Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Cool Infographics - Blog - The Ride of Your Life

• E-Commerce News: E-Commerce: The Towering E-Commerce 3.0 Wave

  Ignore the title and it is a pretty succinct blog entry on ecommerce organisation within traditional companies

• Epic Win - Level-Up Your Life

  Another example of gaming technology being used to change behaviours in the real world. Will try this one out for sure...

• European Multi-Client Retail Mass Market Benchmark 2010

  Some nice stats on retail mass market

• InfoQ: IT And Architecture: Inside-Out Perspectives

• The Relevance of User Experience: Using Every Opportunity to Impress Users | UX Booth

  Good anecdotes for the value of user experience for non-converts...

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Better Projects: BAs and Visualizing Information

  Great visual on knowlegde pyramid.

• adrianh's agile and ux Bookmarks on Delicious

  A fantastically rich collection of links on making UCD and agile work together - the most complete overview I have seen.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Business Model Canvas – Facilitator Cards | the architecture of everything

  Looks like the Osterwaelder business model canvas is gaining traction...

• Touchpoints Bring the Customer Experience to Life - Adam Richardson - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Getting Creative Things Done: How To Fit Hard Thinking Into a Busy Schedule :: Tips :: The 99 Percent

  This certainly resonates with me.

• Agile UX in Practice - some tips | Agile UX

  A little general for my liking, but covers some of the methods that I have also found to be very useful in bringing together UCD type approaches and agile.

• Herding Cats: More Agile Claims

  Another intelligent and balanced explanation from Glenn Alleman (Herding Cats) on why comparisons between agile and more "traditional" approaches are often flawed and unreasonably slanted towards the agile camp.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• » UX Book Reviews: October 2010 Johnny Holland – It's all about interaction » Blog Archive

• ECOMOD - Referenzgeschäftsprozesse und Strategien im E-Commerce

• 6 Free Sites for Creating Your Own Comics

• Adding Sanity to Your Agility | Agile Software Development Videos Directory

• Blowing up the 20th Century Business Model | Management Innovation eXchange

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Twinstan's interesting links roundup on Diigo (weekly)

• Patrick Chappatte: The power of cartoons | Video on TED.com

  Another cracker from TED

• Die 13½ Leben des Käpt’n Blaubär – Wikipedia

  Käpt'n Blaubär has something to say about everything.. Sound familiar?

• » Radio Johnny: IDEA 2010 Johnny Holland – It's all about interaction » Blog Archive

  Thoughts from the IA conference.

• InfoQ: Constantine on combining Agile and User Experience

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

"The game layer on top of the world" - another TED talk

Following on the heels of Jane McGonigal (see previous entries here and here for a little more on her frightening take on our current experiences; "the user experience of reality is broken" and the possible positive role that gaming combined with social media can have on this), TED.com just released a talk by Seth Priebatsch, "The game layer on top of the world".

As with Ms McGonigal, once you get beyond the initial shock of the key statements, the talk makes a disturbing amount of sense; the first decade of the century should be considered the time when the social media infrastructure was put in place that will enable the coming decade to be about influencing behaviours on a mass-scale through games and gaming concepts. Moreover his premise that this will based upon the Facebook online graph (see also here for an interesting blog entry from Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook) seems possible to me.

He sites several examples of this already happening (influencing when people go online and what they do via event-driven games a la Farmville, or any cocktail happy-hour for that matter, is just one trivial example, but there are many more).

What I like about his presentation is that it is doggedly optimistic. Given the obvious "big brother" concerns about any corporate or governmental attempt to influence behaviours through the social media, his appeal for us all to take part to make sure that the massive potential for manipulation is harnessed in a "positive" way feels long overdue (though this might simply be because I am getting older and am no longer on the pulse of what is "in".. actually thinking about it, I suspect I never was).

Of course, the biggest question is, what is "positive"? How do we ensure that it is the petrol efficiency competitions (see here) and not the "buy this to out-do your friends" competitions that win out?

Most certainly worth sacrificing 12 minutes for, his presentation is not very polished, but the simple messages and in particular the clear structure of his "game dynamics" - basically behaviour archetypes that many games are based upon (1. appointment dynamic, 2. influence and status dynamic, 3. progression dynamic, 4. communal discovery dynamic) - are spot on.

This stuff is happening today and is going to massively increase in the future - time to come to terms with it, I fear.

