a loudmouth, kind of a – just not a great person necessarily.

And I was curious about – and so the thing about wide receivers is that these are the guys you’re actually gonna hear about in the press. So Terrell Owens making all kinds of noise – you know, wide receiver. Chad Ochocinco, formerly Chad Johnson, whose number is 85, and so he changed his last name to Ochocinco. Don’t tell him that that’s not actually 85 in Spanish, but…

[Audience laughter]

You know, these sorta loudmouth kind of characters.

And so one day I was reading about this story about Mario Manningham in particular, and he had scored a six on the Wonderlic test. And so the Wonderlic test is this thing, and it’s basically an intelligence test. A 20 on the Wonderlic means you’re average intelligence, sort of an IQ of about 100. It’s a – what is it? It’s a 50-score test taken in 12 minutes.

And so all football players – you know, so football players, intelligence tests, those go together, right? Perfect. So all football players take this as part of the NFL Combine, which is all of the college players go and they do all of these various things. They run a sprint, do some jumps. They do all this stuff, and then after they’ve done all these athletic things that they’ve been tested on, then they sit down and take this intelligence test, which is also just kind of a wonderful picture. I picture, like, a great big class of lawyers sitting down and taking the bar exam, and then afterwards they go run a 5K. And it’s not so much, like, “Does it make you a better lawyer?” any more than the intelligence test makes you a better football player, but hey, it’s one more data point, of course.

And so I was curious about how that actually works across different positions. And so on Wikipedia there’s a rundown of what the different scores are for different positions. And so starting with a diagram from Wikipedia, sorta do the basic design stuff and kinda clean things up a little bit. Here, I just cleaned up the colors and the layout and all that, and added the numbers to each of the positions. So guess who the 17′s are out on the outside here? Our beloved wide receivers. And so, also, we then actually just sized the dots based on those numbers, and then actually, we don’t actually have to show the numbers anymore. We can actually just put the positions back in.

So the wonderful sort of thing that comes out of this – so I’ve just taken this very simple set of numbers, just plotted it out, and what I can see is that QB, the quarterback there, isn’t actually the smartest guy in the field. It’s actually – the smartest guy is his center, right in front of him, and these two guys on the outside, who are basically most in charge of preventing him from getting killed. And so they have to adjust to a large number of situations, as opposed to the guys on this side. In red, we have the defense. They’re just programmed to kill.

[Audience laughter]

They just need to go and attack and all that.

And so this is a really fascinating sort of story. And I think it’s interesting to take data sets like this, and especially for an audience who’s not necessarily even into this or hadn’t necessarily heard of it, but instead how can you actually engage people in data in ways like that.

Sometimes it’s actually just nice to see the data. So this is all 26 million road segments from the entire U.S., so just plotted out. The wonderful thing that happens – so the first is the obvious things of – so here’s Detroit and Chicago, and so things are gonna be exceptionally dense in that area. Here’s the Bay Area, so you can kinda pick out San Francisco there, and then moving down the Bay, and the way that things change as it heads into the mountains. This is Kansas City, so much more gridded.

But my favorite – so here’s the Appalachian Mountains, and basically defined by the roads avoiding them. So I haven’t actually done anything to include geography or anything like that. Instead, just showing the data actually brings that out. Like, it actually just – this extra layer actually kind of hops directly out of the information. Just sometimes data will kind of give that to you.

Because I can’t actually get degrees nor clients doing football plots or street maps, I do a lot of work in genetic data, so my Ph.D. work had to do with genetics. One of the typical things you do with working with DNA is, we just wanna see it. We wanna be able to browse through it. We wanna find a particular region, study it, see what sort of data is happening in that area.

This is the UCSC Genome Browser. This is looking at 160 base pairs of DNA; this is 10,000; this is 600,000. And the thing about this – this is very typical of data-oriented design – is that you sorta treat everything as “Well, it’s a bunch of start-and-stop positions; it’s all distance along a chromosome.” So we can just put these points on a line because they’re developers, and so they’re thinking about it in terms of, well, it’s just a bunch of starts and stops, and they’ve kind of gone up this level of abstraction instead of saying, “Well, how are people actually gonna use that data?” So at 600,000 base pairs, do I actually need all of these elements? Like, what’s actually relevant on each of these parts?

And then – so you were thinking I was Mr. Smart Designer – I started with – so the Powers of Ten. So everybody in design class has seen Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, or even those of you who aren’t designers, you’ve probably seen it.

And so it’s this wonderful thing. You’re moving through orders of 9 to 2. We can kind of zoom in. And this is the story of working with the genome, right? That, really, when scientists are dealing with it, you start out at 3 billion base pairs of DNA. They’re gonna do most of their work with about half a million to a million base pairs. You need to be able to zoom in to about 50,000 base pairs of these base pairs, just these letters of A’s and C’s and G’s and T’s. And you also need to get all the way from that 1 million scale down to individual letters. So I said, “Great. I’ll just kinda build out this browser that actually lets you sorta zoom through this information.”

And so here it is actually up and running. You can zoom in. We’re on a particular gene now. Now it’s kind of zoomed into individual letters. This is actually a terrible way to do a browser. However, Nick Nolte here is using to figure out, in the movie The Hulk, why his son keeps turning green and destroying buildings and so on.

[Audience laughter]

So for your average scientist, it’s actually gonna be a great deal of seasickness because you’re sort of doing a lot of time sort of going through these layers of zoom. But in fact, you don’t actually learn anything from doing that zooming.

And so instead, a better solution is basically I wanna see all of that information at the same time. I wanna see the forest and the trees simultaneously. So up at the top here I’ve got these 600,000 letters, in the middle I’ve got 10,000, and then down at the bottom I have 160 individual base pairs.

And what I’ve done is that, up at the top, this is my region of interest. I have a couple little tick marks that say something interesting is happening there. And I can hone right in to just one of these little tick marks all the way down to an individual letter that might be a – the scientific term is a “causative allele for selection” as far as – I’ll spare you doing 18 minutes of a genetics lesson.

[Audience laughter]

Basic idea: I wanna be able to get through these layers of detail, and I care about very different things on each of those levels.

This was a more advanced version based on the same browsing framework. Instead, here we’re looking at 12 different mammals and how similar they are to humans, so there’s this fascinating stuff where basically those pink plots there, that’s percentage of similarity from human all the way across chimp and dog and armadillo and etc. So we have this amazing sort of level of similarity with all these other species, and so it’s really quite interesting and fun to work with this data in this fashion.

So this is the tool version of it, and then this is an illustration I did for a magazine actually using that data. So real data – you can sort of see that. But instead just something that looks more – just looks interesting, feels good, feels like DNA, sort of this sorta spatial kind of thing.

And this is one of the things I try to do with my work in general, is be able to move back and forth between these more practical things of sort of tools for scientists that allow you to really analyze and work with the data. But on the other hand, how can you do things that are sorta more purely visual or more evocative, more sort of further out kind of things? And it just winds up being helpful, because if you do too much of one or the other, you kinda get stuck.

And this is a common thing that comes up, especially with data visualization work, and to a degree with design, this sort of balance of aesthetics and function, and that they’re treated as this sort of Cain and Abel type of battle between aesthetics and function and who’s gonna win out and all that.

And so perhaps better, we can think about things as a bit more like a spectrum. So can we move back and forth? The thing is, that’s not even quite the right way to look at it, that it’s maybe more we can have, like, an axis or something. So we’re further up the aesthetics axis on a particular piece; we’re further over this way on the function axis. But they’re not mutually exclusive, essentially.

But really, the main takeaway, though, is those aren’t actually the things that are gonna be most impactful on the project itself. And so much more often it’s gonna be your audience for whom the piece is created, actual context of use, the time that you have to actually implement the project. So there are all these other factors that are gonna have a much greater impact in terms of the way people work with the piece that you create. And sunspots.

Another illustration. This is looking at the chimp. So one of the main genes that’s different between us and chimps is this gene called FOXB2. And FOXB2 is believed to be connected to language acquisition, that essentially that’s one of the main differences between us and chimps within that gene. It’s about 72,000 letters of DNA, and there are just 9 single-letter positions that account for the actual functional differences between us and chimps. So among the 3 billion base pairs of DNA that we share with chimps, and amongst the 20,000 different genes that we all share, within this one gene there’s this 75,000-letter chunk of data. And of that, there are 9 letters that may essentially be the difference between us having language and their language being significantly more primitive.

And so this is a fairly simple – so this poster essentially shows all of those letters actually plotted out, and then it just highlights the different locations where those take place. And so, again, can you take this data set, or data sets like this, and be able to tell a story about what’s actually in that information?

And then this is back in the scientific tools side. This is the big-boy version used by the scientists to actually track down this type of data within – so this was a project I worked on with some collaborators at MIT and Harvard – basically as a way to track down these different areas, and try and find regions that are under selection.

So Processing. One of the other main goals of my own work is in basically getting more people creating things with code. So to that end, Casey Reas and I have started this project. It’s called Processing. It’s a free and open-source programming environment. The whole idea is to kinda make it easy to get up and running making visual things.

So this is Processing. I can – we wanted to be able to write a line of code and hit Run, and hopefully something show up on the screen. Or if I add a couple more lines. “Good God, he’s coding in front of a bunch of designers.”

[Audience laughter]

So here, a very simple interactive thing. This is just following the mouse. And instead, let’s see. Let’s set the field to – I’m sorry, let’s set the stroke to the mouse position divided by 2. Let’s change a stroke – wait. And so on. So we shift the color a little bit.

And so what we wanted to do was get people up and running quickly with code and have a – put all the fun stuff at the beginning so that, later, they can actually – once we have them hooked, that they can expand out into other endeavors.

It’s Java-based. And I won’t go through this whole slide, but the whole idea, it’s freely available – Max, Windows, Linux. You can download it from Processing.org. And we have a really wonderful set of projects that have been created with it at Processing.org/Exhibition. I encourage you to check them out. I use it for visualization work, and then there’s a lot of – Casey Reas uses it for interactive artworks. And then there’s a whole range of things that people have done.

This is the growth of the project. It leads through this past February. And so Casey and I have been doing this project, and this is sort of fun and also a bit terrifying. As we look at sort of number of users per week actually using the software, we’re at about 25,000 a week.

One of the terrific things that hops out of this data is that nobody likes to code over Christmas. So here in January, we have this total downturn and also this sorta sloping thing that happens. This is heading into August, and then everybody comes back, and it’s “Oh, September. Time to actually work.”

[Audience laughter]

And so this has been kinda fascinating to watch this grow. There are a number of books about the software. Most recently, Casey and I did a really small, very basic book that we wanted to make it really easy for anybody to get started, have it be a really inexpensive book. You don’t make any money on books anyway.

And actually, so I put this in to remind myself, but I have a bunch of little cards that O’Reilly gave me. So you can get, like, the e-book for, like, $5.00 or something like that. I think this means I actually have to pay O’Reilly money rather than actually, like, me actually making my nickel on it or something like that.

But I encourage you to check it out, ’cause the whole premise for this – that Casey and I’s grand scheme, grand goal in all this is that we’re really trying to ruin your career. We’re trying to get more designers to actually start doing programming, and more programmers to start doing design work. And we’ve actually been kind of successful with that, with a few cases. And it’s really wonderful watching people kinda making this transition and kind of working out different skill sets.

Let’s see. A personal project. This is looking at Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. And so I got interested in this because a friend who worked in genetics was telling me about the fact that Origin of Species actually changed an enormous amount over the course of Darwin’s life, so I went and started looking into it. It went from about 150,000 words in the first edition that he wrote, up to about 190,000 words in the sixth edition – the sixth English edition that he wrote before his death.

And so I like that – I think that’s fascinating for a number of reasons. One is that we typically think of – particularly outside of science, you think of, like, scientific ideas as these things that kind of – like, way out. The theory of evolution: Darwin went up on a mountain, and he figured it out, and then he brought clay tablets down and kind of gave it to science, and then that’s it, evolution’s figured out. Except for the American right.

[Audience laughter]

But one of the things – so instead, we can actually see Darwin himself actually kind of struggling with these different ideas. So this is a basic interactive viewer. Loads in all six editions. You can see them over the left-hand side. Blue is an addition; red is deletion. So basically, here we have Darwin plus Track Changes, so we can see –

[Audience laughter]

– just interactively kind of flip through the book and kind of get a sense of the types of things that changed over time.

The final version instead looks something more like this. Where here I just wanted to show a composite of the book for an exhibition. So we start out with the entire text, so here’s all 150,000 words done in a sort of half-pixel font, just kind of Greeked in. With the mouse, you can actually read different portions of the text. And over time, it’s simply adding these other editions to the Greeked portion up here. And so we can actually – once this is built – has finished its animation, we can see, for any given word, where that actually came from and what the provenance of that was.

So we can pick out things like – so one of the things that Darwin ran into trouble with was he didn’t actually – he didn’t talk about God enough in the first edition, and so this was a considerable point of concern given the sort of attitudes of the day.

And so we can see in the first edition where he said, you know, “There’s grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst the planet,” blah, blah, blah. But in the second edition, in that closing paragraph he adds this extra “by the Creator,” so he can actually kinda cover himself a little bit in terms of how people were feeling about this theory of evolution that kinda seemed to leave God out of the whole equation as far as who was making what and who was responsible for the incredible variation you see between different plants and animals and so on.

Actually, we’ll move on. This is online on my site. You can actually check it out there, with a little bit more time. Let’s see here.

So backing up a little bit, this also brings to mind a certain process of how you develop this sort of work. So as far as starting with data, what typically happens is that I have this pile of information. I need to be able to acquire it, parse through it, filter it, mine it. So this is kinda the computer science and math side of things. And then it gets kinda thrown over to the wall to people doing graphic design and interaction design and visualization and that sorta thing. And instead, this is a terrible way of actually working with information because of the way that each of these different parts actually inform one another.

Typically, in practice I’ll start by sort of jumping through a couple of these steps. So for instance, doing that initial piece with the sort of Darwin and Track Changes. But then once you’ve done that, you kinda work backwards and say, “Well, what’s the question? What’s the story that you can actually pull out of this?” And then once you’ve done that, the important part is this iteration step of the interaction – the way the interaction work is gonna affect how you do the data-mining portion and so on, and so basically you can’t really separate these things. And so really trying to look at things sort of from “have a data set” to how we actually understand it.

And this is a data set. So this is looking at some healthcare data. This was a client project for GE. This here – you think this is fascinating, but it actually goes on for another 160 columns, which gets better, and then 6 million rows. And so typically what you do is you kinda look at data like this, and there’s a tendency to say, “Okay, how do I make a picture of it?” instead of kind of “What’s the story? What am I trying to actually say about the data? Why did we collect it?” and then working back to the actual piece.

This was the piece that we created for them. Basically, it’s 6 million patient records from their electronic medical record database, and this is what it looks like. So of all of the people in the database, 97 percent do not have heart disease; 3 percent do. One percent have had a stroke. That’s the breakdown on smoking. And so very quickly – so this doesn’t feel like 6 million. We can actually get through the data in a very fluid way.

But also, it gets more interesting when we actually start comparing things. So one of the things about various conditions is that they don’t actually happen in isolation, so it’s all about correlations and comorbidities and things like that. But you can’t say that, and so instead, how can you actually demonstrate that to people and get them to start working with it?

So here, highlighting diabetes, you can see how in the database, 4 percent of people who have a normal body mass index have diabetes, and that rapidly goes up to 26 percent of the people who are morbidly obese who have diabetes. And so I can write a 1,000-word article about it, or I can actually just demonstrate it and get people hooked into the interaction of sort of flipping through it.

This is another looking at healthcare costs by age. So the angle of the wedge is the relative number of people with a particular condition. The area of the wedge is the overall cost for that condition. So at age 50, hypertension’s a big one. Back towards age 18, not so much; it’s actually asthma. And so we can actually just play with the data in a very fluid way to see what’s in that data set.

And then most recently, this is one looking at aging populations, so each of these bars represents people of age – so here it’s 0 to 5 – I’m sorry, 0 to 4; 5 to 9; 10 to 14; and so on. So the fascinating thing is that Japan basically has this enormous cohort of people who are age 60 to 64, and over the next couple years, what does that actually mean for their economy, their healthcare system? So here we are going through the next couple years. And we actually wanna – how do we actually tell that story with that information? We can actually just play this back or actually look at it just straight from 1950 all the way through 2050. Over at the right, we have this composite. We can flip between different countries here and so on.

This is also online. This is Healthymagination.com. And we’ve been doing projects like this to basically – how can you work with them, trying to understand some of this data?

More recently, I’ve been working for Google to actually look at how we can get the Processing software to run on – or actually be able to create things for Android devices. So this is actually the same piece, just up and running on Android. Here’s the cost piece. Everything kind of changes on mobile, and so you have to do a good bit of – sort of move things around, and how do people actually interact with it, and so on. We can talk about that some more later.

And then, finally, on the more – back to the more complicated end of the scale. So back to the genetics work that I showed, here’s a browser of the entire human genome, so actually running on a Google Nexus One phone. And this just works, so all 3 billion letters of human DNA, all 20,000, 25,000 genes, and you can actually just scan through it on a mobile device.

And this is – which is sort of an astonishing thing as far as, like, right now it’s an expensive sort of phone, but this is quickly becoming the norm. It’ll be, you know, $100.00 in a couple years. What does that mean for (a) the type of data that we can actually carry around, much less (b) sort of the healthcare side of what health information can we actually take along with us, and how does something mobile that just actually exists in our pocket that is owned by us?

So with that, I will close, and thanks very much.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

My name’s Andrew Crow. I’m a senior experience designer with Adaptive Path, and like Peter was saying, that I’ve spent a lot of time recently with Zappos. In fact, I’ve spent about a year with them doing a bunch of different things, anywhere from some training and then working directly with their team. And in fact, some of ‘em are here tonight. I see you. So I’m gonna try to avert my eyes from this side, and I’ll talk to this group over here ’cause you’re more comfortable.

