Author: Ken

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 3:30PM

Abstract:
The all-knowledgable webmaster is long gone, replaced by groups of specialists. When they work well together awesome things happen. When they don’t the results are ugly, insecure, inaccessible and slow, assuming they launch at all. What’s the magic that great teams have in common, and what can we learn from them?

Paul Hammond - Flickr
Simon Willison
George Oates - Lead Designer, Flickr
Matt Biddulph - CTO, Dopplr
Dave Shea - mezzoblue.com

Django framework came out of needing to create site quickly. Reminds me of “Speaking of Faith”

There are more than 2.3 billion photos on flickr now.

Designers find themselves to spend more time defending decisions because it is more difficult to layout empirically.

Developers may know what is possible more. Working prototypes may bridge the gap.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 2:00PM

Abstract:
Is it a game or is it real life? When you get right down to it, is there really a difference? Learn about the growing popularity of ARGs from one of the most innovative minds in this industry. Jane McGonigal explains what it is like to be a puppet-master of this exciting new genre.

Jane McGonigal - Creative Dir, Avant Game

[Her slides can be found here.] [Her blog for Avant Game.]

ARG - alternate reality game
Goal: Make the real world more like games. We need the real-world to have better design.

Game designer’s perspective on the future of happiness

Positive psychology - a look at our brains not as something that malfunctions. It looks at the well-functioning brain - what makes us happy and satisfied.

[References: Laynard and Gilbert.] What they are discovering resonates with game design.

[Reference (opposing POV): Wilson, Against Happiness.]

This is not about warm, fuzzy happy, but capturing the best human experience.

Is what we are doing as persons who work with interaction also in the happiness business? We need to start thinking that our primary goal is optimizing happiness.

Her 2013 projection:

• Quality of life becomes the primary impact for measuring services.
• Positive psychology is a principle influence in this.
• Communities form around these visions of a life worth living.
• Value will be defined aas a measuralbe increase in happiness or well-being - the new capital.

Happiness is not a warm puppy or warm fuzziness. The concept is changing and includes:

1. satisfying work to do
2. being good at something
3. time spent with people we like
4. being part of something bigger

These points match precisely with the goals of games. Multiplayer games are the “ultimate happiness engine”.

Signals of the change: “I am not good at life” is an excerpt of graffiti she sees on the way to work each day. Being good at things in life is tough for some people. In a game mileu, one can walk into a huge collaborative environment where there are supportive humans and game-based rewards.

• Games come with better instructions.
• They come with better feedback to help us grow.
• Better community - even in competition there is collaboration that comes from a mutual buy-in to the virtual ruleset.

We are seeing global mass exodus towards virtual worlds.
[Reference : Castranova] It makes sense that people spend more time in game worlds because they are given better opportunities to succeed. This makes it a rational decision. The average MMO player spends 16 hours/week in the game. Yes, this can be exploited by entrpeneurs, but we are talking about taking what the game worlds have and making it in the real world. for many gamers the perceived quality of life is better in-game - virtuality is beating reality. What would the world be like if people felt good at real life?

Bad news
Games in 2008 - it is like we invented the written word and just made books - only books - and missed all the other media.

Some cool ARG examples:

• Chore Wars - get experience for home work
• zyked - treat exercise like an MMO
• serios - Virtual currency for getting things done in a company. Reveals relationships that are usually difficult to see.
• Citizen Logistics - What if life were like a game to help others. It knows where you are via GPS.

In order to imagine the future, it is good to look back twice as far as you want to look forward.
Example: soap kills germs article from 1931 - why not “Games kill alienation/depression/boredom”

Alternate reality comes from science fiction. It is not “alternative” or an escape. It is an another way of experiencing existence.
Example game: World Without Oil (WWO)

How are ARG amplifying happiness skills? Here are some gamespeak measures of these skills:

• mobbability - collaborate and coordinate massively large
• cooperation radar - knowing people’s strengths
• influency - the ability to adapt your persuasive strategies in different environments and with different communities
• ping quotient - your ability to reach out to people on a network and you are responsive; easily engaged
• multi-capitalism - knowing what capital is important to a given culture or group; bartering skills
• protovation - rapid, fearless innovation that damns failure to being a learning moment that is fun.
• open authorship - comfort with giving content away and knowing it will be changed. making something that is enhanced by others and not broken.
• signal/noise management - ability to handle so much noise and pick the salient signal.
• longbroading - abilirty to tink at a high level see everything
• emergisight - see patterns emerging and forsee their implications

These amplify our tendency toward the optimum human experience. How can interactive systems encourage these 10 superpowers?