Combining user-centric design and agile product development processes

As I have written before (see here), there is a blazing discussion in the blogosphere (and at every well-respected conference on agile development right now) about how best to combine agile development practices and user centric design processes.

Jeremy Johnson (blog here), recently posted an interesting summary of the findings of the "Agile UX Retreat 2010 Group" here. In particular, I liked his take on the role of UX as a "glue" between product management ("product owners" in the agile scrum jargon) and software development (the "scrum team" to stick to the parlance). A nice slide summary can be found here.

This certainly matches with what I see in practice - really successful online development projects put UX as the centre of both the product development and software development processes - in fact this should practically be a "given" nowadays (even if it is hardly ever done successfully).

Nevertheless, for me, the really challenging issue is not doing this, but doing it efficiently - that is, bringing together traditional business analysis and design methods and roles with user experience practices efficiently (without undue overlap).

More to follow on this topic...

Visualising the customer experience

OK, I admit that it is becoming a bit of a theme in my blog, but the value of visualisation tools to enable change in organisations, to clarify target-state goals and to motivate projects can hardly be over-emphasised.

I stumbled across a great blog, "Designing Change" that I would recommend - there are some great examples of customer experience visualisation (and I do not mean wireframes and visual design, but rather conceptual visualisation).

The challenge with such imagery (as I have found painfully, not being the most visual of people myself), is to find the right metaphor for the particular concern that you have. Of course tools and methods can help there a lot (and I have already posted several entries on this - see for example here, here and here). But the best way to get going is through "inspiration" (or copying, as I prefer to call it). Here is a great collection of conceptual visualisations to get you going (from a guy called Dave Armano who has impressed me a few times on his blog:


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Have fun.

Design thinking & strategy - a book review

As threatened in an earlier post, this entry is another book review.

"Design thinking; integrating innovation, customer experience and brand value", edited by Thomas Lockwood (of course, available via amazon), brings together a bunch of big names in design management and provides a nicely balanced overview of current ideas about the role of design in innovation, service delivery, but in particular in developing brands.

I especially liked the contributions by Kevin Clark & Ron Smith from IBM Corporate Markting (on the value of leveraging design professionals and skills to provide insights in all aspects of the business), Erik Abbing & Christa van Gessel (who provide a 4-step method for brand-driven innovation) and Mark Jones & Fran Samalionis from IDEO (who have put together a nice framework to design new service innvoations).

Despite the many interesting essays, I was underwhelmed by the book as a whole. I guess it is my nature (or background, or both), but I was looking for a more complete answer, showing how design thinking can be applied / integrated into the business - beyond the straightforward application of ideation and visualisation techniques to the product and brand development process.

Using design thinking (and at the very least design techniques) combined with more analytical/structured methods in the business strategy space to bring the "outside-in approach" into an organisation and to give those ideas traction feels like an idea on the brink of maturity - in a couple of years this is going to be entirely mainstream.

Nevertheless, if this book was anything to go on, there is a lot of work to be done before then. The tools need to mature to be applied in the broader business strategy arena (ie. outside of the product development space where they are most at home). It feels like progress is being made quickly (with new blogs and companies popping up daily) - it is a fun time to dig into this space!

Given my own more analytical background, I personally find it rather frustrating trying to create rather than deduce, but also all the more rewarding when it pays off - I hope to be posting later this year on the topic of design thinking in the context of business architecture as my ideas mature.

As such any help that can be found in books like this on methods and approaches are thoroughly welcome!

"Save the online damsel, save the world!"

Having recently posted a presentation from the somewhat frightening Jane McGonigal (games designer and director at the Institue for the Future), I have been on the lookout for more from her that perhaps backs up her claims regarding the user experience of reality.

I am very pleased to be able to write that her voice-over on the presentation (well, at least on a very similar presentation that she gave at TED recently - see below), is much more positive and pretty convincing - the basic message is as follows; millions and millions of people are spending serious amounts of time building "virtuoso" skills (her word not mine) in these online games and they can be harnessed to achieve breakthroughs in the "real world" (ie. the non-digital part of the world). She goes on to give some nice examples of games adjusting behaviours in the real world.

At the very least, the presentation was uplifting (and made me think back to the notion of passionate engagement that I posted on recently).

I am intuitively enthusiastic about her belief in the online generation, the value of "MMORPGs" in developing real skills and am absolutely convinced in her assertion on human need for meaningful exertion (ie. for a valuable cause, for an "epic" in her words), rather than "just" work.