Anyway, so I wanna talk to everybody here today about in-house design teams. And looking over the rosters or the attendee list for today’s event, or this week’s event, I noticed that there are a lot of people here who are on in-house design teams. Some of you are consultants; some of you are freelancers. But it stands to reason that there’s a lot of people here from various organizations in which you are part of the design team that works in house.

And some of you brought along your bosses. Well, maybe not brought along; maybe they came with you, but that’s cool. So I think there’s some conversation that hopefully will come out of this discussion, this presentation, that might hopefully spark some ideas that you can take back to your companies a little bit later.

Before I go a little bit too much further, I wanna recognize something that I think we all understand, but it’s very rarely said, and that is, in-house design teams are our heroes. I mean, if you think about it, these are the people that work day in and day out and build the Web applications and the e-commerce Web sites and all the different things that we use, the social networks, all the things that we’re really fond of. These are the people that work tirelessly to build those things for us. They make them work the way they work. They make – the gentleman who was up here from Facebook earlier.

These are the people that really try to have a deep understanding of us, the end user, but also try to balance that with what the business is requiring of them. Right? The business needs for growth and expansion. So they’re in this sort of dual position of wanting to solve problems for a wide variety of audiences, and I think that makes – to me, that makes them my hero because they continually hack at this to make it work as best they possibly can, given the resources that are available.

But like all heroes, they face challenges. Sometimes those challenges are political. I’m gonna talk about a few other challenges. Sometimes the challenges are a sort of unclear definition and things that they have to deal with on a daily basis.

For example, I’ve sat in many meetings where I’ve heard things like this: “The executives are telling us that we need to leverage the synergies that exist across multiple channels so that we can boil the blue ocean and accelerate an emergence of high-maturity behaviors, adding color to our advertising.” That’s bullshit.

[Audience laughter]

But I hear it all the time. I hear talk like that all the time, and it leads to a bunch of complications, not the which – one of which is that there’s a lot of confusion around goals and mandates and priorities and things like that.

And from that, I think I’ve heard, both from being in house – I was in house for a while at Princess Cruises, where I led the Web team and the strategy and business development team, and also now working with Zappos for quite a while. I’ve heard three sort of emerging things that keep happening over and over again. And there’s a lot of different challenges and problems that in-house design teams face, but I think these three sort of encapsulate at least the things that I’m hearing.

The first one is: “We don’t have the resources to do the projects that our executives are asking us to do.” Does that sound about right? Seeing some heads nodding. Seeing some tears already. Don’t do that.

[Audience laughter]

So we know the resources to do the projects that our executives are asking us to do. And resources could be anything from manpower or people or time or priorities, support, things like that.

The second thing that I hear often is that “we don’t have the skills necessary to do the kind of work we’re asked to do.” And that actually makes perfect sense, right? The design world and the technology world and the product world is moving at a really rapid pace. It’s to the point where designers can’t really keep up with the type of skills that are necessary, and if they do, they’re making sacrifices on other things that they could be working on as well. So it’s a reality, and there’s ways that we can sort of live with that reality a little bit better.

And the third thing that I hear – and this is, sadly, one of the most common things – is that “you’re gonna tell my boss” – as a consultant. They’ll tell me as a consultant, “You’re gonna tell my boss the same thing that we’ve been telling her for months, but for some reason she’s gonna believe you.” And at first, I thought that was really funny, and then I realized that’s really sad, because it’s true. It’s unfortunately very true. For a lot of reasons, which I’ll discuss in a few minutes, there are issues that lead up to executives or leadership trusting outside opinions more than they trust their own internal teams. And I think – and hopefully we’ll address some of that today.

A little bit about Zappos, though. So like Peter said, I got to work with the Zappos UX team in Las Vegas, and – let me skip back to this slide – they are a small and brilliant team producing an online experience that reflects the core values that are important to that company.

And if anybody’s familiar with Zappos, you’ll know that there are core values that sort of permeate everything that they do. There’s a few up here on the screen, but there’s more than this. So things like delivering WOW through a service, embracing and driving change, pursuing growth and learning, create fun and a little weirdness – believe me, if you’ve been to Zappos, there’s a lot of weirdness – and, of course, doing more with less. And there’s a few other things, but the important thing to know about the core values is how much they affect the product decisions and the sort of various channels that Zappos has.

So I got a chance to sit with the customer service team and to listen to how they talk to the customers that call in, either customers ordering a product or they’re returning a product. And you’ll hear how the tone of voice and the words that people use to work with the customer is very reflective of the core values. And you hear that also when people talk about how they select the merchandise that’s gonna be sold, or how the online team decides to build a Web site and sorta craft that.

But I think what’s interesting about the core values and how they relate to the Zappos UX team in particular is that it’s very common for an in-house design team to have a set of brand values or attributes, or maybe it’s a marketing campaign that they’re asked to incorporate in their Web experience, their Web site. But Zappos has, I think, taken it to another level in which these core values are so integrated into the company culture that everything that they do has to reflect these values.

So imagine – it’s one thing to say “Let’s write copy that is friendly” if it’s for a family site, or “Let’s do graphics that are cool and edgy” if it’s for a different type of brand. But the Zappos UX team has to embody these values in the very interactions that take place in the Web site. So things like simply just filling out a form to return a product has to basically emulate some of these values – delivering WOW and a pleasurable experience, and all these sorts of things that made for a lot of interesting challenges for the team. And they’re a small team, which makes all the products – sorry, all the tasks that they have to do even more difficult.

So let’s talk about some of those – the three things that I brought up earlier. So “We don’t have the resources to do the projects that our executives are asking us to do.” A lot of times, that boils down to having the right amount of people. Budgets are such that manpower plans – and by manpower, I mean resources or people – manpower plans are typically figured out well in advance, right? A lot of times they’re planned out at least a half a year, sometimes a year in advance.

So saying that – so going to your boss and saying, “Hey, you’ve given us this long list of things that we need to do, but I don’t have enough people.” Their reaction is, “I can’t hire anybody right now. It’s not in the budget. We don’t have time to do that.”

So one of the things that I’ve noticed – there’s a couple things that you can do to adjust – or to address manpower issues or resourcing issues. One is to have a stable of contractors, right? At Adaptive Path, we have a long list of contractors and people that we like to work with so that when we get stuck resourcing a particular project, we can call those people. So in-house design teams I think can copy that or emulate that, in that if they have a list of local resources or even non-local resources that they could call, that is a very quick and easy way to staff up your team.

But more importantly, it’s getting to know the project plan for a period of time, whether that’s six months or a year or even two years, whatever that roadmap ends up being. The designers should be able to take part in that planning so that they can give honest and open feedback to the executive team, saying “You know what? You’re asking us to do a lot of things, and this is all great, and we’re happy to do this, but I don’t have enough people,” or “In six months I’m gonna need an extra resource or a different type of person on my team; we should start hiring that person now,” or “Let’s address the budget issue now,” because by the time you need someone to augment your team, it’s already too late, right? There’s rarely an opportunity for hiring that quickly.

And I know Zappos is sort of facing this issue right now and that they’re trying to staff up their team. So if anybody is enjoying working in Las Vegas, they’re right back there if you wanna see them afterwards. I’m sure they’ll be happy to talk to you about staffing up their great team.

Another challenge that comes to play when we talk about resourcing is time and realistic priorities. I think we all can basically agree that there’s never enough time to do the work that we’ve been asked to do. There’s always crazy deadlines: “We want this yesterday,” that type of thing.

But oftentimes, time can be sort of mitigated by understanding the priorities of what you’re being asked to do. So when we started with Zappos in January, working on the actual Web site, I sat down with them, and they handed me this long list. It was like one of those scrolls that just kept going. And they were like, “This is what we have to do in 2010.” And I was impressed.

I was also petrified, because the problem was, is they were all very tactical issues that needed to be addressed. They were all very important things for the Web site and for the organization, but none of it was prioritized. None of it had any sense of grouping or understanding of what was important to both the business and the user.

So we sat down with them, and it took us a little while, and it was a little uncomfortable in the beginning. We sat down with them, and we looked at that list, and we tried to make sense of it. We tried to say, okay, first of all, what’s first and foremost important for the end user? Right? What’s important for our customers? What products and features and environments and experiences do they need?

And then we tried to match that with what was important to the business. What is the business need from this Web site? So grouping those two things together really started to paint a picture of what was important to do first, what was feasible to do first, what required extra resources, and things like that.

And we ended up with a roadmap, and we were able to go back to the executives and say, “Here’s that long list that you asked us to do. Here’s now a roadmap that makes a little more sense. And these features and things that we’re gonna do in the first phase, we’re gonna do those maybe in months 1 and 2, and then this next thing might take us a little while longer and we have to circle back with the developers to make sure that they’re ready for that, those things of things.” And so on.

So we ended up going from a very highly unprioritized list to now a roadmap in which we could all feel comfortable executing on. And that helped, then, everybody to understand how much time it would take to do those things. We could confidently say that this particular feature that we’re gonna develop for the Web site now is gonna take six weeks, and therefore, everybody get off our backs, because we’re working on it and you’re gonna have it in six weeks. It was that type of feedback that we were able to give – a little more politely than that. But it allowed us to have better conversations with the executive and the product management teams.

Another resource – or another thing to pay attention, like I said earlier, is that design needs a seat at the table, I think, as early on as possible. It’s important to have the designers be involved – just as designers wanna have developers involved in the beginning of a project, we wanna make sure that design has a seat at the table when it comes to project planning and resource management and understanding what’s next, in terms of what’s important to the executives.

That allows the designer to give honest and open feedback very early on. It allows the designer to say, “Everything that you’re asking us to do is great. We’re happy to do it. I’m gonna need this, this, and this. And more importantly, I’m gonna need you, my boss, to do this, this, and this for me in order for me to be effective.” So being able to have those conversations smoothes out a lot of the problems that you’ll experience, typically, further on in the project.

And speaking of asking your boss for support, executive support is also a crucial resource that, if you don’t have, you’ll falter just like as if you didn’t have enough time and enough people. Executives, whether they verbally say it or not, they realize that their success is tied to your success as a designer, as a design team. Therefore, they often should act as if they are your sword and shield. Right? They’re the people there that are carving out time – no pun intended – carving out time for you to do the work that you need to do. They’re there to act as a shield to sorta deflect the problems that are coming their way, right? To keep you focused and not distracted on the project work that you’re doing.

So looking at them as a sword-and-shield sort of position allows you to have a different relationship with them. It’s no longer someone handing you work to do or asking you to execute on a vision. They become part of your team and become a partner, and I think that’s important to look to as a resource.

The second big problem that I hear a lot from design teams is that “we don’t have the skills necessary to do the kinda work that we’re asked to do.” This, I think, is inevitable with any team. I think even at Adaptive Path we face this, where we’re so busy with project work that we don’t necessarily have time to develop new skills, although we’ve collectively come to the realization that we really need to restructure our hours such that we do have this time.

I remember personally when I joined an in-house design team, I spent so much of my time working on the actual projects and executing on a vision and doing all the things that were valuable to the company and valuable to our end users that I really didn’t take much time to improve my skills as a designer. To be honest with you, my skill for Photoshop ended with, like, Photoshop 4 or 5. I had layers and I was happy, right? I mean, that’s kinda what I – that’s where I ended. Now, granted, I launched CS5 now, and there’s a lot of new features, and they’re all wonderful, but when do I have the time to sit and learn how to do some of these magical features that they’ve added?

And I think that’s important to recognize that in-house design teams face those same challenges and that they are filling their entire eight-hour work day, sometimes longer, with executing on something, but rarely do they have the opportunity to get better.

So how do we address this? Well, clearly, training, right? Training comes first to mind. Training and maybe potentially hiring new skills, of course, would take care of that issue. But I think finding time, as a design team leader, as an executive, finding time to allow your team to get better at what they do will only yield in better results and a higher-quality product. So it’s kind of a very obvious thing, but it’s rarely pointed out that design teams don’t have that opportunity to engage in training and sort of getting better at what they do.

Providing that opportunity. Providing that opportunity to attend conferences like this or read books. Providing an education budget is also one way to sort of combat this. I’ll just move on.

The other thing that I hear a lot, of course, is this: “You’re gonna tell my boss the same thing that we’ve been telling you, and for some reason she’ll believe you.” And this is, of course, unfortunately very true. Oftentimes when I sit down with a client team, the first thing that I’ll say is, “Look, I’m not here to show you up. I’m not here to say that I’m better than you. I’m not here to do any of those things. I’m actually here to take everything that’s important to you and somehow make that work. So if I have to be the mouthpiece for your organization or your group to your boss, I’ll do that. If there’s something that you want – that you’re having trouble articulating, let’s talk about how we can do that together so that we can continue to build up an understanding that your team is actually more important in the organization than some consultant that was brought in.”

And of course, this leads directly to credibility. And it’s an unfortunate thing in that, for some reason, third parties tend to have a little bit more respect and credibility than the people that are in a in-house design team. And that’s a harsh reality, but I don’t think it’s true at all. I think the people that were hired on to execute on a particular product or service are the ones – like I said in the very beginning, they’re the heroes. They’re the people that know the product and service the best. They’re the people that know the landscape better than anyone else. So sorta this reality of credibility I don’t think is one that should continue to exist.

But it’s important to point out where credibility comes from. And the way I look at it is that credibility comes from trust, which is based on positive experiences that stem from opportunities to show value. And if I could reverse that, deconstruct that a little bit, showing – coming up with opportunities to show value for your team within an organization, opportunities to show value for design and user experience, begin to build positive experiences that people have with your group. And that leads to trust and ultimately to credibility.

At Zappos, we were sorta dealing with this in the very beginning, in which the organization, although built on these amazing core values, didn’t necessarily have a good understanding of what design was and what user experience was. They didn’t really appreciate the level of effort that this team was putting into making the company a success.

So we started with a couple of things. I think the very first week, what we did is we ended up putting a whiteboard or a – I forget if it was corkboard or whiteboard – on a wall. And we started listing down all the different requests that were coming in. You know, the merchandising needed this, or the customer service department needed this, or some other group within the organization needed this. We would list those, and we’d put them up.

And the goal was that when those people walked by, ’cause a lot of people actually – if you’ve ever been to the Zappos office, people are constantly walking by. In fact, there are parades of people on tours. But as people would walk by, they would see that “Oh, the user experience team has heard what I’ve been asking for, so all those endless e-mails that I think are just going into some spam filter somewhere, they’re actually hearing me and recognizing that I have a legitimate issue.” So that builds – going back to this. We’ve shown our value by creating a positive experience. People are starting to have positive experiences with your group because they feel heard.

The other thing that we did was – one other thing that I suggested, and I’m not sure if it’s actually happened yet is – and Laura, who’s here from Adaptive Path, had suggested this a while ago, which is find something in your office or your organization or something that doesn’t quite have the best user experience, and then fix it. So if trash can’s in the wrong place, or if there’s not enough supplies in a certain meeting room, fix that and then put a little note – and this is gonna sound corny – put a little note that says, “This experience was brought to you by the Zappos user experience team” or whatever your organization is.

It sounds so silly, but if people see that often, they’ll start to think that your user experience team is not just focused on the Web site. You guys don’t do just Web pages. You guys are starting to think about experiences that go beyond what’s on the site. You’re starting to think about how you can improve people’s lives through positive experiences. And that starts to trigger some different ways of thinking about your team. Now people may come to you and say, “You know what? I’ve got this problem, and I think that maybe you guys, because you think a certain way, might be able to solve this.”

This happened to me personally with Princess. We were redesigning the way that the check-in process works for people to get on board the ship. And people would have a ticket, the paper ticket. They would go down to the docks, wait in this really long line, and they would get on board.

And what we ended up doing is we ended up looking at the types of people that came in and the situations that they came in with, the different luggages, the different types of class – of ticket, and things like that. And we essentially proposed a complete reorganization of the sort of on-board experience, and it shifted the way people got on board the ship, and I think there was some percentage of increase in efficiency.

But the point is, is that that started having a lot of people come to my group, which essentially was the Web and strategy group. They started coming to us and asking us about, like, “Well, what do you think about how this might work on board?” or “What do you think about how this might work when we mail something out to our users?” And that was definitely beyond the call of our organization – our in-house design team’s duty, but it made sense to people, and it showed value, and it eventually led to a certain level of credibility.

So those are sorta three things, and I’m happy to talk in a lot more detail with people afterwards, but I think there’s a couple of opportunities here that go beyond sort of just solving problems that everybody’s used to. Those opportunities are things like knowing your audience. In-house design teams know your audience better than anyone else does. Yes, you might hire people out to do a little bit of research every once in a while, but essentially, when you’re on an in-house design team, you know your audience best.

The fortunate thing about that is you also know your business best, so you can match those two needs up a lot easier than someone from the outside. And the value of that is being able to lead your industry in certain areas. For example, Zappos is known as a leader in customer service. Why? Because Tony talks about it all the time – Tony their CEO.

He talks about customer service so much that people now look to him as a leader in customer service. So other organizations that have nothing to do with shoes or clothing or anything else look to Zappos as a leader in customer service, and they study and they watch the way the business decisions and the design decisions that have been made by Zappos.

So knowing your audience, knowing what’s important to them, knowing how to serve them best can translate into a bunch of opportunities for your team and your organization that don’t necessarily readily present themselves.

This idea of building complete experiences is also an opportunity for in-house design teams as well. Complete experiences for me are a little bit more than sort of what you’ve been charged to do. So for example, if your team is in charge of developing a Web site, there’s a lot of other channels out there within your organization, especially an e-commerce situation, that you can be affecting, right? This whole concept of WebPlus 1. You’ve got this Web, and then you’ve got these sort of Plus 1 or 2 or all these other channels.

