Insights and Strategies from InfoCamp 2009
Table of Contents
- InfoCamp 2009
- Schedule
- Keynote by Axel Roseler
- Session 1: User Experience 101 (Quentin Christensen)
- Session 2: Web Optimization UCD & Kittens (Jason Carmel)
- Introduction to Breakout Sessions
- Session 3: Integrating UX and Agile/SCRUM (Daniel Jaeger)
- Session 4: Top Down UX: Holistic User Experience (Nick Finck)
- Session 5: Death to Static Wireforms Panel (Matt Turpin, Kevin Nick, Kris Bell, Aaron Louie, Beverly Slabosky, Andrew Otwell)
- Session 6: What is Information Management, "MSIM"
- Session 7: Theories and Foundations of UX, Technical Communications, UCD, HCD, etc. (Ryan Collier, Kyle Hurt, Devor Barton)
InfoCamp 2009
Background
Takeaway
- Perky people are annoying.
- Look at diagramming
- How to do usability testing
- How to have a reasonable usability
Tasks
Paper prototype of Facelift
Provide a UCD approach to review
Qualitative output from the application review.
IA definition
The core goal is discoverability
When is IA done
Look at having IA pull in some of the work currently assigned to WebDev to allow for faster testing of features.
Allow for better flow of the site.
Move people to HTML and allow for testing early.
How is UX supposed to be Agile?
How to control standards on the site?
Testing for copy and sizing
Designing for alternative scenarios are particularly difficult when consuming a wire frame.
Conveying the message to development is hard.
Schedule
Keynote by Axel Roseler
How to create the right design for a client.
Look at the presentation; abstracting from the actual request from users.
What is the design process as it relates
What are the metrics for design success? What happens when design has failed or doesn't consider the implementation
How you evaluate a design against the data collected.
Session 1: User Experience 101 (Quentin Christensen)
Microsoft Sharepoint background.
What is the process associated with the created
User Experience design is essential to all groups of the company:
Takeaway
How to pitch the design for the Facebook application?
Set up a focus group.
Create a persona associated with the application.
Bob Johnson is a Facebook user who only has a passing interest in signing up on Classmates.
Goals:
- Simple view of class information
- Don't sign up at Classmates
Should this type of user be supported
On Wednesday of next
Look at the discussion for the usability testing session.
Look at time perception.
Session 2: Web Optimization UCD & Kittens (Jason Carmel)
Jason Carmel Director of Optimization Zaaz
- Pane-esque speaking style
- Noted that there wasn't site optimization technologies
- Looking only at publicly available strategies for optimization
- Perkiness as a requirement
- Using the designer as the key focus for the implementation
- This excludes the developer
- Quant vs. qualitative groups in the company
Introduction to Breakout Sessions
Information design.
What is happening for portfolio development.
IA summit and information design.
Design and gardening
Experience design User centered design User centered process Service design Visual design
Session 3: Integrating UX and Agile/SCRUM (Daniel Jaeger)
Determine how agile uses the approach.
What are the elements of Agile that would affect the design process.
What is usability when you're evaluating a three week sprint cycle.
What are the essential elements of Scrum that make it difficult to integrate into the product development process.
Amusing breakdown between designers and developers; not room for much else.
What are the considerations to look at the number of designers.
Design before the coding. Look at waterfall. still required Design is structural
What are junior developers having difficultly with.
How about outsourced development.
Why is the design provided in advance.
Why is documentation provided that isn't essential to the core functionality of
What works with Designers
Look at UX and Test as part of the same org
Session 4: Top Down UX: Holistic User Experience (Nick Finck)
Check for the slides on Slideshare. #hcx
Brand experience is only one component of the overall process.
What is the experience / message associated with the Facebook application?
Session 5: Death to Static Wireforms Panel (Matt Turpin, Kevin Nick, Kris Bell, Aaron Louie, Beverly Slabosky, Andrew Otwell)
What is the goal of the panel?
How to create wireframes that are used.
How does one correctly document UX?
Animation, interactive applications become problematic; there should be a defined level of type of communication required.
Developers and tester are the core people for the output.
Executives and UI tests are
Tools
Look at
Pencil & Paper Axure (PC) HTML + jQuery Fireworks Visio Expression Blend Sketch Flow Excel (pluggable content) InDesign
Defaulting to a particular solution. What are the patterns used? Big ideas?
How to focus attention away from the visual design round.
Usability testing is better with dynamic prototypes. Look at providing this with
Need to make sure executives know that it's about the interaction and not the final implementation.
Would be preferable to move the interaction design away from a separate project team.
What are the organizational barriers
What would the cost be for switching.
How to flatten the organization to allow for design and IA to work with pluggable components.
Move core web development to module development.
Look at having IA pull in some of the work currently assigned to WebDev to allow for faster testing of features.
Session 6: What is Information Management, "MSIM"
University of NC, UW, etc. are a couple
Quantitative data models.
Information solution designer.
Is information a thing or a process.
Senge's Five Disciples
Look at the MindManager for consolidation of email.
How to determine if information management is a cost center.
What is the data that needs to be preserved.
How do you justify that a cost saving is being preserved.
Make self visible.
What would the organization be like if a role wasn't active.
Pitching information management to executive teams is a specialized skill.
What do CIOs do to control the data for the organization. How are project managers working to
long-term vs. near-term options for controlling information.
Session 7: Theories and Foundations of UX, Technical Communications, UCD, HCD, etc. (Ryan Collier, Kyle Hurt, Devor Barton)
How can theory be applied to IA?
What is a theory?
Why does one even need a theory?
- Principles of visual design
- Color theory
- Activity theory
Activity centered design.
- Commonsense theory
- Working theory
audience analysis;
how academics and practitioners evaluate technical texts
- Rhetorical theory
WTF? How does a design communicate with a user.
How defend a particular UI decision. The people are coming from an academic process for proving the correctness of design.
Best approach is the use of constrained rhetoric to provide a justification of an approach for stakeholders and implementers.
- Cognitive theory
Another example site:
wehearttheory.com
The process seems to be:
- Find an organizational artifact