On her website she sums it up nicely: "What the world needs now is an epic win." - So finally my younger brothers have all the justification that they need to get back online and start gaming.

Thanks Dr McGonigal!

Here is the post from TED:

Microsoft is not all bad

As much as I hate to admit it, the guys at Microsoft really do some pretty cool stuff. A couple that have caught my eye recently:

Xbox - project Natal
This is going to be transformational like the Wii



Pivot from Live Labs
This is the kind of data visualisation tool that I love - you can just feel what this is going to mean for managing and traversing large chunks of data and information (think Jonathon Harris' universe - see also previous entry). It build on the wonderful seadragon technology (not that I really understand what that is, but it allows you to zoom in and out of pictures really quickly and I like that - see also this link for great examples).

Bill and Ballmer are not all bad.

Tribes, passion & getting ideas off the ground

Following on from the previous post on "Tribes" and the power of passionate leadership, I stumbled across a great site, the99percent.com that focuses on getting ideas off the ground. One videocast that jumped out was by Ji Lee (Director of Google Creative Lab) - he talks about the transformative power of personal projects (and the fact that the professional and personal world inevitably intersect if we are passionate about what we do, even if we like the idea of keeping them separate).

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User Experience of Reality

I am an enthusiastic proponent of online gaming and its value in the development of children and adults alike, but I have to say that this presentation by Jane McGonigal even frightened me a little bit.. "the user experience of reality is broken". Hilfe!

User Experience of Reality

View more presentations from avantgame.

Authentic experience - the next level of economic value?

I know it is becoming a little bit too much of a recurring theme, but today's TED lecture is a cracker. It is fairly uncontroversial and familiar terrain (the progressive shift from products to services and then to selling experiences to differentiate to the customer). Joseph Pines basically argues that "authentic" experience is becoming a key to successs and provides a nifty corporate 2x2 matrix ("true to self" vs "be what you say you are") to show various flavours of experience. He gives a few simple commercial experience examples and manages to frame it all with a quote from Hamlet, all in 14 minutes.

Here it is:

Agile & user centric design

I haven't written for a little while; life coming up to Christmas is "hectic" (and a bunch of other things not suitable for print on this blog). This weekend, I had been fully expecting to write a short introduction, describing how my string of bad luck over flights was over - I had a fantastic flight on Friday night, landing 30 minutes ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, I am now sitting at Heathrow Terminal 5 watching the delay on my flight back to Duesseldorf go from 10 minutes, to 20, to 60, to 90 minutes as they replace the tyre before we take off. Ah well.

As always it has given me a chance to a) spend more money than I wanted to on cheap DVDs and b) do a little reading on combining agile project management and user centric design. This is a topic close to my heart and something that is akin to squaring the circle. The basic difficulty is clear, user centric design approaches tend to try to map out a complete detailed vision of the user experience for an application or website in order to ensure a consistent and deliberate flow through the entire site, whereas agile approaches focus on evolutionary development of systems, building up the complexity of the solution over time.

There is no reason that these two approaches should not co-exist however. As always it is simply a question of measure; agile doesn't say no upfront design, just enough; user centric design doesn't say don't experiment over time, just understand the overarching customer needs you are trying to fulfill.

I am very pleased to see that there is a nascent discussion finally emerging out there on this topic. The following links provide some food for thought, with plenty of practical steps to making the two approaches work together (as well as giving so more detail on where the difficulties between the approaches arise in the first place):

• http://agileproductdesign.com/index.html - a really good blog, by a guy specialising in the combination of agile and usablity. Definitely someone I am going to be following in the coming months. I particularly like his analysis of where the difficulties arise.
• http://www.slideshare.net/mgiudice/humancentered-design-meets-agile-development-presentation-625465/ - a nice overview on combining approaches.
• http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2007may/agile-ucd.pdf - an article in the Journal of Usability Studies - good to see some designers enthusing about agile.
• http://www.alistapart.com/articles/gettingrealaboutagiledesign - another good blog, with some concrete practical advice on what to do when combining scrum and user-centric design.
• http://www.useit.com/alertbox/agile-methods.html - a recent article by Jacob Nielsen (usability guru) on difficulties with agile that has kicked off some controversial discussions online. Strange; the original article seems entirely common-sensical and compatible with agile as I understand it.
• http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/agile-usability/ - a newsgroup with a pretty active discussion around usablility in agile projects.