So at Zappos, we talked about what complete experiences could we possibly start affecting. And one of the things that I’d love to see us – to see the team do – and I say “us” because I feel like I’m still part of the team. One of the things that I really wanted to do is build a great online experience, but start to expand out into how people unbox their products. When you get a white Zappos box, it’s like Christmas, right? You open it up. There’s gonna be shiny shoes or something that you’ve just purchased. It’s really sort of a – that white box has become iconic with this sort of emotional reaction.

But what about that unboxing experience could be tied back to the Web site? Could the receipt or the shipping label that’s stuck to the box – could that look a little bit more like the experience that you had online? Or could some of the language that’s used in that be a little more reflective of the customer service types of things that people have been talking about?

So there’s ways to build more complete experiences because you know your product and services so well, and I think that’s an opportunity for in-house design teams to sorta branch out.

So to sort of sum this up a little bit – I’ve got this long, pithy statement here, and it basically says continually look for ways to showcase value by taking projects outside of your space, cross-training others in other disciplines, having discussions with your other departments within your company to talk to them about the value that you could bring and help them, and defining the intended experience of your brand. Define what people want – define the way that you want people to interact with your company or your brand.

I think those are – that sort of summarizes the opportunities and some of the problems that I think a lot of in-house design teams face, because essentially, in-house designers, if you remember, they’re our heroes, and you have the opportunity every day to go to work and be that hero. And probably one of the most important things about heroes is that they look good in spandex.

[Audience laughter]

I had to work in spandex somehow. So anyways, thank you very much, everyone. I appreciate it.

[End of Audio]

Transcripts provided by Verbalink

My name is Adam Mosseri. I’ve been a product designer at Facebook for about two years now, and today I’d like to talk about how we at Facebook use data to inform certain types of decisions, but how we also are very skeptical of being overly data driven. This is all really about decision making and what informs our decisions, so I’d like to start quickly by talking about who makes the decisions.

It’s important to understand that, at Facebook, we believe in particularly small teams. Most projects are about six or seven total. We believe in small teams because we believe they are more efficient, and speed is something that’s incredibly important to us. It’s also important to note that decisions are made by those teams.

I’m also a manager. I manage about nine product designers at Facebook. I don’t approve any of their work. I give them feedback, and participate in feedback systems, so they get feedback from other designers as well. But teams, like a Photos team, for instance, will make a decision about the Photos product, pending only Mark Zuckerberg our CEO’s approval, so it’s a pretty flat decision-making structure. So I’m gonna walk you quickly through our team structure.

There’s always a designer. This is Francis. How many of you guys are designers here? I’m sort of curious. Okay, so a bunch, nice. Product designers at Facebook are responsible for visual design, for interaction design, also for what we call product design, which is essentially product strategy, and we even do some front-end implementation as well.

There’s almost always also a researcher. This is Gabe. Gabe loves Post-Its, so I wanted to show this. Do we have a lot of researchers? Not a lot of researchers. Interesting. A couple over there.

This wasn’t the case two years ago when I started at Facebook. Researchers were involved in some projects, only the biggest, but not a lot of them. But over the past two years, I’ve seen us sort of grow to accept the importance of both qualitative and quantitative research, so this is now sort of an integral part of our team.

We also have an engineer, usually between one and four. This is Ola. He’s actually our most prolific engineer in the entire company, despite the blanket. But you don’t have a lot of engineers, I don’t think.

And then product managers. This is Blake. Blake is actually a director of product at Facebook. Product managers at Facebook are responsible not just for project managing, not just for making sure things ship on time, that everybody has what they need, but also for the quality of the product. They’re sort of like mini-CEOs within their projects usually.

And, again, like I said, just so you know where I’m coming from, I’m a designer first and foremost. My main interest is in ensuring a certain quality of experience. But today we’re gonna talk about how these teams use data, and I’ll stop at talking about the ways we do.

And we do use data. We value it. We store an incredible amount of data. We have about 20 people on the data team: 10 engineers, 10 data scientists. We record about four terabytes of data a day. We invested a lot in the technology to store and query all this data. We have, I believe, about ten petabytes’ worth of storage, which is an incredible amount. And we believe it’s important, but we use it in sort of certain particular ways. And the first way I’d like to talk about today is how we use it to sort of optimize usually workflows or interactions.

Data helps us understand how users use the product, which then in turn helps us understand how to optimize the product. And the most tangible and recent example I could think of for today was photo uploading. I’ve been working on photos for the past few months, and we recently, about two months ago, replaced our photo uploader. To give you a sense of scale, about – I believe it’s – over 200 million photos are uploaded a day, and a few weeks ago we hit 50 billion photos in the system. That’s a ton of photos.

But we thought we could do better; we thought there were problems. Actually, this is pretty interesting. How many of you guys use Facebook? Nice. How many of you guys have struggled uploading photos to Facebook? Yeah, that’s about a third of you. So it’s pretty bad considering we’re, I believe, the largest photo site on the Web.

So we started with a hypothesis, as we usually do. The way we use data can generally be divided into two areas. There’s hypothesis generation. And that usually includes sort of exploratory data analysis: we believe it’s difficult to upload photos. And then there’s hypothesis evaluation: iteration, testing, and that sort of thing.

So the hypothesis was quite simple in this case. It was that users were having trouble uploading photos. We knew this anecdotally, from our own experiences, but also because, as you can imagine, any time a friend, a relative, a loved one has trouble uploading photos, they call us personally.

So I’ll walk you quickly through the current upload flow on the site. You start on the Photos dashboard. This is what we call the dashboard. It’s on the homepage. You can also get here through the composer or the profile, and you click on Upload Photos on the top right of the page. You then get a form that asks you for some information about the album. You fill out some information; you say where it is or what it was about. You describe it.

And then you get to this page, which is sort of the start of the problem. This page has too many actions. First you select photos, and then you upload ‘em. So you click Select Photos, then you get an OS dialogue, or an operating system dialogue, that allows you to select files. You select them. You hit okay. And then it tells you you’ve selected six. You can change your selection. Then you click Upload, and hopefully you wait patiently as it compresses and uploads your photos to Facebook. So this is a lot of steps.

Putting this presentation together was sort of – felt sort of like airing our dirty laundry. So a few months ago we decided to do a waterfall analysis of the photo-uploading experience. A waterfall analysis is simply taking a look at each step in a flow and seeing what happens.

So of users per session who try to upload photos now, only 87 percent reach what we call the ready state – that means that page you saw where it says Select Photos, Upload Photos – and everything’s working. We lose some people to – some people decide not to upload photos ’cause the page takes too long to load. Some people don’t have the most recent version of Flash, and we’re currently using Flash for photo uploading. So we lose a bunch of people right off the bat. This is actually pretty bad.

Only 57 percent of users actually select photos. In this case, selecting photos means not only clicking Select Photos but also finding some files and successfully selecting them. Fifty-two percent actually upload photos, so that’s click the Upload button, ’cause you can change your selection. And then 48 percent are actually successful. We lose 4 percent to poor load times, bugs, etc. It’s pretty bad, but it’s actually significantly better than where we were.

If you look over the past two months, you can see the photo success rate has increased from 34 percent to the mid-40s. Now, this was a new Flash uploader. I’ll talk about the old Flash – I mean a new photo uploader, and I’ll talk about the old photo uploader in a little bit. But we’re continuously iterating on it, removing bugs, removing pain points, removing steps, etc. And we watch this – this is sort of data driven. This is one of the types of products that are data driven.

But I wanted to dive into one specific change we made. We found that 85 percent of users, when we first launched this, were selecting only one photo for an album, which is clearly not ideal for us or for them. And we wanted to figure out why, so we took a look at the UI that users used to select photos, and they use this.

This is called an operating system file selector. We don’t actually have control over this interface. This is the Mac OS version; there’s a Windows version as well. But it’s very difficult here to select multiple files. You have to click on one and hold Option or Shift and then click on another, and this proved to be very difficult for the vast majority of our users.

So we did what we don’t like to do: we added another step. After you click Select Photos, we gave a little – we showed you a little tip that said “You can select multiple photos; this is how you do it.” There was a little bit of friction, but we believed it was important, ’cause clearly a lot of people were struggling.

This resulted in a drop on the number of people who were uploading only one photo, from 85 percent to 40 percent, which was huge. We also only show you this dialogue until you successfully select two, and then we never show it to you again. This meant that photos – per attempt. This 90 percent success, this is per attempt, increased from 3 to 11, which is a big win for us.

This graph is actually interesting. This is photos per upload attempt, and you can see that – this is over two months. You can see there’s about eight spikes. Does anybody have any idea why there’s spikes? What was that, weekends? Sundays. People upload photos of their interesting weekends on Sundays. We see really interesting patterns in the data all the time. It’s about 150 percent of the average, every Sunday. So this was an example of how we use data to sort of optimize a workflow. We’re very comfortable doing this.

Another type of way we use data which is significantly different is to sanity check decisions we make for non-data reasons. So it’s a little bit complicated, but we do things for all sorts of reasons, and we have key metrics that are very important to us. And so we generally sanity check our changes with it, by running A/B tests. At our size, we can launch a product to a small percentage of users, like half a percent, and get statistically relevant data very quickly, which is really just sort of convenient.

So I wanna talk specifically about what we call the composer. The composer is what we call internally the “What’s on your mind?” input field that you see at the top of your homepage, right above the News Feed. I’ll try to show it to you here. This is the way that most – not most users. This is the way that a lot of users update their status. But once you click on it, you get a few other options: add a photo, post a link – what was the other one? Oh, add a video, etc.

But recently, we’ve started to roll out our Questions product. I think we’ve finished rolling out in the U.S. Do you guys all have the Questions product? Yes, no, maybe? Well, anyway, for Questions, it was important for us to surface a really easy way for you to just ask a question on the homepage, and this “What’s on your mind?” input field wasn’t gonna cut it. It didn’t really afford us that sort of flexibility.

So we wanted to test moving the composer to more of a selection-based model, so we tested a couple options. We tested a version that was just four links across the top, so we could add an “ask a question” link. We were worried, though, that this would decrease the number of status updates, because the relative prominence of statuses is less here. And it did; it decreased status updates by about 1 percent.

We also tested a version here where we tried to incentivize users to update their status by showing them their most recent status. The idea would be that stale content would motivate you to upload – to update your status. And it worked marginally. It was about a .5 percent increase in status updates. That wasn’t actually statistically significant, but we saw it in the data.

And then we tested a big option. We always test the big option. This was links and an input field. This resulted in a 2 percent increase in status updates and a 2 percent increase in photo uploads. But the real – the truth at the end of the day and what we were actually hoping for – and we actually ran around eight different versions, not just three that I showed you here – was that none of these really significantly moved our key metrics, which was what we really wanted, actually. We wanted to make sure that we could go with the UI that we thought was the best, and so we went with the simple one, ’cause the homepage is very complicated; I’d argue it’s significantly too complicated. It’s very important that News Feed is high up on the page, so we went with the simplest, lightest version. This is actually a pretty recent example. This is – I’m not even sure if it’s fully rolled out.

And the third way I wanna talk about how we do use data, and comfortably, is to evaluate retroactively projects. This usually is for small projects. I’m gonna talk a bit about the deactivation page. The deactivation page is the page you get when you decide to leave Facebook, which we find sad. And Lee Byron, a designer at Facebook, actually spearheaded this project. It was his idea. He designed it; he built it; he ran the tests; and he shipped it.

And the idea was that the current version of the deactivation page – this was in mid-2008 – was just a form. We wanted to know why you were leaving, but we didn’t ask you to stay. We didn’t give you a reason to stay. So he thought about being somewhat emotionally manipulative, and he did this.

[Audience laughter]

As you can see, it says – there’s a picture of my friend Aaron, and it says, “Aaron will miss you,” and then Kevin, and “Kevin will also miss you”; “Send Wayne a message.” To just hit that emotional chord, to give you a reason to stay, to make you feel guilty about leaving. And it was wildly successful. It reduced deactivations by 7 percent. Seven percent at this point is millions and millions of users still on Facebook, ’cause this was a year and a half ago and when we were about 70 million users.

And so this project was entirely data driven, but it was in sort of a mid-size project. This wasn’t a homepage redesign or a new version of Photos or a new version of Groups, and so we’re comfortable with it in these areas.

But I think it’s fair to say that, at Facebook, in product – we call product “product management and product design” – that there’s a healthy skepticism of being overly data driven, maybe even too much so. But I thought a lot about this for this presentation, and I tried to articulate why: why we’re really so skeptical of overusing data.

And the most straightforward reason I could think of was that it’s very difficult for a set of metrics to fully represent what you value. There are a lot of factors that go into making any sort of product decision, as I’m sure you guys all know.

Quantitative data is one. We use it, as I’ve showed you over the past three examples. Qualitative data is another. Our researchers run qualitative tests all the time. We have a usability lab; an eye tracker, which is pretty amazing, actually, if you ever get the chance to use one; etc.

Strategic interests are another factor we use in making decisions, as I talked about with the Questions product. User interests are another: what people complain about, what can people ask for.

Network interests, which are actually significantly different. Competition clearly factors into our decision making. Regulatory bodies at this point. At our scale, we have to deal with privacy advocacy groups. The European Union had a lot to say about Questions – oh, no, sorry, about Places. So we deal with them, and we looped ‘em in on decisions.

And business interests. This is actually, on purpose, small because explicitly we value revenue generation right now less than growth and engagement, growth being defined as how many users come onto the site, engagement being defined as how often users use the site. So these are all important factors that we use in making our decisions.

And so this is sort of implicitly understood at Facebook, and every once in a while we experiment with something that’s a little bit maybe too data driven, I’d say. So I’d like to talk about a pretty recent example, which we called internally the engagement team.

We’ve gotten away with a lot of designing for ourselves over the past six years. And recently we’ve decided to really invest in trying to understand why users use the product as much as they do and how to sort of motivate them or to persuade them to use it more. So we created a team we called the engagement team, which was tasked with understanding engagement and increasing it significantly, but also with quantifying it, which was sort of the dangerous piece.

And our first attempt at quantifying engagement was RAW, reads and writes. So what do I mean by that? We talk a lot about the social graph internally and externally. The social graph is the digital representation on Facebook of real-world entities. Your relationship with a friend, we call a friendship. You going to a party, we call a – you are ______ to an event. Your football team is a group. And we believe that – or we talk about that the social graph is just objects and connections between objects within the system that represent real-life entities. And we talked about what reads and writes are. Reads are creations of either objects or connections between objects – sorry, writes. And what reads are, are what they sound like: reads of that information.

And so we just decided to treat all writes equal and all reads equal, and start to try to optimize for that. We did this over the past few months, and we ended up with products like comment liking. Comment liking is what it sounds like. We produced – we put the product that allowed you to quickly and easily like a comment. Here, Saleo said, “Fine,” and for some reason I liked it. This, actually, biometric was wildly successful. It produced an 11 percent, I believe, increase in likes throughout the entire system. This is really good for our metric goals.

But there was sort of a feeling within the team or within the company that this really might not be the best thing to optimize for. We sort of got what we asked for. This type of write, the fact that you like the comment, is explicitly or obviously less valuable than you telling us that you had a baby or that you switched jobs or that you moved companies. So clearly, all writes weren’t created equal, and we started to struggle with this.

We also started to struggle with what we found ourselves optimizing for. We found that 85 percent of the content in the system was generated by users who log in more than 25 days a month. That’s a lot of users – or, sorry, a lot of days. That’s actually around 20 percent of users in the system.

But we realized that if we start optimizing for this percentage, for these heavy users, for these power users, that’ll be invariably at the expense of our more casual users. Casual users are important to us too; some of ‘em become heavy users. There’s no reason why you can’t log into Facebook once a week instead of 25 days a month. And we realized that we were over-optimizing for a small user segment at the expense of the rest.

So what we’re doing – and I actually have a brainstorm today back at the office – is trying to reevaluate this metric. We created this team; we’re committed to understanding engagement, but clearly the metric-driven approach isn’t working for us, and specifically that metric is poor.

So another reason why – to move on – why we are skeptical of data-driven design is that we find that overreacting to data often leads to what we call micro-optimizations. A micro-optimization is when one interest over-optimizes for itself at the expense of another, and this is a very difficult thing for us as we scale.

As we scale, a division of labor becomes invariably sort of more intense, and you have different people representing different interests. We have a Photos team; we have a growth team; we have an engagement team; we have a News Feed team, etc. And all of these teams optimize in good faith for their own interests. But sometimes these interests can be sort of opposing or distracting from each other, and sometimes you can get lost in the specifics of a decision and sort of miss what we think of as the big picture.

So I’m gonna give you an example of something that launched that was core to our product for a long time, that I think was a poor decision. And it’s what I call the application menu, or we called internally the application menu.

This was the site in early 2008, and the navigation was on the left. That’s how you navigated to what we call applications. Applications are photos, groups, events, notes, but also platform applications – PackRat, Mafia Wars, FrontierVille, etc.

And we redesigned the whole site – right when I started at Facebook, actually – with the idea that we wanted to move the navigation to the top, explode the frame, and allow content on the site to sort of thrive. The application menu moved from being a list on the left to a dropdown at the top of the page. And this resulted in a significant decrease in traffic to applications, and this was a big problem for developers.

So we were committed to this though, so we started to explore how can we increase the prominence. So we moved it to the bottom of the page, as you can see it here. Not particularly prominent, but it increased traffic significantly. We even tried the “big blue button” approach. This resulted in a 5x increase in traffic, but we all hated it, so we actually didn’t launch this, so maybe we didn’t do as poorly as we could’ve done.

But what we were doing here is we were optimizing for a local maximum. Within this framework, there was only so much traffic we could funnel to applications. And what we needed was a structural change. Our premise was sort of off. Our interests were basically leading us down the wrong path, and we didn’t realize it, and we launched this.