Fertile ARG environs:

• Twitter is a great example
• Nike iPod
• Plane communication - onboard interfaces for games and communication.
• Hightech dog collars - (conceptual idea) MMO where your avatar is your your dog
• my car is a video game - Prius owner turns saving energy into a game
• Trackstick
• Neurosky transmitter

Lost Ring:

• ARG for the 2008 Olympic Games in Bejing (http://www.thelostring.com/)
• Goal: You can discover a lost sport that has not been played for thousands of years

Takeaway:

1. Soon enough, we will all be in the happiness business.
2. Game designers have a huge head start. Look at games.
3. ARs signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for a real quality of life.

Some of the questions:

• The military messes with this. They use gaming as a layer of abstraction that desensitizes soldiers to reality/human life.
• There is a problem in that some people opt out of reality. That is all the more reason to make reality options that emulate happiness goals found in games.

Other examples she has been involved in:

• Ministry of Reshelving
• Tombstone Hold’em
• X2 project ARG for scientists

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 11:30AM

Abstract:
Universities have played an historic role in developing innovative uses of technology. Most of the advances in the new social web have emerged elsewhere. This conversation will focus on work by various universities to explore how social media and UX techniques are being used on campus.

Three take-aways will be:
* How to rethink social media and UX for the academic setting
* How to get universities to open up to these new ideas
* See what great things are being done at other universities

Samuel Felder - Sr Designer, University of Southern California

We are here because we also view our inspiration and competition coming from outside our sister institutions - from the private sector.

The tension is where to put the web group - in the central IT group or in Marketing/Communications.

Moderator: sharing group formed - sharing patterns, snippets and centralized ideas. Calendaring, for example, moved to agile web apps - a web services model. This focused upon using small solutions/tool and not huge purchased solutions. This freed development.

Other universities have a stronger branding institution-wide - templates.

Check out the University of Chicago’s new redesign as it is a result of user testing. the entire process started about 2.5 year ago. This is for the entire university.

It seems many places have differing web groups vying for tech and/or branding leadership. How many get a mandate from on high?

Biggest backlash comes from people who are told that the mian pages are not primarily for them. This can be alleviated by creating role-based sub-pages (e.g., researchers, alumni, etc.).

The idea is to build something that is easy enough and useful enough that people who do not need to use central services *want* to use central services.

RSS is a wonderful element from which to build all kinds of interfaces.

Check out the MIT admissions site: 8-12 students blogging about what it is like to be at MIT.

??http://web.lesley.edu/default.asp

University of Kansas and the gators have good branding policies.

Cool idea: Building a pretty output for a Subversion repository to handle those things that are, basically, versioned documents (e.g., the catalog). USC is working on this.

Identity management with Shibboleth for single sign-on for Internet2.

The role of the web council is key.

Tuesday, 11 March 2008 - 10:00AM

Abstract:
The iPhone may be the most disruptive technology of this decade. The countless ubiquitous computing tools available to User Experience professionals mean convenience and usability headaches. With boundaries blurring between web and mobile, how will the UX discipline change? This panel explores challenges for designing Rich Internet Applications for multiple devices.

Kyle Outlaw Sr Information Architect, Avenue A | Razorfish
Kate Ryan (Moderator) - Sr Content Strategist, Ten Digital
Scott Jenson - Google
Karen Kaushansky - Sr UX Engineer, Tellme
Loic Maestracci - Dir of Mktg, Groove Mobile

The iPhone represents about 200+ patent filings and 150 million in development.

Kaushansky:
Goal is “voice in” direct to data out.
“mobile” is not a descriptive enough word for the multiplle contexts the user could be using the device within.

Jensen:
His job thus far has ben to make Google work on crap browsers.
The iPhone, with its full browser support, has changed the playing field.

