IA Summit: Lessons from Slime Mold: How to Survive and Thrive in Ever-Changing Organizational Environments

Slime Mold

Kate Rutter gave a wonderfully passionate, informative, interactive, and engaging talk on what we can learn from slime mold. I loved her use of slime mold as a metaphor for our work environments, and also how she looked to nature to solve very human problems. I have always held the belief that many human breakthrough’s have occurred when we have turned to and learned from nature.

Throughout the talk, Kate recommended a few books:
Evocative Objects: Things We Think With by Sherry Turkle

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Stephen Johnson

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Here are my notes from the amazing talk:

Kate started out the talk by first telling us that slime mold are amazing because they are in constant conversation with the environment. When the environment is nourishing, the slime mold are thriving as multiple separate organisms. If the environment looses its abundance and is only able to sustain the slime mold, then the slime mold begin to signal each other and cluster. If the environment reaches a critical stage and is starving, then the slime mold form into slugs and attempt to survive.

After explaining this concept, Kate had the audience reenact the slime mold life cycle. A few volunteers were wearing white hotel robes to represent the slime mold, while the rest of the audience was the forest floor. The “forest” floor help up our hand when we were nourishing and the “slime mold” flitted about the room (in a very hilarious way!!). Then the forest floor lowered their hands a bit when there isn’t as much nourishment, and the slime mold began to send out distress signals and find each other. When the forest floor began to starve, the slime mold hunkered down and attempted to survive. This was REALLY FUN.

After the fun demonstration, Kate went on to connect the dots. She mentioned Lewin’s equation B=f(p, e) which states that behavior is a function of the person and the environment. She extended that notion to say that E = f(p, b) that the environment is a function of people and behavior, and by that token B=E, our behavior is our environment.

Now think about your organization/work environment. If you are in tune with your environment, then you can change your behavior accordingly. We can even learn which behaviors are the most appropriate from slime mold:

Environment: Nourishing
Behavior: Exploring, Sensing

Environment: Tough
Behavior: Sensing, signaling, clustering

Environment: Hostile
Behaviors: Sluggish, significant clustering (slime mold form into slugs)
You need to know: what won’t you give up? what can you leave behind? how much will you participate in collective action?

This translates to:
1) Sensing the organizational environment
2) Signaling to others (co-workers) about your senses. You can signal in different ways: great signals are loud and sticky and lead to change. High Volume Signals are memorable, energetic, have a pattern, are reinforced
Visual Signals get ideas through faster, and are able to communicate more information.
Choose the appropriate method of communication (signal) to get your message across
3) Band together as a team to support each other and survive

How does one create a rich work environment?

• Collective play
• Simple rules of engagement
• Shared Standards
• Always Sensing
• Always Signaling

Kate recommended the use of a TAZ: Temporary Autonomous Zone which is an area outside of social control, a temporary space outside formal structures of control where collective play and creativity can occur. This does not mean that people should not do work, but rather follow the motto of “we are having fun, but we’re not kidding”. Many of the most successful companies have R&D departments which are outside of the formal structure.

Moreover, team members can user multiple platforms to listen for, send, and reinforce signals:
Twitter, RSS, Google Alerts to sense industry, economic, web trends.
Keep all eyes open, use strategy documents and watch the market.
Work Out Loud = post work, notes, and info so that is visible in high-traffic areas. Open the doors to participating in design work. Hold open design sessions.

Happiness Checklist

• Have satisfying work to do
• Chance to be good at something
• Connect with people we truly like
• Opportunity to be part of something bigger

Kate concluded with 4 simple things – be more like slime mold:

• Make places and spaces for collective play
• Work out Loud
• Sense with intent: signal back what you learn
• Constantly tune behaviors

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IA Summit: Integrating Effective Prototyping into Your Design Process

Fred Beecher gave a really good, practical talk on how to integrate prototyping into the design process. There has been some chatter lately in the UX community about traditional deliverables being replaced by prototypes. As with prototypes, I think deliverables have their place based on what you are trying to accomplish, the time constraints, client/company culture. Personally, I hate documentation just for the sake of documentation. After my first job, I was interviewed at a firm that was astonished at how little documentation I had. I explained that my job consisted of communicating with 2 developers that I sat next to, I did not need to create elaborate documents for them as much of our communication was instantaneous. I also created a lot of prototypes, which was the extent of my documentation. Something that really hit home this year for me is this: All the artifacts that we create as designers are there to facilitate communication and further discussion, use what is appropriate for the situation, and do not go about creating things just because you feel that is your job. It is not your job, your job is converse, collaborate, generate ideas, and synthesize.