This existed on the site for a year. But it did spawn a few of the conversations about navigation and how navigation should operate and persistence and about platform navigation versus internal navigation. And it ended up resulting in a team that designed this, which is the current crumb – what we call the crumb – the current navigation of the site, which was sort of a half-step backwards, to a left nav with a wider frame and a bit of a more flexible system.

So we were optimizing for something locally, and we needed to be somewhat disruptive to sort of get out of it. And this resulted in an increase in application traffic, but this was about a year later.

Another example of a local optimization – or a local maximum where we got lost chasing a local maximum is the old photo uploader, the one that existed temporarily, briefly before the one I showed you, and it looked like this. And this photo uploader was awesome.

Basically, within the context of Facebook, we allowed you to browse your file system, see thumbnails of photos, and select what you like. You could select photos from different folders. You could click Upload, and you can continue to navigate the site while it was uploading. It was a really great experience.

But the problem was, to enable this, to give us access to the file system, we had to build a browser plug-in, a downloadable – something you had to download and execute. In Safari it looked like this. You got a very scary warning that said, “An applet from Facebook is requesting access to your computer.” It was actually much worse in IE. In Internet Explorer, you got an ActiveX control. If any of you have seen that, it’s a 11-pixel, tiny yellow thing across the top of the page you’re supposed to find. In certain browsers, you had to download and install something. A lot of users actually don’t understand the difference.

And we did a waterfall analysis, and we found that, out of the roughly 1.2 million people a day that we asked to install the uploader, only 37 percent even tried to. That means that 63 percent said, “Piss off,” like “This sounds like – this is either spam,” or “I don’t trust you,” or “I don’t know what this is,” or “I don’t understand,” or “I got lost somewhere in the process,” and they didn’t even try. And only 23 percent were actually successful. This is abysmal.

Twenty-three percent is a little bit misleading. Out of the 1.2 million who tried to install, there was another 600,000 that already had it installed. So the overall success rate was around 40, 45 percent, which is about where we’ve gotten recently, if you remember this slide from earlier.

But what we needed to do was start over, really. We had reached our local maximum, which was around 40 percent, 45 percent. We had been optimizing for months. We had made substantial gains, but we had plateaued, and what we needed is to move to a completely new uploader. And we’ve reached our previous performance, and we’re still on an upward trajectory ’cause it’s still a new project.

But this is somewhat disruptive, which leads nicely I think into my last point, which is why – or my last reason why we’re pretty wary of being data driven, which is that we really believe – and this is a little bit controversial – that real innovation invariably involves disruption. And disruption is usually – involves a dip in metrics.

And this is core to our sort of culture. It’s core to our product beliefs. It’s one of the main reasons why I joined Facebook. I joined in 2008, but I started to try to join in 2007 because I saw News Feed, and News Feed was an example of a project that was executed in lieu of, in spite of, or just oblivious to data.

Does anybody remember this version of the site? This is pretty awesome.

[Audience laughter]

This is Ezra. Ezra was actually employee No. 6 at Facebook. This is what it looked like. And the way people used this site back then is they navigated from profile to profile, essentially trolling for interesting information. And we had – we knew that this wasn’t ideal. It was actually good for the standard metrics at the time for engagement, i.e., page views. People loaded a lot of pages in search of something interesting.

But we thought we could do better. We thought we could surface what was interesting to you right there on the homepage, create a custom social newspaper for you, and we called it News Feed internally but – yeah, both internally and externally. And it looked like this when we first launched it.

And this, if you remember, had a massive backlash. Users hated us. We got a ton of bad press. This is one of my favorite quotes: “Generation Facebook is taking action – against Facebook” – Time magazine. TechCrunch hit us. There has been an overwhelmingly negative public response to Facebook’s launch of two new products. The two new products were News Feed and Mini-Feed, which is your feed on your profile.

But we stuck to it. We believed in it. We added some privacy settings. Mark wrote a letter to the entire user base about – explaining what we were doing and why. And eventually it ended up becoming the primary driver of traffic and engagement on the site. It is probably our greatest success story.

But I think it’s only fair, if I’m talking about bold moves in spite of data that were successful, is to acknowledge some of our failures.

Beacon was a project where the basic idea was that Facebook shouldn’t just be about what happens on Facebook. When you go to Facebook, you should see what your friends are doing all over the world. And the way that manifested was that we would allow third-party sites – that is, sites that are not Facebook – to funnel your activity back to Facebook. So if you created a review on Yelp, it would come back to Facebook. If you wrote a review on Rotten Tomatoes, it would come back to Facebook. And it looked somewhat like this. Basically, in your News Feed at the top of your homepage, we threw those stories. We created stories about things you were doing off of Facebook.

But we did this – it was opt-out. We did this implicitly. And the classic terrible story was when Christmas was coming up, and you bought your girlfriend a nice bag on Amazon. And then she logged into Facebook, and she saw that you bought a nice bag on Amazon, and either you had spoiled Christmas by letting her know what she got beforehand or she found out that you were buying a bag for somebody else, and this was just terrible. It blew up, and we tried to stick to our guns, and eventually we had to sort of roll back and make it opt-in – yeah, make it opt-in.

And it’s a pain point. It’s actually difficult for us to talk about. But I wanna acknowledge it. It’s real. Along with trying to innovate and trying to make bold moves comes – you run the risk of failure, and you have to just understand failure, acknowledge it, and move on.

A couple other projects that were made sort of in spite of data or in lieu of data were homepage redesigns. We’ve done this a number of times. I’ve actually worked on the last two, so if you hate them, you can e-mail me later.

This was the homepage in 2009. This was March of 2009 we launched this. This had nothing to do with data. The idea here was that we wanted to make the News Feed entirely about what your friends were saying. So instead of algorithmically deciding what we thought was interesting, we showed you everything your friends were saying: the photos they were posting, the status updates they were writing, etc.

It being all-inclusive also meant that we sort of were focusing on recency and voice. We didn’t say what your friends were doing, so if your friend RSVP’d to an event, we didn’t tell you; if your friend joined a group, we didn’t tell you. But if your friend posted a status, we told you. So the idea was the focus on voice, the focus on recency – ’cause it updated in real time ’cause it was all-inclusive – and to focus on simplicity, determinism. You knew how News Feed worked.

It did increase comments significantly, and it did tank wall posts significantly, but we were gonna go forward with this no matter what, ’cause we believed in it for _______ reasons.

Another one – homepage redesign which we talked about briefly was this one, which was about improving and simplifying the navigation on the site. Instead of the way – the way before this to get to photos was you had to find a 16-by-16-pixel icon in the bottom left of the screen in a gray bar, which was very difficult for a lot of users, and we knew this was wrong. This resulted in an increase in traffic to applications, but we were gonna move forward with this.

But I do wanna take a moment to acknowledge that when you make these big changes, when you don’t take baby steps – and I actually do believe in baby steps – there’s a cost. There’s a very real cost.

This is a real group on Facebook called “I automatically hate the new Facebook homepage.”

[Audience laughter]

This is awesome. This is, like, my favorite group. There’s over 23,000 members, and some of the hate groups had millions of members. Sometimes it was – you would have a hate group about one homepage redesign that would then exist until another homepage redesign, and people would join that, at which point you had people who were hating on both, and so you wanted to go to one or the other. It gets really complicated. But it’s real, and we need to understand it, and we need to be somewhat sympathetic.

The way I think about it is that the average user who logs into Facebook today will spend about 46 minutes on Facebook. That’s crazy. That’s a lot of time. Now, if you spent 45 minutes every night at your desk organizing your photos, writing letters to your friends, doing your thing, your social sort of activity, and then I came by with no provocation, with no heads-up, and I just rearranged your desk for you, you’re gonna be pissed. It’s gonna happen. I’m messing with your desk. That’s real. That’s a real sense of entitlement, and it’s – you can argue with it all you like, but the truth is we need to understand that.

So moving forward, we need to understand how to message our motivations behind our major decisions better by explaining value add to users better. There’s clearly a lot of room for improvement. But I do believe that you’ll see us continue to make big changes that you’ll be like, “How is this good for data?” or “How is this good for anybody?” but there’s a reason behind it. Usually it’s either because we believe that this is where the market is going, or it enables a product that’s gonna come later, or we’re worried about being stagnant and we wanna continually innovate.

For us, the greatest risk is really taking no risk at all. That’s why I’m at the company. That is, like, pervasive from Mark, all the way down through to all of engineering, all of product, etc. And I believe in this. I really, really do.

That doesn’t mean we can’t do better. That doesn’t mean I’m not pushing for us to do better. But it means that at the end of the day we make decisions based on common sense, on interests, on strategic interests. And we use data. We acknowledge it’s important, but it’s really just a small piece of the pie.

So that’s actually all I have today. Again, my name is Adam Mosseri. My e-mail is Mosseri at Facebook. If you liked this or you thought I’m totally off base, I’m really actually open to feedback. But thanks for your time.

[End of Audio]

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About the presentation
At Facebook, analytics play a critical role in informing design decisions, but internally there’s a wariness of the idea of design by numbers. In this talk we’ll hear about three primary ways Facebook uses quantitative data. | read more…

About Adam
Adam Mosseri is a product design manager at Facebook, where he works on creating useful, universal, and fast interfaces to help people share more effectively. | read more…

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About the presentation
In-house design teams are our heroes. They design, build and refine the web sites and applications we use on a daily basis. They see projects through to completion and deal with tough decisions along the way. | read more…

About Andrew
Initially a print and web designer, Andrew moved into information architecture and interaction design to promote holistic user experiences to corporate clients. Andrew has over 12 years of design, technical, and strategic experience in the technology industry. | read more…

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About the presentation
The ability to collect and store data continues to increase, but our ability to understand it remains unchanged. Data visualization makes use of our evolutionary proclivity for decoding visual images and employs this ability as a high-bandwidth means of getting data into our heads. | read more…

About Ben
Ben Fry runs a software and design consultancy in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on understanding complex data. Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. | read more…

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About the presentation
The world we experience every day bombards us with requests for connectivity from many angles, requests that it seems we feel pressured to respond to. And some of us have no doubt had some responsibility for designing it that way. But is the inability to switch off and disconnect losing us anything valuable as humans? | read more…

About Ben
Ben Fullerton is an experience designer at Adaptive Path. His career has meandered down a windy road from its origins on the web in early 2000, taking in mobile, brand, application, service and strategy work at consultancies and in-house design teams, from startups to corporate behemoths. | read more…

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About the presentation
Don’t Forget the Humans! This is the mantra in world of healthcare, and over and over again we hear that “patient-centered care” is the perfect desired state. But what about all those other humans in the system? What about the nurses, pharmacists, doctors, transporters and business people? | read more…

About Chris
Chris McCarthy is the Director of the Innovation Learning Network (ILN) and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy (IC). | read more…

About Christi
Christi Zuber is a nurse with a passion for design. She is the director of the Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit Integrated Delivery System providing healthcare for over 8.5 million people each year. | read more…

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About the presentation
Make It So explores how science fiction and interface design relate to each other. The authors have developed a model that traces lines of influence between the two… | read more…

About Chris
Chris Noessel is an interaction designer and self-described “nomothete” (ask him directly about that one.) In his day job as a consultant with Cooper, he designs products, services, and strategy for a variety of domains, including health, financial, and software. | read more…

About Nathan
Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. | read more…

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About the presentation
In The Godfather, during Michael Corleone’s nephew’s baptism, shots of the sacrament of baptism performed by the priest are mixed with shots of killings ordered by Michael taking place elsewhere… | read more…

About Christian
Christian Palino is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. He has broad experience as an interaction designer and art director crafting solutions where service, environment, business, and communications meet to create empathic experiences. | read more…

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About the presentation
We’re moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy, where creativity and innovation will be the keys to value. New rules apply. | read more…

About Dave
Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. | read more…

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About the presentation
Since 2006, time spent on the Internet has outstripped time spent watching TV. According to a Harris Interactive poll conducted in late 2009 people spend an average of 13 hours per week online–excluding email. With the increasing penetration of Internet-enabled phones, many people spend substantially more time than that. | read more…

About Elizabeth
Elizabeth Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist and manager of the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research. Originally a psychologist by training, throughout her career Elizabeth has focused on understanding the ways in which people interact – whether their interactions are primarily face to face or are technologically mediated. | read more…

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For over two years, designers and engineers at IDEO and Ford Motor Company collaborated closely on a signature HMI experience for the company’s entire Ford and Lincoln 2010 vehicle portfolio that consumers would find simple, attentive, and intuitive. | read more…

About Iain
A partner at IDEO and co-lead of its Chicago studio, Iain Roberts is a self-proclaimed “excellence freak” whose life-long passions for combining technical precision and cutting-edge aesthetics have resulted in award-winning design and strategy work for such diverse industry giants as Ford, AT&T, Kraft, Motorola, and Altec Lansing. | read more…

About Tasos
Tasos Karahalios joined IDEO in November 2000. He works across offices as both a project leader and senior design engineer on a wide range of projects within the Health and Wellness and the Consumer Experience Design practices. | read more…

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Turns out that the fundamental principles that led to the success of the web will lead you there, too. Drawing on 15 years of web design and development experience, Jeff will take you on a guided tour of what makes things work on this amazing platform we’re all building together. | read more…

About Jeffrey
Jeffrey Veen is a founder of Small Batch, Inc. where he’s leading a team of developers and creating user-centered web products. | read more…

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About the presentation
Working as a user interface designer in the games industry presents some unique opportunities to engage players. So why are memorable interfaces a rarity? Joe will attempt to answer that question, and he’ll offer his perspective on the industry, show some of his work from major titles, and talk about what inspires him. | read more…

About Joe
Joe Kowalski is a graphic designer and user interface artist who joined Double Fine in 2007. He has received widespread praise for his work on Brutal Legend, notably on the front end shell, with some going so far as to call it “one of the greatest menus in the history of video games.” | read more…

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About the presentation
As UX designers, strategists and makers, creative thinking is the fuel we use to explore ideas, envision solutions and generate designs. Staying fresh and engaged is crucial to delivering great work. But it takes a team approach to create and foster a culture that thrives on creativity. | read more…

About Kate
Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. During her ten plus years in the web industry, she’s honed her talent for bringing companies and customers closer together through smart strategies and inventive design. She actively embraces the term “specialized generalist.” | read more…

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About the presentation
For many years, Fantasy user interfaces (FUI) in film and television have drawn both acclaim and ridicule in equal measure. Credited with pushing boundaries about what is possible and dumbing down and misrepresenting a complex field of work and setting false expectations in the eyes of users. What is the truth? | read more…

About Mark
Mark Coleran is a visual designer whose work crosses over into a wide range of industries from film & television through to software development. | read more…

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About the presentation
It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. | read more…

About Michael
Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications 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. | read more…

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About the presentation
Visit the average workplace and if it were a zoo the humane society would protest! The environment and organizational principals fail to provide the basic mental furniture for workers to focus attention, motivate, collaborate, and to accomplish. No wonder so many struggle with getting things done. Likewise most user experiences fail by ignoring the same simple fact. Human’s require emotions to decide. | read more…

About Nicole
Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President of XEODesign, Inc., has twenty years of expertise in Player Experience Design (PXD) for mass-market entertainment products. | read more…

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In 2009, Mindflash began the process of re-thinking not only their product, but how people in the organization create products. In this case study, Cameron and Paula will discuss 5 critical actions that set Mindflash on a trajectory to create compelling and meaningful experiences for their customers, while fulfilling the business goal of becoming a true SaaS. | read more…

About Paula
Paula is an experience designer at Adaptive Path. She is a strong believer that our designs define who we are and who we will become; she is passionate about designs that illuminate our best human qualities: Kindness, respect, honesty, courage, humor, charm, integrity. | read more…

About Cameron
Cameron Gray is VP of Engineering and Product for Mindflash.com and an entrepreneur and agile evangelist who appreciates the art of creating user focused apps. Mindflash.com is the easiest and most effective way to deliver in-house training online. | read more…

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On April 3rd, 2010, media publisher Bonnier launched Popular Science+ iPad edition as a first step toward a vision of what digital magazine reading can be. | read more…

About Sara
Sara Öhrvall is Senior Vice President, Research & Development, the Bonnier Group. She is responsible for the digital magazine project within Bonnier and was behind the Mag+ concept launched in December 2009. | read more…

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Traditionally, magazine designers and editors have been well-equipped to create compelling experiences in print, but highly crafted digital formats have proven more elusive. | read more…

About Wyatt
Wyatt Mitchell is the Design Director at Wired magazine. He joined the Wired editorial art department in 2007, bringing a broad range of magazine experience. | read more…

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Now you can relive the main stage speakers in all of their brilliance and glory. We’ll be blogging and tweeting as they are posted, so follow @uxweek on Twitter to know the moment each one is ready for your viewing pleasure. For all of you who have been waiting patiently while we get everything together, thank you. We hope you enjoy the new style and format. Check ‘em out!

Want to get in on the smartphone app action but don’t know where to start? Suzanne Ginsburg, UX designer and author of Designing the iPhone User Experience (due out just before UX Week), is leading a half-day workshop on designing smartphone apps. She’ll take workshop attendees through an overview of the software and hardware that define the smartphone user experience and lead you through sketching and prototyping concepts and custom gestures, transitions, animations and sound to make your app shine.

Jamin Hegeman and Jared Cole, designers at Adaptive Path, provide an introduction to service design practice and methods in their half-day workshop, From Products to Services: A Service Design Crash Course. Participants will examine a familiar service, map the customer journey, create a service blueprint, and create solutions that support the overall goal of the service.