Outlaw:
site: designblog?
The iPHone will be extremely disruptive within the tech and UX.
Sees his business becoming part agency - part lab
smartpox.com - app that creates 2D bar codes to be read by phones
FoodNinja - app to find restaurants developed for the iPhone.

iPhone loves and dislikes:
- Pro: Scrolling really worked with a finger - not as an afterthought.
- Con: The iPhone does not yet do the simple task of being a phone or SMS.
- Pro: Audacity of the design: no menus or scrollbars. Sim that is configured for unlimited data.
- Con: Apple is perpetuating the myth that this is the web.
- Pro: visual voicemail
- Con: Why does it take 5 clicks to make a phone call
- Pro: Simplicity
- Con: perhaps the combo of software and hardware will be its undoing

Jensen: There is always a tendency with any new tech to try to do the same things we did yesterday with it. With the iPhone the innovation will come from left field.

Outlaw: iPhone stripped the device down to its four core features and did them in a satisfying way.

Possible contenders:
the Sidekick - nice keyboard
PSP Slim
Skype (with 3 in the UK)

Jensen: SMS app is poor, but this is a product of Apple designers saying no until it hurt perhaps.

Open Access:
Examples: Google Android or the iPhone SDK
Carriers control the distribution channel and this slows down development

Outlaw: Going into these areas where standards are thin, developers will need newer ways - Agile.

Jensen: Currently, the iPhone is considered a consumer of information, but as battery life and bandwidth improve they will become producers of information.

Outlaw: Phone will cease to be a specialization and succumb to the collision of phone/web/pc. The channels will mix (VOIP calls from a website).

Killer app predictions:
- Luggage search application
- Using the phone to mediate my data in the cloud
- Infinite battery and bandwidth

http://lifeaftertheiphone.ning.com/

Monday, 10 March 2008 - 5:00PM

Abstract:
Recent federal court rulings in National Federation of the Blind v. Target have dramatically expanded the scope and application of U.S. disability law to business web sites that used to fall outsides the law’s reach. This panel will explain address the legal changes arising from that case:

• who’s now covered by the law
• the potential consequences of ignoring the law and disabled users
• what kind of compliance the law requires

This panel will also cover a number of simple, concrete tips you can take to make sure the business web site you develop can accommodate your users’ needs.

Anitra Pavka - anitrapavka.com
Michael Wasylik - Attorney, Ricardo & Wasylik PL.

Why worry about accessibility?
Standard arguments to begin with…
- Target case: 8 highly paid lawyers vs. good web designers - not even a contest.

Audience:
- Worldwide, those with disabilities is about 10% (650 million)
- world’s largest minority
US:
- 10 million visual impairments

Section 508 (Rehab Act of 1974) - for government and government services

Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990
- Title III applies to private business and requires “public accommodations”
- Although it does not apply to web sites explicitly, web sites are increasingly becoming public accommodations. However, ADA references a physical space.

In 2002, Southwest Airlines won a case vs. Access Now, Inc. ruling that the ADA did not apply to their web site.

Rendon v. Valleycrest Prod. Ltd.
Telephone access to the gameshow, Who Wants to be Millionaire was considered a place of acc and telephone service was a service

The Target case would not apply to Amazon or 37Signals since they have no brick and mortar stores.

Monday, 10 March 2008 - 3:30PM

Abstract:
This presentation will cover tips, techniques, best practices, and gotchas for designers working with XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript in multiple languages. Special attention will be given to right-to-left and bidirectional content. XHTML + CSS + JS + UTF8 + LTR + RTL = client-side i18n fun

Jon Wiley - User Experience Designer, Google

Google is localized into 117 languages.

Does internationalization = translation? No.

It is enabling your product for localisation. Adaptation of product’s cultural content (including language).

globalization: carries too much baggage to be precise in this context.

translaiton is not transliteration.

Localization is more than translation
- local content
- legal compliance
- marketing is culturally dependent
- keyboards
- currency formats
- date formats
- cultural appropriateness

This session will not focus on those - only markup.

Character encoding
- In the beginning, there was ASCII and it was limited to our character set.
- Unicode attempts to bring all language character set together.
- UTF-8 is what we want to use (vs. UTF-16 or UTF 32) because it is backwards compatible with ASCII. ASCII is a subset of UTF-8

Since there are thousands of Unicode characters then no font has all of them. Test everything.

Possible to present a mix of scripts at one time.

Another advantage of UTF-8 is that it is smaller than UTF-16 except for CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) languages.