Really, it all comes down to understanding what the user wants and needs and what the client wants and needs. Agile provides the framework to do this, as long as you can work with your client and users closely to build a strong vision of the purpose of the system up front and then continue to work with both parties throughout the development process to get quick feedback integrated into the system. But the first methodology that really anchors the user-centric design more firmly into an agile setting, will really win my vote.

"Working through screens" workbook

Well, for once I have to admit that I had a nearly perfect flight experience this morning; the flight was on time, the airport was empty, the seat was great, the bags were waiting for me once I got through passport control. The only thing that made it slightly less than absolutely perfect was landing in a cold and snowy Duesseldorf having been in South Africa for two weeks ;-).

Whilst trying to warm up in a freezing cold flat, I stumbled across an interesting online book this morning that provides insights into the design process for creating applications for knowledge work. From Flashbulb Interaction, it aims to support the product development team in the early concept phase ("100 Ideas for Envisioning Powerful, Engaging, and Productive User Experiences in Knowledge Work"), but from my perspective it offers a more complete view for application design than that.

What I really like about the book is that it is built around three concrete "knowledge domains" (building for architects, clinical research and financial trading). Although I guess this is more a product of the experience of Flashbulb as an organisation than a conscious decision of these industries as good examples. The domains make the concepts much more concrete. That said, by far the best element of this beautifully presented framework are the "Application envisioning questions" for each of the ideas.

It is available for download as a PDF, or as an online reference.

The need for information architecture

Coming from a "nuts and bolts" kind of systems analysis background, I have to work hard at taking a more user experience driven view at development projects. Though I have worked on this front for several years now I am consequently constantly looking for structured approaches to user experience design and the varied facets (or "planes" as Garret refers to them in his seminal primer on user experience disciplines).

I found an interesting set of presentations recently on slideshare from the euroia2008 (the European Information Architecture summit). Predictably enough, these presentations focus on information architecture and do not provide anything like an overarching user experience framework, but they do give a few ideas about where things are going in this space and some nice concrete examples of approaches to try out.

Much to my surprise, it turns out it isn't just about a having a sitemap and a navigation structure ;-). Definitely worth a browse! The slides are here

Visual problem solving on the "back of the napkin"

I am just back from a weekend in London. I left the office really early on Friday (around 12:30) because I had hoped to get to the opening of a friend's new office in Notting Hill in the evening.

Unfortunately, the airlines conspired against me once again (see also my earlier posting on reading a Peter Drucker classic whilst struggling to get to Scotland a couple of weekends ago). I ended up flying to London Heathrow, rather than City from Duesseldorf via Stuttgart.. not the most direct route one can imagine! I arrived at the restaurant around 21:00. I suspect this will also not be the last time that I start a posting this way.

But there is a bright side. As with my trip to Scotland, the delay was not a complete loss as it gave me the opportunity to read another book from my backlog; "The Back of the Napkin - Solving problems and selling ideas with pictures" by Dan Roam. Given all the hype surrounding the book, I had high expectations that were only partially fulfilled.

Don't get me wrong. The book is well constructed and provides lost of thought-provoking examples of using visualisation to identify, frame, explain and sell ideas (much as the subtitle promises) and - even better - it provides a conceptual framework for structuring the analysis and visualisation of problems. However, it did not blow me away with its insight as I had been hoping.

Either way, it is well worth reading. For those not inclined to invest the 2-3 hours, Mr Roam has kindly produced a cheat-sheet for the key ideas and provides it for free on his website. And being the master presenter that he is, there are also a couple of presentations of his ideas on youtube (here is the 5 minute primer and here is an hour long presentation for Authors@Google.

At the risk of getting boring already.. TED is fantastic

Before leaving work earlier, a colleague stopped by my office ("my" and "office" are both exagerations given that I currently work at a pulpit on wheels in whatever office space I can find) and we got chatting about the world and, as I have often done over the last 12 months, I got on to the topic of TED.

It doesn't matter who I show the site to, it is always a delight to see their faces light up when I pick out just one or two presentations - this evening it was the classic presentation on the wii by Johnny Lee and Jonathan Harris' presentation of the website "we feel fine".

This second presentation is my personal favourite, Jonathan Harris' ability to create elegant user interfaces to simplify complex and aggregated data gives us a glimpse of what the internet is going to become and the ways we are able to interact with more complex information networks visually.

If you have not visited wefeelfine.org yet, then do so immediately..

And if you haven't visited TED, go there even quicker.