Rock Band is crucial to our sanity at Adaptive Path and we are thrilled to have Rock Band and Guitar Hero designer Joe Kowalski, now a graphic designer and user interface artist with Double Fine, hitting the main stage with his talk Video Games and the User Interface. Working as a user interface designer in the games industry presents some unique opportunities to engage players. So why are memorable interfaces a rarity? He’ll attempt to answer that question, and offer his perspective on the industry, show some of his work from major titles, and talk about what inspires him.

Christian Palino of Adaptive Path will talk about Eisenstein’s theory of montage and how it provides an analogous model for exploring the relationship of service touchpoints to the space between those touchpoints, and how users experience them both.

Kevin Cheng is the product manager at Twitter, and co-founder of the user experience web comic OK/Cancel and the online comic publishing network Off Panel Productions.

I met Kevin Cheng a few months back, at an IxDA SFRedux of Interaction10 here at Adaptive Path. We momentarily geeked out about how the things we design are increasingly blurring the boundaries between our digital and physical worlds, and the significant role that storytelling plays in quickly capturing and communicating concepts that could otherwise feel too abstract. Kevin has pioneered a super practical approach of using comics to do just this.

When I heard that Kevin was conducting a workshop at UX Week 2010 called, See What I Mean: How to Communicate with Comics, I jumped at the chance to interview him.

Click through HERE to read the interview.

Kendra Shimmell — kendra@adaptivepath.com

In this workshop, we’ll be learning how to make interactive images of data with Processing, a free and open-source programming environment found online at processing.org.

We’ll start with a handful of examples that look at different kinds of data, with a focus on how to adapt these to your own projects. We’ll also cover ways to represent information–whether maps, charts, or something less conventional–and talk about the programming basics of working with information interactively.

He will wrap up day four of UX Week with his talk, The Reality of Fanasty in which he’ll examine why Fantasy user interfaces (FUI) looks the way it does, how it has evolved and the unique challenges and requirements that shape this unusual area of UI work.

Chris McCarthy, Director of the Innovation Learning Network (ILN) and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy joins his colleague Chrisi Zuber, a nurse with a passion for design and Director of the Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente to talk about their work developing human-centered designs that positively impact the experience of Kaiser patients and the clinicians who care for them.

Sara Öhrvall, Senior Vice President, Research & Development, the Bonnier Group also hits the main stage on the last day of UX Week. She’ll walk us through what magazine reading of the (very near) future might look like in her talk The Mag+ Concept: The Silent Mode of Digital Magazine Reading.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

As the systems we design for become more complex, design is changing from a solo activity to a team sport, where designers, partners and users work together to co-design experiences.

Participatory design requires new skills and design practices. How can you engage more people – including many who are not designers – in the design process, without losing the creative culture and energy that fuels the design process?

Gamestorming applies game thinking and game mechanics to these kinds of business and design challenges. Gamestorming can help you quickly form simple models of complex systems, so you can involve others in your design thinking, explore systems, and experience them from within to gain new insights. Gamestorming is a holistic design approach that will help you combine design practices like sketching, sorting, prototyping and role-play to gain meaningful design insights and outcomes.

In this workshop, led by Dave Gray, co-author of Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers, an upcoming book from O’Reilly Media, we will talk about gamestorming: What is it and how does it work? You will learn the ten essentials of gamestorming, a basic toolkit for designers and innovators, as well as gain some hands-on experience with gamestorming as a design practice.

Often ignored by usability, neuroscience now proves that emotion deeply connects decision making and performance. Emotions also coordinate the actions between people. The trick is that emotions and social experiences are emergent qualities that cannot be designed directly. Nicole brings this challenge to life in her workshop.

Anyone who wants to understand how to use fun and emotion in the design of experiences should attend:

• UX designers
• Game designers
• User and customer researchers
• Product managers
• Customer experience strategists
• Software developers
• Service designers
• Experience marketing

In this interactive XEOPlayShop we will cover how the choices in games craft player emotions to increase engagement.
In addition to competition there are game mechanics that increase curiosity and others that create social bonding that makes team work possible. We will examine these 4 Keys to Fun plus new social mechanics from XEODesign’s research to see how successful social media and iPhone games offer more playful interfaces that increase engagement, loyalty, and viral distribution.

By adding these kinds of choices designers can drive user behavior to create more engaging experiences.

From XEODesign’s latest player research we will look at:

• How games create emotion and self-motivation
• What mechanics and emotions drive social engagement, networking, and increase social bonding
• How player choices create emotions such as Schadenfreude, Fiero, Curiosity, and Love
• The emotions and mechanics that drive viral distribution

Comparing examples from social media such as Twitter and Facebook to games on the web, console, and iPhone we draw out the secrets of social play and the emotions that makes something viral. Come hear the latest research results on emotions and games played on iPhones and social networks and what that means for more serious applications.

Free white papers on emotion and the fun of games are available here: http://xeodesign.com/whyweplaygames.html

What is a XEODesign PlayShop?
A XEODesign PlayShop is a seriously fun workshop where participants learn how to craft emotion to create new experiences. Together we explore ways to design new emotions into gameplay and innovate to reach new consumers based on XEODesign’s 17 years of player research by evaluating a selection of published games and non-game social UIs. Participants team up to work through group exercises on exercises provided or on their own concepts in development. This XEOPlayShop:

• Offers a fresh perspective and hands on experience on the mechanics and emotions that drive player experiences
• Exposes team members to new ways of thinking about games
• Inspires teams to incorporate more engagement factors into current projects and future games
• Designs goals and assessment parameters to be conducted in the next Stage

Benefits

1. Increased usage and fun factor of games currently in development
2. Easy to apply techniques to increase appeal and fix “flat” gameplay with the 4 Keys to Fun
3. Enhanced understanding of how to increase player engagement
4. Specific changes to current projects that will make them more fun
5. Understand the mechanics that inspire gameplay and conversion
6. State of the art techniques to create innovate play experiences that broaden the market

One thing everyone does agree on: Dealing with web content is hard. It’s complicated, expensive, time-consuming, and often overwhelming. There’s new content. Legacy content. User-generated content. Print to web. Text to video. Static to dynamic. The list goes on and on.

But who’s responsible for wrangling all this content into submission? Agencies want the client to do it, but the client doesn’t have the necessary infrastructure to plan for and execute user-centered content. The client wants the agency to do it, but the agency doesn’t have the subject matter expertise—let alone the internal resources—required to create content that’s always accurate, relevant, and consistent over time.

Good news: The practice of content strategy gives us tools and processes that can help bring order out of your content chaos. But before we can sell our organizations on investing time and money in content strategy, we need to help stakeholders understand exactly how content can make or break user experience, and what the costs are when we wait until the 11th hour to deal with it.

What will be covered?
Content strategy is the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content. In this workshop, we’ll learn:

•    How and why content gets the short end of the UX planning stick
•    How to integrate content strategy in the user experience design process
•    How to evolve content-focused tactics into a cohesive, sustainable content strategy
•    Techniques for getting stakeholders to understand and align on the business value of content strategy

Who should attend?
This workshop is for anyone who’s convinced that great content is central to a successful user experience and wants the tools to make it happen: Marketers, web editors and writers, user experience designers, information architects, product managers, and anyone else who deals with web content at any stage of the content lifecycle.

Good Design Faster is a two-day workshop that helps you understand how to get ideas out of your head, onto paper, and into a prototype format with remarkable quickness. Because you’ll be working in groups, it’s best for everyone if you take the full two-day workshop.

Part One: Sketching for UX Design
You will learn the fundamentals of, wait for it…. sketching by hand. Sketching is a remarkably powerful tool, and you can learn the basics of sketching for user experience design in an afternoon!

This workshop will focus on helping you to become a more confident/better visual communicator by demonstrating simple drawing methods to improve your collaborative design processes.The format for this fast-paced workshop will be a balanced combination of demos, discussion and hands-on drawing practice. We’ll start the session by covering basic, beginner skills like straight lines, rectangles, line weight, color use and shading and move on to some lightweight techniques for drawing motion, people, hands, 3D space, page layout and visual narrative. All techniques will be focused on communicating interactions for web, desktop and mobile and include methods adapted from industrial design, comics and film production. You’ll finish the session with a portfolio of sketches, tips and new methods to feel confident drawing your ideas for your team and your stakeholders.

In this first part of the workshop you will:

• learn basic techniques and skills for sketching
• learn to draw elements specifically relevant to UX design
• experiment with creative storytelling for your ideas
• embrace the power of sketching to communicate clearer and faster

Part Two: Design Sprints and Sketchboards
Colleagues and clients always want results sooner. How can you deliver without compromising quality? Building on the sketching skills learned in Part One, we share Adaptive Path’s sketchboard method, an approach for exploring a variety of ideas before settling on one direction. This session will be a hands-on, fast-paced guide to quickly generating your own great experiences.

The skills to achieve good design faster are vital for any UX professional’s toolkit. They make it possible to explore a variety of ideas before settling on one direction. They’re a great antidote to the wireframe rut, for designers who find themselves perfecting their wireframes only to see them misinterpreted or unimplemented. And they’re all but essential for anyone whose team uses an agile methodology. This workshop is for anyone who wants to develop ideas and incorporate outside feedback more efficiently. Brandon will guide participants through a process that will get them sketching, sharing, and evolving better ideas right away.

You will learn:

• Techniques for rapid sketching and idea generation
• How to use sketchboards to share ideas and focus discussion on the right questions
• Best practices for eliciting quality feedback and working it back into the design
• Making sketchboards work for your situation

Good Design Faster is a two-day workshop that helps you understand how to get ideas out of your head, onto paper, and into a prototype format with remarkable quickness. Because you’ll be working in groups, it’s best for everyone if you take the full two-day workshop. You will need a laptop for this portion of the workshop.

We are working in a world of rich, dynamic interfaces, both on the web and on our devices. The experiences we design are interactive, responsive, and have emotion. Prototypes allow us to articulate the feeling and function of a design in a way that a wireframe does not.

Building on the design learnings from Day One of Good Design Faster, you’ll learn how to go straight to “wireframing” in code and producing an interactive digital prototype without bothering to churn out umpteen wireframes. You’ll see how your sketchboard materials can serve as a basis for your prototype.

On Day Two, we’ll start by introducing the importance of prototyping to a design process. Through a short presentation we’ll discuss how the use of many small prototypes can better inform the design of a system than one large prototype. Specifically, we will show that:

• Effective prototypes are fast. We want to use techniques that allow for rapid iteration. A prototype should not just be bolted onto the end of a design process. Incorporating the creation of a prototype into your daily design work allows new ideas to emerge and validates concepts quickly.
• Effective prototypes are disposable. Just like with any design deliverable, we are creating an artifact intended to express an idea to someone else (stakeholder, developer, user, etc). Once that design idea has been communicated, the prototype deliverable can be discarded. We don’t have to feel the burden of creating a masterpiece that will live on, and we certainly don’t have to work in production-level code.
• Effective prototypes are focused. We want to select the interactions of our design that really need to be prototyped. Look for the parts of your design that have of complexity. Look for interaction patterns repeated throughout the user’s experience. Look for the interactions that bring revenue to your product. A prototype that demonstrates these interactions will be the best use of your time and energy.

There are many, many, many tools for prototyping. We’ll demonstrate a few methods and discuss the pros and the cons. You will learn how to select the right tools and techniques for your specific team, organization, process and problem.

After the morning’s overview, participants will break into their teams and begin to build an interactive prototype. A mid-day pause will demonstrate the need to test a prototype with sample “users”. Following the test, iteration on the prototype will incorporate feedback and ultimately result in something that can be presented. Everyone will leave with a working prototype that they can show to others and the skills to incorporate this into their daily work.

Please bring your laptop.

The technology-enabled experiences we create are predominantly solitary experiences: laptops, mobile phones, mp3 players and PDAs are all optimized for the individual, or at least for one person at a time. Email, user accounts, mobile phone numbers, and even social networks presume that people engage with a system in isolation.

In the messy, real world though, no person is truly an island. Throughout our lives, we work to share, negotiate, collaborate, and enjoy each other, face-to-face, in the world. We are embedded in relationships with partners, children, parents, close friends, and co-workers. These relationships strongly influence our behaviors, motivations, and aspirations, and yet these connection are often ignored or little understood in the design process. At present time we know more about the future of social engagement in disembodied networks than what social engagement might look like with the people closest to us.

We are also living at a time of environmental crisis where making a personalized device for every single person, is not all that sustainable, or desirable. We have a responsibility and opportunity to disrupt our possible trajectory towards a distopian Wall-E like existence.

This workshop provides a starting place for better understanding and designing for people in their natural state: embedded in interdependent groups such as couples, families, and project teams.

We will be exploring what it looks like to do design research with interdependent groups, considering theories and methods to help structure field work and analysis The end goal of this interactive workshop is to support the creation of design-actionable accounts of the motivations, behaviors and meaning-making of groups, and of the individuals that bring these groups into being.

This workshop will transform you into a behavior change genius. Yes, I know that sounds unrealistic, but I believe it’s absolutely true. If you pay attention and engage in our activities, you will gain the skills and insight to rank among the Top 1% (genius status) when designing for behavioral results.

[Academics, please skip the next paragraph. In your profession complexity is good. So skip ahead, okay?]

Human nature is not so complicated. You can read hundreds of academic papers, and the inquiry you’ll find is fascinating. But in reality just a handful of human factors guide our behaviors. And you can learn these factors in one day. That’s good news for designers. Step by step, I’ll clarify human nature in a way that’s both accurate (true to science) and actionable (useful in your work).

Case in point: We humans are lazy. To account for this reality, a few years ago I mapped out the six elements of simplicity. I’ll teach these elements to you. And with this new insight, you can pinpoint why many designs fail to achieve results. It’s taken me a decade to accept the reality (I’m a bit slow at times) that simplicity matters more than motivation when it comes to influencing people. You’ll see this clearly in our workshop. Together we’ll get hands-on, trading off simplicity against motivation in competing designs. You’ll understand why simplicity wins.

Next case in point: Information. Except for Spock, we humanoids are not very logical. We pretend to be rational, but c’mon: Farmville? Lady Gaga? George Bush’s second term? (even his first one!) . . . are any of those things rational? Of course not. So let’s downgrade the “info matters” meme and ramp up on what really changes people. And that would be “hot triggers.”

New technology gives us new ways to deliver hot triggers. And that’s what all the industry fighting is about right now: Zynga sues Facebook; Google freaks at iAds; Amazon claims to own the social network patent. All this drama is about who will have the power to deliver hot triggers in the future Because that’s what changes behavior. And that’s what creates value. Of course, in this workshop I’ll unveil the power of hot triggers.

Final case in point: Habits. Daily habits. Ah, now that’s the holy grail. In fact, I changed my entire Stanford teaching plan to create a new course about habit formation — how technology can create this most powerful of all behaviors. I’ll share the best stuff from my class. You’ll learn what it takes to create a habit in yourself, your dog, or a customer. (Okay, let me back up: Our focus in this workshop is commercial, but what you learn will help you personally. And make your dog better too.)

Like I said, we humans aren’t really so complicated. Until now, no one has explained human nature clearly. And no one has mapped those insights onto the emerging opportunities in technology. So that’s what my workshop is all about.

I’m sharing my best insights, my best learning activities, at the best UX event of the summer. See you there!

—

Oh yeah, one more thing. Before committing to this workshop, you should check me out first: www.bjfogg.com. Warning: It’s not totally updated, but my other sites (like captology.stanford.edu) are even more legacy. [sigh]

Today millions of people depend on Smartphone apps to get them to work, find their next meal, and stay in touch with family and friends. Apps are poised to play an even deeper role in people’s lives, in ways not yet discovered. Skilled individuals who can design applications that are usable and delightful are essential for their success. Designing Smartphone Apps will help attendees take on this challenge.

The session will begin with an overview of the software and hardware that define the Smartphone user experience, with particular attention to the iPhone and Android. Having this background will enable attendees to develop innovative app solutions that harness Smartphone technologies.

Next, we’ll discuss ways to sketch and prototype app concepts, using upfront user research as a starting point. Specific prototyping approaches that we’ll delve into include paper, PowerPoint/Keynote, on-device, and video. Hands-on exercises will be provided during this part of the session.

Attention to detail will add delight to your app’s user experience and make it stand out from the competition. The last part of this session will introduce a variety of ways to make your app shine. Some of the techniques we’ll discuss include custom gestures, transitions, animations, and sound.

How do you get people to read your documentation? How do you get a point across within 10 seconds? How do you make sure your product stays true to its original vision?

Google used them. The US Postal Service used them. Adaptive Path used them. The US Navy used them. Business author and TED speaker Daniel Pink used them. It seems comics are in use everywhere lately.

Comics are a unique way to communicate, using both image and text to effectively demonstrate time, function, and emotion. Just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics tell stories of your users and your products. Comics can provide your organization with an exciting and effective alternative to slogging through requirements documents and long reports.

In See What I Mean, Kevin Cheng, OK/Cancel founder/cartoonist and author of the soon to be released Rosenfeld book by the same title, will teach you how you can use comics as a powerful communication tool without any illustrator skills.

This full day workshop will help you:

• Learn a method to document your organization’s work, ideas and vision in a way that any project teammate, customer or manager will readily understand and consume
• Put the “story” back in “storyboarding” and really describe the user experience from the users’ perspective
• Include the use of comics in the product development life cycle to prevent wasted time and resources spent building the wrong product
• Use comics as a way to engage users early and solicit their feedback
• Sell the value of the method to the rest of your organization
• Discover the properties of the comics medium that make them so much more than either words or pictures

In See What I Mean, Kevin will walk you step by step through the process of using comics to communicate, and provide examples from industry leaders who have already adopted this method.

Some feedback from previous workshops:
“Got everyone past the fear of drawing.”

“Take it. It will give you a fresh perspective and another useful tool as an alternative.”

“It’s a great way to add another interesting tool to our arsenal to make stuff usable.”