No need to use character escapes since special characters are just in UTF except…
reserved chars: > < &
hard to see characters  

Telling the browser what to do in the content-type, meta or css. Priority is given to the meta.

Specifying a languages
You really want to serve in the right language since they need to know how to pronounce the words.
Speciifying a lang does NOTHING to specify encoding and direction.
<html lang="en" xml:lang="en"...
Again, meta and repsonse header can be used, but the html header is best.

Direction:
LTR = left to right text
RTL = right to left
bidi = bidirectional (e.g., Hebrew and English in the same document)

Logical order in the source

visual hebrew: literally coded bacwards

Scripts have a default direction and need not be specified
markup is LTR, numbers are always LTR
spaces and punctuation are inherently directionally neutral and they inherit the surrounding script. exception: pucntuation inbetween two scripts and then it defaults to document spec. This can be handled in markup

Avoid changing direction in CSS because direction is not primarily a layout aspect.

Text expansion
English is a compact language. Small words form English can expand easily to 200%-300% in other languages. This hits the hardest in nav tabs and areas designed to be snug.
Use 40% for a rule of thumb.
Some languages eliminate spaces (e.g., German) and this causes wordwrap issues
Some scripts have wider or taller characters.

Whatch out for abbreviations
they are not as common in other languages

Tools
Google translation service (translate.google.com) can be used for machine checks for text expansion. Do not use this for production because you will get crap.
CSS Janus - script for flipping CSS-based layouts. Table-based layouts do not have this problem. However, this is more difficult in CSS. http://cssjanus.commoner.com/

Javascript
Embedded text will render as written regardless of of direction.

IE actually flips the scrollbar to the other side. FF does not.

There needs to be a bidi acid test.

Monday, 10 March 2008 - 11:30AM

Abstract:
Social websites are funny places. What stories do you tell over drinks with friends? About the time when someone accidently uploaded the *wrong* folder of pictures to your site? Or the time you had to manage a full-scale user revolt? Several creators and users of such sites will share five-minute stories of funny bugs, features with unintended consequences, and crazy customer emails. This panel will help you understand about first, second & third order effects when designing such social sites. How nothing goes exactly as planned. You will learn about the importance of being agile and responsive to users when things go wrong. This panel will be a chance to learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making the same ones!

Rashmi Sinha - SlideShare
Guy Kawasaki (Moderator) - Garage Technology Ventures
and many more.

While interesting, this consisted of stories of quirky stories about social media sites. I tried to take some notes, but, well, it just does not matter. I liked it.

Best thought: Users see your site as a playground - give them play equipment. Complex use cases will kill it.

Monday, 10 March 2008 - 10:00AM

Abstract:
Who are you? Who cares? With proper self-branding, not only will you find out who you are, you will make the RIGHT people care, opening up a slew of the RIGHT opportunities specifically tailored for you. This session will define branding (it’s not just the logo), talk about the top five things to focus on your brand, and show examples of brands that work — and some that don’t, plus what they could do to improve. Most importantly, this session will help translate that information to your own personal brand. While this session will focus on a freelance or studio perspective, the ideas presented should be portable to any type of professional setting. Maximize marketing potential and get the type of work and respect you deserve.

Lea Alcantara - Owner & Hired Gun, Lealea Design

How to make your personal brand a success.

[No notes. I was there, but this session was a mistake for me. It does not apply to much I am interested in - mostly about branding oneself.]

Sunday, 9 March 2008 - 5:00PM

Abstract:
As new mobile phones appear in the market with the ability to deliver rich and compelling content there is an incredible opportunity to develop for this new medium. However early forays into mobile content and applications were missing many of the key ingredients necessary for success. As a result content and applications for mobile phones are often perceived as simple hand-me-downs from the desktop. John SanGiovanni, Co-Founder of Zumobi, a new mobile platform for delivering rich content via mobile phones, will both debunk the myth that creating content for mobile phones is a limiting proposition and host a open discussion on the critical ingredients necessary to light up devices with your content (and make money doing it).

John SanGiovanni - VP of Prod & Svcs, Zumobi

[This was a small group in a noisy room around a table. I took notes on paper and I will post them when I get around to it.]