All theories have self-prescribed limits. All models are incomplete. All methods of analysis accentuate one perspective at the expense of others. The real power of any method comes when it is used in conjunction with others. Mixing methods becomes especially important when trying to introduce technology into a real setting. Actual circumstance involving individual idiosyncrasies and collective behaviors brings more complexity than any one method can handle. Artful triangulation across multiple methods can give an efficient handle on that complexity.

In this workshop, we discuss how different user-centered methods can be mixed and merged to drive inspiration, innovation and validation of interactive experiences. We first cover a basic framework of socio-technical design, highlighting areas of active research in the human-computer interaction community.

We will present a number of case studies where we combined methods (ethnographic field work, prototype development and evaluation, focus groups, data mining and field experiments) to derive innovation possibilities and then how we drove the invention process to develop new products. From these case studies, we will illustrate an observation to innovation framework and show how to adapt established methods to address emergent questions. We encourage participants to come to the workshop with their own case studies and/or questions about methods they have used.

We address the following questions of interest to innovators, designers, engineers, marketers, and managers using practical examples:
- What methods are available at the different stages in understanding
a new interactive experience?
- Which of the many meanings of the word ‘prototype’ might work best
in different circumstances, and at what cost?
- How do you identify the blind spots in one method and recognize
alternative ways to illuminate those gaps in understanding?
- How do you undertake conversations across disciplines, each with
their preconceptions, strengths, and limits?

Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying flirtation with loss of control. We will present the dos and don’ts of social web design using a sampling of interaction patterns, design principles and best practices to help you improve the design of your digital social environments.

Designing social websites and applications, or adding a social dimension to an existing project, entails unique challenges way beyond those involved in creating experiences for individuals interacting alone with an interface. Any of the following sound familiar?

• I’m a designer being asked to add “social” to my site!
• I have an active community on my site but people are misbehaving. How can I get that under control?
• We want to build a really cool social experience around [thingy] but we’re not sure how to get people to come join the fun.
• I have a great idea for a social utility but I don’t want to have to first re-create the social infrastructure of the web inside of it.
• People come and read my content, but they’re invisible to each other. How can I peel away the layers so they can participate with each other?
• I’m worried I’m missing an opportunity to help my members connect with each other in the real world.

In this workshop, we’ll address these challenges and more. You’ll explore the landscape of social user experience design patterns and anti-patterns, focusing on the contexts in which specific interface designs work well and the unintended consequences that make some UI ideas seem like a good idea until they turn around and bite you in your app.

Starting with a foundational set of high-level practices that underpin the individual interaction, Erin and Christian will present rules and tips for how to mix-and-match the individual social patterns and best practices to create compelling social experiences. Workshop activities will involve group discussions and sketching to explore the application of social interaction patterns to specific scenarios.

Who is this workshop for?

Designers, developers, architects and product specialists all need to work together to create compelling social experiences online and this workshop will be relevant to anyone who has to plan, design, build, or bring to market social websites and applications.

What will you learn?

By the end of this very full day you will be able to:

• understand, visualize, and communicate clearly about the social design landscape
• apply a set of core social design principles to a wide variety of contexts
• create models for the representation of people and social objects in your app
• add social features intelligently (and incrementally) to an existing site
• design reputation features to enable the type of community (competitive? collaborative? somewhere in between?) you want
• enable sharing and engage organic word-of-mouth growth to launch your project
• embrace openness and leverage the existing open social infrastructure of the web
• introduce representations of presence into an experience so that your users can find and relate to each other
• tie your virtual experiences to the real world in space and time by connecting to maps, geolocation, and calendaring tools
• figure out an enterprise social media strategy for your client, boss, or startup

Service design is a holistic approach that focuses on understanding the service first before introducing products into the service. By understanding the system, designer access what products or behaviors impact the system both positively and negatively, with a perspective that all elements within the system, from product to human behavior, are interrelated and form the service. Service design puts the people who interact with the service as central figures in identifying opportunities to improve the service. However, there is equal emphasis on the people delivering the services as well as the business needs.

In this workshop, we will provide an introduction to service design practice and methods. We will examine a particular service that all participants will be very familiar with, map the journey of several service stakeholders, create a service blueprint, and create solutions that support the overall goal of the service. In doing so, we will identify touchpoints and stakeholders, the overall service goals, participant goals, business goals, as well as the overall form of the service.

By the end of this workshop, participants will:
- acquire a foundation for understanding service design
- develop knowledge about several service design tools
- consider ways to bring service design into their current practice
- learn where to go to find out more

So when I heard that Dave would be presenting a workshop at UX Week 2010, I jumped at the chance to chat with him—via index card, natch. Below, Dave shares a little bit about knowledge games, which he’ll soon be releasing a book on. It’s called Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers, and you can pre-order it on Amazon. Of course, I want it now.

By the way, we learned last week that XPLANE has joined forces with Dachis Group. Big congratulations to Dave, and score for Dachis Group.

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

Leah:

Dave:

(You can read more about Empathy Maps and Business Model Canvas at gogamestorm.com and in Dave’s forthcoming book.)

Leah:

See and hear a lot more from Dave and Leah at UX Week. Use code NEWS when registering for 10% off the current price (which is $1,995 early bird, through May 31).

At Facebook, analytics play a critical role in informing design decisions, but internally there’s a wariness of the idea of design by numbers.

In this talk we’ll hear about three primary ways Facebook uses quantitative data:
• Optimizing small but important interactions
• Finding pain points in existing work flows
• Setting high level success metrics for large projects

Some things are difficult, or maybe even impossible, to quantify. Currently, the design team works to optimize for both the user and the network, and though these two are not mutually exclusive they are not always perfectly inline.

We’ll hear Facebook’s take on how they think they should improve their ability to quantify some of the less tangible data points, like brand perception and long term network value. Those analytics can begin to perform as counter metrics so that they can begin to rely less heavily on instinct, which is important but sometimes fallible.

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Adam Mosseri is a product design manager at Facebook, where he works on creating useful, universal, and fast interfaces to help people share more effectively. His past work includes the last two homepage redesigns, search, and the photos product. In addition to design, Adam is passionate about fostering a collaborative work environment for designers and scaling the team to meet the needs of a growing user base.

Before Facebook, Adam worked as the principle designer on Tokbox, a web-based video startup. He also spent five years running a small design consultancy with offices in New York and San Francisco.

Initially a print and web designer, Andrew moved into information architecture and interaction design to promote holistic user experiences to corporate clients. Andrew has over 12 years of design, technical, and strategic experience in the technology industry.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Andrew managed the web and user experience team at Princess Cruises where he led the development of an entirely new online booking system, e-ticket solution, and online branding and marketing initiatives. Prior to that, he worked with element18 and Interfocus Advertising in Los Angeles.

Continually obsessed with the latest technologies in the mobile and gaming space, Andrew advises on the design of Palm, Windows Mobile and iPhone applications, social networking, and collaboration software. He is an advocate of ubiquitous computing, and approaches projects with a desire to ensure that the experience of the device fits into the overall product strategy.

Andrew is a member of American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Information Architecture Institute (IAI) and the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA).

WORKSHOP: Playing with Data
Wednesday, August 26th

Talk: Computational Information Design
The ability to collect and store data continues to increase, but our ability to understand it remains unchanged. Data visualization makes use of our evolutionary proclivity for decoding visual images and employs this ability as a high-bandwidth means of getting data into our heads. In this talk, I’ll present work I’ve developed ranging from illustrations of data for magazines and journals to software tools used by geneticists to interactive applications for Fortune 10 companies.

————-

Ben Fry runs a software and design consultancy in Cambridge, Massachusetts that focuses on understanding complex data. Fry received his doctorate from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as computer science, statistics, graphic design, and data visualization as a means for understanding information. With Casey Reas of UCLA, he develops Processing, an open source programming environment used by tens of thousands of students, artists, engineers, and scientists.

At the end of 2007, he published “Visualizing Data” with O’Reilly. Fry’s personal work has shown at the Whitney Biennial, the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His information graphics have also illustrated articles for the journal Nature, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Seed, and Communications of the ACM.

The world we experience every day bombards us with requests for connectivity from many angles, requests that it seems we feel pressured to respond to. And some of us have no doubt had some responsibility for designing it that way. But is the inability to switch off and disconnect losing us anything valuable as humans?

Ben will talk through a couple of stories from both history and the present day that suggest that considering what happens when the button is in the off position might be just as important for us.

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Ben Fullerton is an experience designer at Adaptive Path.

Prior to Adaptive Path, Ben was at design consultancy IDEO, where he worked within multidisciplinary teams on projects spanning web, service, strategy and devices for both private and public sector clients. Before IDEO, Ben moved from his native United Kingdom to the Bay Area and spent a short, but rewarding time at Twitter defining features as the then-small service was first beginning to find popularity in the wider world.

Ben was based in London for eleven years, more recently within the mobile team at Samsung’s European design studio, where he provided insight and design direction to Samsung’s Corporate Design Center in Seoul. He came to Samsung after spending many years at pioneering service design and innovation consultancy live|work, which he joined as one of the first employees. It was at live|work that Ben first gained experience in service design — bringing the skills of interaction designers to bear on experiences that occur over time and over many different points of use — at a time when the parameters and methods of such a design engagement were still somewhat ill-defined within the wider design community.

Ben met the founders of live|work at his previous position with digital agency Oyster Partners (later Framfab, now LBi), who, at one time, were one of the largest new media firms in the UK. At Oyster, Ben helped to nurture and grow the capabilities of the front end engineering team (while also sitting through the first technology crash.)

Ben holds a Bachelor of Arts (Hons.) in Contemporary Literature and a Master of Arts from the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London, where he studied the cultural implications of the development of technology with a focus on how people experience material culture. Projects that Ben has worked on have been nominated for a BAFTA and have won a Spark Award, among others.

Outside of work Ben neatly conforms to national stereotypes by spending far too much time attempting to educate people on the immeasurable benefits of a decent cup of tea, and still believes in the zeppelin as a viable form of intercontinental transport. One day he will finish writing a book.

Kevin Cheng, splits his time between Twitter, where he is the product manager for the web client, and finishing his book “See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas With Comics”. He’ll be leading a full-day workshop on communicating with comics.

WORKSHOP: Designing for Behavior Change: Human Nature, Hot Triggers, and New Habits
Thursday, August 26th

Talk: Behavior Wizard: Precision and Power in Persuasive Design
From Apple to Zynga, the best design solutions today change human behavior. Yet despite decades of research, challenges remain for people who design to influence. First, “persuasion” seems a dirty word. It shouldn’t be. We should now embrace that we’re in the business of behavior change. Next problem: conceptual confusion. The landscape of persuasion can be disorienting, muddied by impractical theories and over-hyped techniques. My new work provides a clear view of behavior change, including language that is simple yet accurate. Finally, I’ll demonstrate how behavior change is a step-by-step process. This explains why one-shot solutions rarely achieve outcomes that matter most. To help designers and researchers succeed more often, my Stanford lab has created the “Behavior Wizard,” which maps routes to the 15 ways behavior can change. Overall, despite the challenges in designing for persuasion, we would do well to face the growing need in today’s world, as well as the unprecedented potential for success.

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BJ Fogg directs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University. A psychologist and innovator, he devotes half of his time to industry projects. His work empowers people to think clearly about the psychology of persuasion–and then to convert those insights into real-world outcomes.

BJ has created a new model of human behavior change, which guides research and design. Drawing on these principles, his students created Facebook Apps that motivated over 16 million user installations in 10 weeks.

He is the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, a book that explains how computers can motivate and influence people. BJ is also the co-editor of Mobile Persuasion, as well as Texting 4 Health. His upcoming book is entitled The Psychology of Facebook.

Fortune Magazine selected him as a “New Guru You Should Know.”

Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. As an experience design specialist, Brandon regularly speaks and writes on the subject, trains others, and practices experience design himself as a differentiator for business strategy.

Brandon’s passion for discovering and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments: from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World. This insight with customers – along with a solid grounding in business analysis and a mastery of design methods – allows Brandon to help organizations define and design more meaningful experiences for their customers.
Brandon has over a decade of experience developing new products, services and user experiences for the Web, desktop, and devices. He has keynoted, presented, and led workshops at multiple conferences, including Business to Buttons, IA Summit Designertopia, and UIE Web App Summit.

Some of Brandon’s past clients include the American Cancer Society, Flickr, JetBlue, LeapFrog, Morgan Stanley, and Vanguard.

Brandon holds two master-level degrees from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He received a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he studied the planning, development, and management of innovation. Concurrently, he graduated with a MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon is a past editor for the Institute of Design’s Perspectives on Design and Strategy, allowing him to pick-the-brains of leaders in the fields of innovation, design, and strategy. He is co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World. Brandon also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

What do you do when you have just released a product that has a highly competitive feature set and profoundly low adoption? You can try to repackage it, re-skin it, or less likely, re-think the entire endeavor.

In 2009, Mindflash began the process of re-thinking not only their product, but how people in the organization create products. In this case study, Cameron and Paula will discuss 5 critical actions that set Mindflash on a trajectory to create compelling and meaningful experiences for their customers, while fulfilling the business goal of becoming a true SaaS.
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Cameron Gray is VP of Engineering and Product for Mindflash.com and an entrepreneur and agile evangelist who appreciates the art of creating user focused apps. Mindflash.com is the easiest and most effective way to deliver in-house training online.

Don’t Forget the Humans!  This is the mantra in world of healthcare, and over and over again we hear that “patient-centered care” is the perfect desired state.  But what about all those other humans in the system? What about the nurses, pharmacists, doctors, transporters and business people?  Designing and planning your business for just one type of human not only alienates others, but it actually could be the reason for design failure and solutions that don’t sustain the tests of time.

Our group at Kaiser designs for the humans in our system; we optimize the experience of our patients and clinicians so that the system serves them and their needs, and brings as much joy to their interaction that is, well…. as humanly possible.

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Chris McCarthy is the Director of the Innovation Learning Network (ILN) and an Innovation Specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation Consultancy (IC). He has been with Kaiser Permanente since 1997, in various roles from implementing electronic health records to redesigning the medication administration and shift change experiences. In 2003, Chris partnered with IDEO to learn and import methods of “design thinking” into Kaiser Permanente, and has co-led several multiregional innovation projects which have since been implemented in dozens of KP and non-KP hospitals.

Chris also directs a network of healthcare innovators who share design techniques and prototypes to speed learning and deepen inter-organization collaboration. Members include: CIMIT/Partners, US Department of Veterans Affairs, Indian Health Service, Via Christi, Ascension Health, and HealthTech to name a few.

Chris has a master’s in business administration from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY)/Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), and a master’s in public health in Health Policy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In his spare time, he runs marathons, has taken up piano (again), and goes to way too many movies.

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Chris Noessel is an interaction designer and self-described “nomothete” (ask him directly about that one.) In his day job as a consultant with Cooper, he designs products, services, and strategy for a variety of domains, including health, financial, and software.

His prior experience has seen him developing interactive kiosks and spaces for museums, helping to visualize the future of counter-terrorism, building prototypes of coming technologies for Microsoft, and designing telehealth devices to accommodate the crazy facts of modern health and healthcare.

His spidey sense goes off about random topics, and this has led him to speak at conferences about a wide range of things including interactive narrative, ethnographic user research, interaction design, sex-related interactive technologies, free-range learning, and, most recently, the relationship between science fiction and interface design with co-author Nathan Shedroff.

Chris was one of the founding graduates of the now-passing-into-legend Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy. His graduate thesis was the design of a mobile service for lifelong learners, called Fresh. His academic career has continued as he completed a year as an adjunct professor of interaction design for the graduate design program at the California College of Art.

Chris is regularly published online in the Cooper Journal, and is editor and primary author of “Interaction Design for Visible Wireless”, a Chapter in RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. His next work is most likely to be about generative randomness. He will likely answer questions about it over a drink.

Iain Roberts, a partner at IDEO and co-lead of its Chicago studio and Tasos Karahalios, a project leader and senior design engineer at IDEO join us at UX Week to talk about their collaboration with Ford Motor Company.

Ford and IDEO worked together on two major projects to conceive signature interface elements for all future Ford vehicles launching in 2010. The elements connect drivers with in-car technologies and let them stay connected to their digital lives outside the car. Five key features were reconsidered through extensive research, prototyping, engineering, and robust interaction design, a fast, iterative process that helped to accelerate innovation on Ford’s development end, also. Wanting to induce strong “vehicle love” among new Ford drivers—and deepen their devoted customers’ brand adherence—a team of IDEO and FORD designers and engineers focused on designing an interior information ecosystem that drivers would find attentive, approachable, easy to use, and would allow them to keep in touch with their busy lives.

Don’t Forget the Humans!  This is the mantra in world of healthcare, and over and over again we hear that “patient-centered care” is the perfect desired state.  But what about all those other humans in the system? What about the nurses, pharmacists, doctors, transporters and business people?  Designing and planning your business for just one type of human not only alienates others, but it actually could be the reason for design failure and solutions that don’t sustain the tests of time.

Our group at Kaiser designs for the humans in our system; we optimize the experience of our patients and clinicians so that the system serves them and their needs, and brings as much joy to their interaction that is, well…. as humanly possible.

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Christi Zuber is a nurse with a passion for design. She is the director of the Innovation Consultancy at Kaiser Permanente, a not-for-profit Integrated Delivery System providing healthcare for over 8.5 million people each year. The purpose of the Innovation Consultancy is to develop human-centered designs that positively impact the experience of Kaiser patients and the clinicians who care for them.