Sunday, 9 March 2008 - 3:30PM

“Better than chocolate, better than sex.” Even if nobody really MEANS it, what would it take to craft experiences our users would describe like that? In this new follow-up to creating passionate users, we’ll look at tools that can help take us there (including some fun science). We’ll cover some new, some retro, and some counter-intuitive techniques to take Cognitive Seduction to the next level. Best of all, we can do a whole lot of user wooing without having to change our product.

Kathy Sierra - Creating Passionate Users

What would you like to be really good at, but are not?

Likewise, how do we help our users kick ass at something?

In reviews, would you rather have users talk about the product kicking ass or the company kicking ass? Neither. Correct answer: You should have the users saying, “I kick ass.”

How do we reverse engineer passions so the the user has a hi-res user experience. Allowing the user to feel getting better and better at something?

Big news in neuroscience: neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.

Difference between fantastic and average: It is much less about natural talent and more about practicing - focusing on repetition. (Reference: article from SciAm)

Richard Restak: “We need a rage to master”

Users don’t care about your tool - just what they can do with it.

Book reference: Four-hour Work Week

1) Use Telepathy
Monkey’s brain fired sympathetically based upon the actions of the researcher - mirror neurons. You are not thinking what the other person is thinking - only simulating the activity. But the simulation resolution depends upon YOU. Motor neurons fire based upon the observer’s experience. If I have more experience of the watched activities then my simulation is more hi-res. For visualization, the way you visualize is important - the POV needs to be first person.

2) Serendipity
Our brains are pattern matchers. We are wired to see patterns. We need to bulid in randomness to create serendipity.

3) the Dog-Ears design principle
Example: the real-world physics of the iPhone - the bounce at the end of a scroll. it is about how things move. think about real physics

4) Create Joy
Think about joy. It is crucial to the user’s brain. Playfulness. (Lookup: Amy Jo Kim and Liz Danzico)

5) Inspire First-person Language
What can I do to inspire users to talk about themselves instead of the company or product. for example, Amazon reviews have a lot of “I”.

6) T-shirt First Development
What does it say that someone is one of your users (wearing your t-shirt) and they announce it to the world. What is it saying about them.

7) Easter eggs
User’s like them. Book: A Smile in the Mind

Tools for Evangelism
Get users to woo other users. Give them a means to do it. If they are passionate they just need a means. (See Twitter in plain English by CommonCraft). Gve people a way to explain what may be considered a waste of time.

9) You are a…
(activity: look someone in the eyes) Via evolution, this freaks us out becuase there is a predator reaction from staring. The fear of speaking to/facing others causes stress and it will inhibit thoughtfulness. Managing stress allows users to engage by managing fight or flight.
products to check out: Stresseraser and

10) Exercise the Brain
Example: Brain Age. the exercise that best helps your brain performance is real physical exercise. Optimizing your body for mental focus.
Help improve their body

11) Give them superpowers quickly
example: Electric Rain (user must do something cool within 30 minutes”)

12) ???
Expert really do know more. Example: Chess masters have the ability to pull from a massive number of patterns recognized from an actual game
Learn to do knowlege acquisition and representation
Bruce wilcox
paterns, paterns o best practices

14) Make your product reflect feeling
Tey to imagine how they are feeling - confused

15) Help reinvestment of mental resources into new problems
siggy magnuson
non-experts vs. experts ???
did not grok this one
Help users focus upon what is salient for the acquisition of expertise. Attention offsets: acknoledge that a fun thing is not the primary focus.

16) Create a culture of support
Recreate the hero’s journy for the user so they can become mentors for new users. Make them into a mentor long before they are experts. No dumb questions. No dumb ansswers either. this will encourage people to support one another. teach them how to ask and answer.

17) Do NOT insist on “inclusivity”
Example: jargon is good. passionate users toak differently. You may want to separate the new and expert users, but don’t for

18) Produce Seductive Opacity
mystery - Anticipation - curiousity
diane ackerman from deep play quote.
the digital world has raised the value of the tangible - the package. Example: the smile on the Amazon package. Unboxing as porn.

19) Atoms are not old-skool afterall
example Etsy and Make. digital products are not appealing to our physical senses. that is why networked, tangible devices are so popular. Petted rabits had lower choloesterol
Chumby

19.5) Special guest: Gary - the wine guy
His site encompasses all of what she is talking about.
(briansolace.com)

20) She never mentioned a number 20, but I felt obligated to have one.