Zuber has been with Kaiser Permanente since 2001, in roles that have encompassed finance, strategy, facilities design, and her current position in the Innovation Consultancy which she began to build in 2003. In her innovation and design work, Zuber has partnered with IDEO to learn and internalize a human centered design methodology into Kaiser Permanente.  Zuber and her team have spent thousands of hours of time shadowing, conducting ethnographic observations in clinics, hospitals and patient’s homes, and field testing ideas in the front lines of healthcare. A few of projects developed using this methodology include a nurse shift change initiative, called Nurse Knowledge Exchange (NKE) which IHI named a best practice in healthcare, and a medication administration solution, called KP MedRite, named a good practice by JCAHO. These solutions have been spread across Kaiser’s 32 hospitals and have even been implemented abroad.

Prior to joining Kaiser Permanente, Zuber was a project manager and consultant at Andersen in its health care practice. She led projects that ranged from hospital market assessments in Mexico to reorganizing the model of care delivery for a hospital system in Wisconsin. She also helped develop the foundational services for a future children’s hospital at Saint Francis Hospital in Tulsa, Okla and developed an all-volunteer Spina Bifida clinic to meet the needs of the underserved. Her nursing roots are in home health care.

Zuber has a master’s degree in Health Administration and a Bachelor of Science in Nursing from the University of Oklahoma where she was named “Outstanding Senior” and “Big Woman on Campus” and was also active in the Pi Beta Phi Sorority. She and her husband, Brian, have two beautiful and fast-paced toddlers, Austin and Ava. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area and loves weekend trips to the wine country and the area’s beautiful hiking and kayaking sites.

Christian Crumlish is a writer, information architect, and digital designer.

He is a consumer experience evangelist at AOL, a director of the Information Architecture Institute and co-chair of the monthly BayCHI program.

He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and co-author most recently of Designing Social Interfaces with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, Web 2.0 Expo, PLoP, IDEA, and Web Directions.

Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton. He lives in Oakland with his wife Briggs, his cat Fraidy, and his electric ukulele, Evangeline.

In The Godfather, during Michael Corleone’s nephew’s baptism, shots of the sacrament of baptism performed by the priest are mixed with shots of killings ordered by Michael taking place elsewhere. These murders are thus experienced by the audience as Michael’s “baptism” into a life of crime. This collision of shots is an example of Eisenstein’s theory of montage and provides an analogous model for exploring the relationship of service touchpoints to the space between those touchpoints, and how users experience them both.

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Christian Palino is a design strategist for Adaptive Path. He has broad experience as an interaction designer and art director crafting solutions where service, environment, business, and communications meet to create empathic experiences. Christian is interested in design’s ability to uncover and influence the cultural, social, and psychological implications of emerging technologies and business practices.

Christian is currently engaged in exploring ideas of service design, design abuse, and sustainability in the pursuit of designing uniquely human experiences. Prior to joining Adaptive Path, Christian worked at Microsoft on the redesign of Windows Live Hotmail, helping to integrate calendars and define relationships between private information and social contacts. As an independent consultant based in Italy, he lead design projects across multiple disciplines for clients including Limited Brands, Orange, Henri Bendel, Telecom Italia, Vodafone, Experientia, and Continuum.

Christian received his Masters in interaction design from the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea where he focussed on enabling ‘peripheral’ needs: dispositions, motives, and sympathies outside the mainstream definition of ‘normal’ and ‘desired’ that cannot be addressed simply through user-friendliness. Christian also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic design from Rhode Island School of Design and has taught interaction design and typography courses at IUAV University of Venice, Domus Academy, and the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

A salty cape codder, Christian can also be found stoking kilns, chopping wood in the mountains of Piemonte, and surf casting the tidal flats of the Cape.

TALK: Gamestorming: Design Practices for Co-creation and Engagement
Tuesday, August 24th

We’re moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy, where creativity and innovation will be the keys to value. New rules apply. Yet two hundred years of industrial habits are embedded in our workplaces, our schools and our systems of government. How must we change our work practices to thrive in the 21st Century? Dave Gray will share insights from his upcoming book, Gamestorming: A playbook for innovators, rule-breakers and changemakers (O’Reilly Media).

Dave is also leading a Gamestorming workshop. Head over here for details.
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Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to corporate clients.

He is also a founding member of VizThink, an international community of Visual Thinkers.

Elizabeth Churchill is a Principal Research Scientist and manager of the Internet Experiences group at Yahoo! Research. She previously worked at PARC, the Palo Alto Research Center, and before that at FXPAL, Fuji Xerox’s research lab based in Silicon Valley where she led the Social Computing Group. She has worked on the design of cell phone interfaces, textual and 3d graphical environments, interactive digital posterboards, collaborative work applications and embodied interface agents. She has co-designed several products that have been released in the US and in Japan, has co-edited 5 books, has published within the areas of theoretical and applied psychology, cognitive science, human computer interaction and computer supported cooperative work. Elizabeth has a BSc in Experimental Psychology, an MSc in Knowledge Based Systems, both from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Cambridge. She is the current Vice President of the Association of Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SigCHI).

Erin Malone, Principal at Tangible ux, has over 20 years of experience leading design teams and developing web and software applications, social experiences and system-wide solutions. Prior to Tangible ux, she was at Yahoo! where she led the Platform User Experience Design team and was responsible for building the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and for providing design expertise to the popular YUI (Yahoo! User Interface Library). Additionally, she led the redesign of the Yahoo! Developer Network, oversaw the redesign of Yahoo!’s Registration system, designed cross-network social solutions, developed the ux team’s Intranet and other cross-company initiatives.

Before Yahoo!, she was a Design Director at AOL leading a range of community and personalization initiatives; Creative Director at AltaVista responsible for the AV Live portal and community tools and Chief Information Architect for Zip2 which produced a custom content management system for local city guides, entertainment guides, maps and yellow pages, including New York Today for the NYTimes.

She was the founding editor-in-chief of Boxes and Arrows, a role she served for 5 years. She is the author of several articles on interaction design history and design management and a founding member of the IA Institute. Erin has a BFA in Communication Design from East Carolina University (1986), Greenville NC and an MFA in Information Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1994), Rochester NY.

She is the author of the book Designing Social Interfaces with Christian Crumlish for O’Reilly Media and its related site designingsocialinterfaces.com.

For over two years, designers and engineers at IDEO and Ford Motor Company collaborated closely on a signature HMI experience for the company’s entire Ford and Lincoln 2010 vehicle portfolio that consumers would find simple, attentive, and intuitive. IDEO designers Iain Roberts and Tasos Karahalios will be speaking about the team’s ambitious and ingenious prototyping effort, which included rough-and-ready driving simulators and dashboard interfaces hacked together using a Ford Edge dashboard, touch-sensitive screens, various video game controllers, and the Playstation 2 game “Gran Turismo 3.”

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A partner at IDEO and co-lead of its Chicago studio, Iain Roberts is a self-proclaimed “excellence freak” whose life-long passions for combining technical precision and cutting-edge aesthetics have resulted in award-winning design and strategy work for such diverse industry giants as Ford, AT&T, Kraft, Motorola, and Altec Lansing. In addition to being responsible for leading senior client relationships with Fortune 500 executives, Iain’s desire to push the intersection of digital and physical media has led to recent successful experiments in the field of open-sourced innovation with industry up-and-comers BugLabs. Since 2007, Iain has lectured frequently on the topics of consumer-centered design, design-driven business strategies, ethical consumption, packaging design, and open innovation at universities and business conferences across America.

Before leaving his native England to join IDEO in 2001, Iain was at Dyson, where he was responsible for leading 60+ designers in projects ranging from R & D to concept engineering for the company’s appliance design studio.

Holding an MA in Industrial Design Engineering from the Royal College of Art and a BEng in Aeronautical Engineering from Southampton University, Iain continues to challenge himself mentally and physically through endurance sports, cycling, and hiking.

Jamin Hegeman is an interaction and service designer at Adaptive Path. He has taken quite an adaptive path to get here, from poetry to journalism to editing to web design to a masters degree in design, where his passion for design flourished. He is interested in raising the awareness of design as an approach to addressing highly complex problems and working in multidisciplinary teams to tackle those problems. His work focuses on human-centered service offerings that aim to improve quality of life while also aligning with business goals.

Previously, he was a senior designer at Nokia, where he led efforts to define new services, experiences, and business opportunities for business development, strategic growth areas, and corporate social responsibility. He has produced solutions for mobile, web, netbooks, as well as other networked products in areas such as communications, health care, media, location-based services, commerce, and social interaction.

Jamin enjoys sharing his thoughts on design with others through his blog and engagement with the global design community. He gives talks and conducts workshops on service design, and was a member of the Service Design Network planning board for the 2008 and 2009 conferences, both of which he emceed. He continues to have a strong relationship with and supports the SDN organization and community. In 2007, he directed CMU’s Emergence service design conference. And he organizes Service Design Drinks and Thinks in San Francisco.

He earned a masters in design with a focus on interaction design from Carnegie Mellon University, where he also learned about and practiced service design. He wrote his thesis paper on the thinking behind the design process, and explored combining the virtual and physical to project and prototype aspects of identity for his thesis project. He has a bachelor of arts in English writing, with a concentration in poetry writing, from the University of Pittsburgh.

Design aside, he plays soccer, enjoys good beer, writes poetry, draws, paints, takes care of his betta fish, Kujo, and is in continuous pursuit of the best buttercream frosting.

Jared began his work experience as an interface designer at The Screen House, where he explored communication theory, visual design, and information architecture. He later joined Simmons College as a senior designer working on their website and dynamic publishing applications. Later, while attending Carnegie Mellon University, Jared worked as a design researcher, investigating the independence of individuals diagnosed with congestive heart disease.

In 1994, Jared founded CoffeeKids, a design shop focused on helping small non-profits with their design challenges. Jared is always looking for ways for design to help solve complex social problems, and CoffeeKids allows Jared the chance to offer his design expertise to non-profits.

Jared graduated with a Masters in Design, emphasis on Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, School of Design. He also earned a Bachelors in Design with Honors, emphasis in Visual Communication from Nova Scotia College of Art & Design.

Jared enjoys geeking out in used bookstores and is currently developing his hack skills as an amateur musicologist.

Working as a user interface designer in the games industry presents some unique opportunities to engage players. So why are memorable interfaces a rarity? I will attempt to answer that question, and I’ll offer my perspective on the industry, show some of my work from major titles, and talk about what inspires me.

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Joe Kowalski is a graphic designer and user interface artist who joined Double Fine in 2007. He has received widespread praise for his work on Brutal Legend, notably on the front end shell, with some going so far as to call it “one of the greatest menus in the history of video games.”

Joe worked previously at Harmonix, where he contributed to both Guitar Hero and Rock Band from their early days. Both are now among the gaming industry’s most successful franchises, and have helped to introduce a whole new audience to games.

Joe has a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Turns out that the fundamental principles that led to the success of the web will lead you there, too. Drawing on 15 years of web design and development experience, Jeff will take you on a guided tour of what makes things work on this amazing platform we’re all building together. You’ll learn how to stop selling ice, why web browsers work the way they do, and where Rupert Murdoch can put his business model.

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Jeffrey Veen is a founder of Small Batch, Inc. where he’s leading a team of developers and creating user-centered web products.

Jeffrey was also one of the founding partners of Adaptive Path and project lead for Measure Map, the well-received web analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006, where he managed the user experience group responsible for some of the largest web apps in the world. As a consultant, he has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and and National Public Radio.

Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

In addition to lecturing and writing on Web design and development, Jeffrey has been active with the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS Editorial Review Board as an invited expert on electronic publishing. He was also an original columnist for Webmonkey, the author of the acclaimed books “The Art & Science of Web Design” and “HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites”.

If the internet is more awesome than it was in 1995, Karen would like to claim a very tiny piece of the credit. For more than 15 years Karen has helped create more usable digital products through the power of user experience design and content strategy. Today, as Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science, she develops web strategies and interaction designs for publishers, financial services firms, and healthcare companies.
Prior to starting Bond, Karen helped build the User Experience practice at Razorfish, hired as the very first Information Architect and leaving as the VP and National Lead for UX. Over the decade she spent there, she led projects for dozens of clients, overseeing major redesign initiatives for The New York Times, Condé Nast, Disney, and Citibank.
Karen is also on the faculty of the new MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA in New York, where she teaches Interaction Design History, focusing on the key movements and trends that have shaped the field, and Design Management, which aims to give students the skills they need to run successful projects, teams, and businesses.

Kate Rutter is a senior practitioner at Adaptive Path. As one who actively embraces the term “specialized generalist,” she has spent her ten plus years in the Web industry honing a talent for bringing companies and customers closer together by working to create smart strategies and inventive designs.

Kate’s diverse and intense interests are constantly taking her and her clients to new places. Her background spans technology, marketing, interactive media, and business management. In these fields, Kate has worked in a variety of milieus, from corporations, to start-ups and nonprofit institutions. Her work has helped these organizations grow, change and successfully chart new paths in ambiguous times and shifting markets.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Kate spent several years as a consultant focusing on web strategy and design. Prior to that, she was the Director of Business and Operations for The Crucible, a landmark nonprofit arts organization in the East Bay creative scene. During the bubble, Kate was Senior Director of E-business Development and Operations at Epicentric in San Francisco.

Kate attended Wellesley College, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art. She finds inspiration in a wide variety of subjects, including semiotics, textile arts, origami, code, urban design, fire, and other dangerous things. She is an active community leader as well as a formidable welder.

BJ directs research and design at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab, is the author of Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do, and does consulting work outside of academia and a ton of other really interesting stuff you can read about on his website.

Kevin missed the memo to stop drawing after the first grade. Nowadays, he splits his crayon time between Twitter, where he is the product manager for the web client, and finishing his book “See What I Mean: How to Communicate Ideas With Comics”. Kevin has a history of mixing his many passions for games, comics, design and technology. He was the Director of User Experience for the gaming social network Raptr and the designer for Yahoo! Pipes. He co-founded the user experience web comic OK/Cancel, and the online comic publishing network Off Panel Productions. Through Off Panel, he recently co-created an iPhone augmented reality game called “ARGH”.

He holds a Masters degree from University College London in Human Computer Interaction and Ergonomics and has presented about design, comics and augmented reality at numerous conferences including Interaction, IASummit, User Interface Conference, UXWeek, and South by Southwest. He likes the flavour of the blue crayons the best.

Interview With Adaptive Path’s Kendra Shimmell

An interview with Kevin Cheng about comics, villains, heroes, and design…

Setting: South Park in San Francisco; Kevin doodling as usual…

Why comics?

KS: When did comics become such a big part of your life?

KC: Really, it’s surreal. People often ask me how long I’ve been drawing, but the answer is that I’ve never stopped drawing. For most people it is not about when did they start, but rather, when did they choose to stop. I was drawing a lot of Japanese Manga comics like Dragon Ball when I was a kid. Then I moved to Vancouver and was like, “Finally I can buy those American comics!”

KS: Which artist was your favorite?

KC: I moved to Vancouver (from Hong Kong) during a really crappy era of comics in the early 90’s when brand name artists started to appear like Jim Lee — when they had just spawned image comics. During this time Jim Lee was still working on the new X-Men series.

KS: Again, who takes the title of Kevin’s favorite comic artist?

KC: Probably Jim Lee. Well, there are a lot of awesome artists. The problem with Jim Lee’s work is that it’s all kind of the same. He draws amazing anatomy because I think he was a med school dropout, but other artists like Bill Watterson are much more expressive (creator of Calvin and Hobbes).

KS: Is there anything else that draws you to comics (no pun intended)?

KC: I don’t know if there is anything really deep. I just feel like they are fun to read, so much more fun than reading a thick novel. On top of that, when you are also able to draw them, it’s awesome! I feel inspired by making comics.

What inspires you most?

KS: Speaking of inspiration, as a product manager, designer, and artist how are you able to maintain your creative flow? What inspires you most? I asked you to bring along three artifacts—let’s take a look!

Creative inspiration #1: Fiancé’ Coley (Aw.)

KC: One of them is really cheesy. My fiancé’ Coley is also a designer, but she approaches design different than I do, and it challenges my thinking. I approach things very analytically…

KS: What’s Coley’s approach to design like?

KC: She’s much more creative in a bunch of different areas, and hands-on. I joke that she wears the pants in the family because she can handle a power tool way better than I can—she can fix plumbing. Then on the other hand, she’ll craft an awesome necklace, and jump on the computer and do all the same digital things that I do. From a visual design perspective, I am duotone, and she is much more about throwing in a lot of different colors, which is much harder to resolve, but she’ll make it work. She’ll take on the challenge. She brings a different perspective and approach to the same work. I learn from her.

Creative inspiration #2: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud. Adaptive Path’s Jesse James Garrett has a surprise cameo in this story.

KC: Yeah, so Scott McCloud is kind of like the godfather of comics. If you haven’t read Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art you have to. Any designer should read this because it’s what we do. An interesting story—I was just in Jesse’s office (Jesse James Garrett) and he has a bunch of comics in there. I pointed at this book and asked him, “Why do you have that up?” and Jesse grabs the book and opens it up to a page that talks about how any other comic artist might have drawn this story vs. how Marvel does it. Jesse said something like, “When I read this, it was the first time I was cognizant of somebody else’s process for making choices in how best to present information.” Which was brilliant.

KS: Have you had a similar aha moment that you recall?

KC: Well this book definitely crystallized a lot about comics—about what makes them so engaging and interesting. It’s about communication, it’s not just about comics. We both know that design is fundamentally about communication.

Creative inspiration #3: Games! Kevin gets major geek cred when he shows up with his beta for Ultima Online 8.

KS: What’s your third inspiration artifact?

KC: This is more representative than anything else (and is major geek cred).

KS: Why this?

KC: I draw inspiration most from things that are not specifically design related. I find the best ideas come from drawing on your experiences in other places. For me, games are a big part of that. I actually struggled with what to show you because there really are so many things that inspire me. I dip into lots of books and games. I get into betas a lot, playing for free and experiencing the game while they are building it. So, I get to see the things that they are considering as they are tweaking them. I learn a lot from that.

KS: What are some of the things that you learn from participating in this process?

KC: Engagement. That’s the biggest thing for games. How do you bring someone into a new experience who doesn’t necessarily have any conventions, and how do you keep them coming back? How do you keep them interested? And how do you balance that experience against other people’s (expectations) who are using it too? The social sciences become more and more applicable.

Let’s jump to your UX Week workshop, what’s it all about?

KC: My workshop essentially teaches anybody, whether they have illustration skills or not, why comics are a really effective way of communicating an idea. By the end of the day, anybody can come out of my workshop and generate comics to communicate design requirements, or create a comic for their homepage to communicate the benefits of their product to users.

KS: What about comics make them such an effective tool in the design process?

KC: People read them!

KS: So, you have something against the 80 page report? (laughing)

KC: Well, I am not saying that comics replace requirements and other documentation, but most people don’t need to read the 80 pages. There are some that do, but for most people they just want to know what is this thing that you are building and what does it do for people? So, when people read, that’s the first thing they’re looking for. It all boils down to the power of the comic being concise, of it being expressive, of it being engaging. People can put themselves into that story and relate to it. You can easily share it with other people and get feedback and easily change it.

KS: The idea is to represent a future that doesn’t exist yet, and do it in such away that people engage in that story.

KC: Yes, exactly. Another way that people communicate products’ stories is through video. Creating and editing a video is a lot of effort. So, if you are just trying to get an idea across quickly—sometimes stick figures will do.

Thinking about the design process, characterize the villain. What gets in the way of innovation?

KC: Tunnel vision. Getting stuck in this bubble where you start cycling around internally so much that you forget what you are building for.

Now, characterize the hero of innovation.

KC: Comics put the product in the frames—in the life of the user. It’s not just a persona, which is about a person, but it’s about how the person will use this thing in the context of their life. The hero is context (hell yeah!) The other hero is actually shipping!

As a product manager at Twitter, what comic hero do you most identify with?

KC: Who is that character? So, there’s nothing stops the juggernaut, and nothing moves the blob—neither of which is quite accurate, but what I am trying to convey is…

KS: Um, I have no idea what you are talking about right now (we are both cracking up)…

KC: Don’t worry about it (laughing). I’ll explain. So, someone had congratulated me on my new job (at Twitter) on LinkedIn, but was confused about what I actually do there because my job description says I attend meetings and write emails. That is my job. I am not a designer in my current position. I am not an engineer. I talk well to both groups because of my past and I strongly believe that a good product manager is one who sees ahead and deals with all of the crap so that no one else has to. I am a shield. I am someone like Plastic Man!

Identified: Kevin is Plastic Man!

60 Second Sketch Challenge. Draw a comic that depicts our interview today. Go!

60 Second Sketch Challenge: Kevin accepts the challenge!

Sketch 1: Grabbing some coffee before the interview.

Sketch 2: A depiction of Kevin talking.

Sketch 3: Kevin is still talking, and apparently I have fallen asleep
The caption reads, Coffee was not enough for Kendra.

WORKSHOP: Good Design Faster
Wednesday, August 25th

Leah Buley is an Experience Designer for Adaptive Path. As someone interested in the potential of user experience design to help businesses make better decisions, she is dedicated to making this a reality within her own projects as well as for her clients. Leah has worked with organizations in a variety of industries, including financial, legal, telecom, and non-profit.

Before joining Adaptive Path, Leah was a user interface designer for Barclays Global Investors where she designed transactional financial systems, client-facing web sites, end-investor tools, and internal applications. It was here that Leah also championed firm-wide education and better integration of user experience design into the project lifecycle. Before Barclays Global Investors, Leah worked for New York-based interactive agencies Flat and Plural, as well as BMC, an information services company in Los Angeles. Leah started her career in design as an opinionated web developer.

Leah has a Master of Arts degree in Library and Information Science from San Jose State University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in American Studies from Barnard College. She is a member of both the American Society for Information Science and Technology, as well as the Information Architecture Institute.

Les Nelson is a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center working on innovations of socio-technical systems. His work considers how existing technologies get adapted to meet changing social practices. Les joined PARC in 2004, studying and innovating information sharing practices and collaboration support tools used in system engineering, sensemaking, and usable computer security. Les’ involvement with Xerox goes back to 1995, where he was the first researcher hired into the FX Palo Alto Laboratory. His research in human-computer interaction has lead to 2 products, 20 patents, and many prototypes and publications in social computing, mobile computing, and tangible computing. Before Xerox, Les worked for Lockheed Corporation on research, development. and technology transfer in software engineering; and he started a software engineer for IBM. Les received an undergraduate degree in Mathematics and Computing from Trinity College, Hartford, CT, and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

For many years, Fantasy user interfaces (FUI) in film and television have drawn both acclaim and ridicule in equal measure. Credited with pushing boundaries about what is possible and dumbing down and misrepresenting a complex field of work and setting false expectations in the eyes of users. What is the truth?

In this presentation, Mark Coleran will examine why FUI looks the way it does, how it has evolved and the unique challenges and requirements that shape this unusual area of UI work.

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Mark Coleran is a visual designer whose work crosses over into a wide range of industries from film & television through to software development. Having originally come from a print background as a Graphic Designer, Mark has been designing and producing motion graphics for the film and television industries for the past 13 years. His clients and jobs have been as diverse as the BBC to Cartoon Network, creating titles and network identities, to the creation of computer screen graphics for feature films such as The Bourne Ultimatum, Deja Vu, The Island, Children of Men and Mission Impossible 3 amongst others. He has also worked in software, most recently with Canadian Developer, Gridiron Software developing a new generation of workflow tools for creatives in the application, Flow.

KEYNOTE: Mediated Culture
Friday, August 27th

It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press and a few hundred again before the telegraph. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. A Flickr here,  a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges. New types of conversation, argumentation, and collaboration are realized. Using examples from anthropological fieldwork in Papua New Guinea, YouTube, university classrooms, and “the future,” this presentation will demonstrate the profound yet often unnoticed ways in which media “mediate” our culture.

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Dubbed “the explainer” by Wired magazine, Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. After two years studying the implications 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 culture, technology, education, and information have been viewed by millions, translated in over 15 languages, and are frequently featured at international film festivals and major academic conferences worldwide. Wesch has won several major awards for his work, including a Wired Magazine Rave Award, the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in Media Ecology, and he was recently named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic. He has also won several teaching awards, including the 2008 CASE/Carnegie U.S. Professor of the Year for Doctoral and Research.

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Nathan Shedroff is the chair of the ground-breaking MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA. This program melds the unique principles that design offers business strategy with a vision of the future of business as sustainable, meaningful, and truly innovative—as well as profitable. www.designmba.org

He is one of the pioneers in Experience Design, an approach to design that encompasses multiple senses and requirements and explores common characteristics in all media that make experiences successful, as well as related fields, Interaction Design and Information Design. He speaks and teaches internationally and has written extensively on design and business issues, including, Experience Design 1 and maintains a website with resources on Experience Design at www.nathan.com/ed He’s a serial entrepreneur, works in several media, and consults strategically for companies to build better, more meaningful experiences for their customers.

His three new books in 2009 include, Design is the Problem, about sustainable design; Experience Design 1.1, an update to his 2001 book; and Experience Design 1 Cards, a design tool based on his book that helps designers create more meaningful experiences.

His 2006 book, Making Meaning, co-written with two members of Cheskin, a Silicon Valley-based strategy consultancy, explores how companies can specifically create products and services to evoke meaning in their audiences and customers. www.makingmeaning.org

In 2006, Nathan earned a Masters in Business Administration at Presidio School of Management in San Francisco, CA, the only accredited MBA program in the USA specializing in Sustainable Business.

Nathan earned a BS in Industrial Design, with an emphasis on Automobile Design from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. However, fear of Detroit, coupled with a passion for information design led Nathan into this arena, where he worked with Richard Saul Wurman at TheUnderstandingBusiness. Later, he co-founded vivid studios, a decade-old pioneering company in interactive media and one of the first Web services firms on the planet. vivid’s hallmark was helping to establish and validate the field of information architecture, by training an entire generation of designers in the newly emerging Web industry.

Nathan was nominated for a Chrysler Innovation in Design Award in 1994 and 1999 and a National Design Award in 2001.

Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President of XEODesign, Inc., has twenty years of expertise in Player Experience Design (PXD) for mass-market entertainment products. Voted by Gamasutra as one of the Top 20 women working in video games, and cited by Wired, Fast Company, CNET, ABC News, The Hollywood Reporter, and Red Herring, her clients include Sony, EA, Ubisoft, Sega, PlayFirst, The Cartoon Network, Disney, Lucas Arts, Nickelodeon, LeapFrog, Mattel, Monolith, Xfire, D.I.C.E, Leap Frog, Ugobe, The Learning Company, Broderbund, Roxio, Cisco, Go Pets, Sierra Online, and Maxis. She has an undergraduate degree in Psychology from Stanford University where she also studied film making and computer programming.

Since founding XEODesign in 1992 Nicole’s design and research has improved over 40 million player experiences, including several popular franchises for casual audiences such as three of the Myst Series, Diner Dash, GoPets, Cosmopolitan Virtual Makeover, Mavis Beacon teaches Typing, Jeopardy Online, as well as creativity coaching for the designers of The Sims.

Nicole was the first person to use facial expressions to measure player experiences. Through this research which she published in 2004 she discovered that people’s favorite player experiences (PX) craft emotion by offering choices in four play styles: the Hard Fun from challenge and mastery, Easy Fun from exploration and role play, Serious Fun for relaxation and real work, and People Fun from the excuse to hang out with friends. XEODesign’s PX model on emotion and games called the 4 Fun Keys inspires a wide range of creative approaches for crafting more emotions from play. With the 4 Fun Keys developers access player’s emotional response to innovate early in the development cycle where there is much less risk.

Throughout her career, Paula has pursued her interest in the situative and psychosocial nature of how people interact with artifacts and environments. She advocates that great experiences require thinking strategically about the ecological systems formed by people, organizations, markets, and stakeholders and delivering products and services that evolve these systems in positive ways.

Past employers and clients include Human Code, Sapient, projekt202, Stanford University, WOWIO, Hasbro Interactive, IC2 Institute, Texas Workforce Commission, Dell, Citibank, Teachscape, Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Spark Media, Thomson West, Microsoft.

Paula received her Masters of Art in Learning, Design & Technology from Stanford University and her Bachelors of Design in Electronic Communication Design from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. She is a ukulele player in training and a strong advocate for Snap Circuits.

Peter Merholz is president and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path’s ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.

Peter’s work at Adaptive Path began with a focus on information architecture. Over time, he expanded his areas of expertise to include product strategy, user research and practice development, and in turn added these to the repertoire of services offered by Adaptive Path. Peter has worked with a wide variety of clients, from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups. Some of Peter’s past clients include Hallmark, Intel, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, and Vanguard Financial.

Internationally recognized as a thought leader on user experience, Peter’s blogs and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. Peter’s thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term “blog” in 1999 when it was a nascent genre. He is also the co-author of Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World.

TALK: The Mag+ Concept: The Silent Mode of Digital Magazine Reading
Friday, August 27th

Sara Öhrvall is Senior Vice President, Research & Development, the Bonnier Group. She is responsible for the digital magazine project within Bonnier and was behind the Mag+ concept launched in December 2009.

Sara has previously worked at Volvo Cars, where she was responsible for concept development of  jeep hybrids, sports and eco cars. Other experiences include Managing Director and partner of brand agency Differ and founder of the innovation-focused consulting firm Ninety.

Sara has worked in Tokyo, London, Singapore and Brussels and has an MBA from Umeå Business School in Sweden. She has also studied architecture and design at Parsons School of Design in New York.

Suzanne Ginsburg is a user experience consultant based in San Francisco, California, and the author of Designing the iPhone User Experience. She works with many different kinds of organizations, from established technology companies to small iPhone start-ups. Suzanne also maintains a UX blog, iPhone UX Reviews where she reviews iPhone and iPad apps and provides advice on app design.

One of her favorite aspects of user experience design is exploratory user research that helps uncovers users’ unmet needs and inspires innovation.  She has conducted exploratory research for online communities, home networking software, and several iPhone apps.  Sketching and prototyping also play a big role in her design process.  Suzanne is constantly exploring new approaches and evolving her prototyping tool kit.

Suzanne has a Masters Degree in User Interface Design from UC Berkeley’s iSchool and an undergraduate degree in Business Management from Cornell University. You can learn more about Suzanne at Ginsburg Design her company web site.

For over two years, designers and engineers at IDEO and Ford Motor Company collaborated closely on a signature HMI experience for the company’s entire Ford and Lincoln 2010 vehicle portfolio that consumers would find simple, attentive, and intuitive. IDEO designers Iain Roberts and Tasos Karahalios will be speaking about the team’s ambitious and ingenious prototyping effort, which included rough-and-ready driving simulators and dashboard interfaces hacked together using a Ford Edge dashboard, touch-sensitive screens, various video game controllers, and the Playstation 2 game “Gran Turismo 3.”

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Tasos Karahalios joined IDEO in November 2000. He works across offices as both a project leader and senior design engineer on a wide range of projects within the Health and Wellness and the Consumer Experience Design practices. One of his current roles involves engaging specific clients to develop longer term strategic relationships aimed at changing their internal development processes.

His recent projects have resulted in designing numerous physical products including desktop videophones, DNA diagnostic equipment, and surgical handpieces, as well as defining new business models and service experiences for industries ranging from the automotive to the world of stem cell processing. Prior to joining IDEO, Tasos worked at FRABA AG in Germany, where he designed electromechanical safety systems, and at Technics Inc., where he worked on designing new PCB assembly and manufacturing systems. In addition to his work, Tasos has been actively contributing to local engineering organizations as well as supporting the creation of a non-profit organization aimed at increasing access to clean drinking water across the world.

Tasos holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering and a BS in Economics, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with continued education in engineering management at Northwestern University.

Traditionally, magazine designers and editors have been well-equipped to create compelling experiences in print, but highly crafted digital formats have proven more elusive. With the arrival of the iPad, Condé Nast’s WIRED—in partnership with Adobe—is leading an industry-wide revolution in how people experience and consume magazines. Join Wyatt Mitchell, Design Director of WIRED as he walks through the behind-the-scenes process for the creation of a new digital version of WIRED.

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Wyatt Mitchell is the Design Director at Wired magazine. He joined the Wired editorial art department in 2007, bringing a broad range of magazine experience. Previously, Mitchell has held titles at VIBE, Esquire, Details and O, The Oprah Magazine. He has received over 30 national design and editorial awards from groups such as the Society of Publication Designers, Print magazine and Communication Arts. In his spare time he practices to become the oldest important jazz pianist.

Dave Gray, Founder and Chairman of XPLANE and co-author of the forthcoming book, Knowledge Games: The Visual Thinking Playbook, will also rock our world with a workshop that shows us how to apply game thinking to our design challenges.

Jeffrey Veen, one of Adaptive Path’s founding fathers and most recently, co-founder of the very cool Typekit, a subscription-based service for linking to high-quality Open Type fonts from some of the worlds best type foundries, will give a talk on something awesome, because that’s how he rolls.

Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President of XEODesign, Inc., is the world renowned expert on emotions and the fun of games and how to apply game design techniques to create more engaging products, services and games. She’ll lead a workshop for anyone who wants to understand how to use fun and emotion in the design of experience.

Leah Buley and Julia Houck-Whitacker, both of Adaptive Path will be leading returning workshops, Good Design Faster and  Design is Made of People, respectively.

Watch here for more updates as we fill out the line up.

Andrew Crow | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

The 5 Minute History of User Experience

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Jeffrey Veen | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

5 Minutes on Imitation in Design

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Alexa Andrzejewski | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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Natasha Sakina Alani & Brian Cronin (Mobile Literacy) | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Mobile Literacy: Designing Mobile Technology for Emerging Markets
How do you use a mobile phone if you’ve never learned how to read or write? How do you use a mobile phone if it’s one of the first pieces of technology you’ve ever interacted with? In late 2008, Adaptive Path went to rural India to investigate the impact of mobile technology. Based on our research findings, we created concepts that depict a product and service to meet pressing needs of people in these areas. During this session, Brian Cronin and Natasha Alani will share the process Adaptive Path used to gather information about how people currently use mobile phones in rural India. They’ll also share the design criteria we believe are important, for designing mobile phones for people in rural areas of emerging markets, and the Steampunk Phone and Mobilglyph design concepts that show how a product and service, designed for the needs of people in rural areas of emerging markets, could significantly impact people’s information sharing and use of mobile phones.

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Scott Snibbe | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Social Immersive Media
Based on twelve years’ experience developing interactive camera/projector systems for museums, entertainment, branding and retail, Snibbe will discuss a distinct form of augmented reality focused on social interaction: social immersive media. His work builds on the language of cinema, casting users as actors within simulated narrative models. He will discuss design principles and interaction techniques to create strong emotional responses and social engagement through visceral interaction. He will also describe approaches to clearly communicate branding, cultural and scientific ideas through the medium, how to promote specific distinct social behaviors in users, and how to connect immersive experiences to online social networks.

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John Peterson | UX Week 2009 | Adaptive Path from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

Public Space: Prototyping and Pro-active Design
Architects and designers of the built environment are primarily service providers. This means that we mostly wait for the phone to ring with a client’s preconceived project agenda. Public Architecture works outside of this model by acting as both problem-solver and problem-identifier. In many of these cases no conventional client exists. Additionally, the design process of public spaces has historically involved only a handful of participants. The needs of most of the users are simply imagined by designers. Through the use of prototyping methods (nearly unheard of in land use development) new ways of actively engaging the user’s experience and needs become possible.

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