I will now step off my soap box and recap Fred’s presentation..

Integrating Effective Prototyping Into Your Design Process

View more presentations from Fred Beecher.

Fred mentioned that there are 2 dimensions to prototypes: visual fidelity (VF) and functional fidelity (FF). He then plotted them on an X-Y axis.

Sketches – low visual and functional fidelity
Paper wireframes – medium visual, low functional fidelity
Paper JPGS – high visual, low functional fidelity

Image Mapped Sketches – low visual, medium functional fidelity
Clickable wireframes – medium visual, medium functional
Image Mapped JPGS – high visual, medium functional

Proof of Concept – medium visual, medium-high functional
LVF Interactive Prototype – medium visual, high functional
HVF Interactive Prototype – medium-high visual, high functional
“Product Ready” – high visual and functional

Two additional dimensions:
Technical Fidelity – either “production ready” or not
Fidelity of Content – a prototype is NOT just interaction, content plays a large role in testing. Testing a prototype with crappy content will give you crappy data. Your prototype should have plausible content.

Given the many different types of prototypes, the trick is to know which one is most appropriate to use given the problem/question you wish to solve. The entire purpose of the prototype is to test/research. As with any research, we need to use the most appropriate method to solve the problem.

Here are some guidelines..

Low Visual Fidelity (LVF)/ Low Functional Fidelity (LFF) is good for:

• discovering missing functionality
• finding problems with workflow
• separating good UX design concepts from less good ones
• getting preliminary consensus from stakeholders

LVF/HFF

• Enabling the use of user testing as a design tool
• Proof of concept testing of isolated interactions
• Enabling remote prototype testing
• Validating design direction/implementation with stakeholders
• Supplementing paper documents

HVF/LFF

• Discovering any usability problems introduced by the design
• Finding out problems with workflow when testing with non-savvy users
• Iterating through multiple form factor concepts when working with physical devices

HVF/HFF

• Integrating new designs into an existing system
• User Testing with non-savvy user
• Supplementing printed documentation for offshore development
• Wowing stakeholders into submission

The best part of Fred’s talk was when he described how to incorporate prototyping in different process environments.

For Every Type of Business Process, first develop the detailed scenarios you want to test

Agile:
First develop the detailed scenarios you want to test
Sketch 2-3 design concepts and test to choose one
Build small interactive prototype for critical interactions and proof-of-concept test them
Work with the developer to get a production ready prototype and test it too

Waterfall:
First develop the detailed scenarios you want to test
Build an interactive prototype and walk through it with stakeholders
Simultaneously walk through prototype and documentation when handing it off to developers
Generate annotated prototype for developers reference

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IA Summit: Design Games for IA

Donna Spencer led a really fun session about utilizing games for design work. She said that playing games stimulates different parts of our brains, and can help us be more creative. Here are some games that she went over, I am really excited to put them to use!

Also see this Boxes and Arrows article: http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/using-design-games

Books: Thinkertoys by Michalko and Innovation Games by Hohmann

Games to Play with Users

Design the homepage – using markers and paper, ask the user to design a homepage that would be perfect for them. The drawing itself does not have to look like a homepage, and can be much more free form. The drawing will enable you to understand what is important to the user.

Divide the dollar – start with a set a of features (either pre-defined or generated by the user). Give the users 100 fake dollars and ask them to diving the amount among the feature list. Ask the users to explain the reasoning behind their choices. This will help with feature prioritization.

Metadata – show users an object and ask them to tell you what they call that ‘thing’. This will you understand how people think about objects.

Freelisting – tell me as many of [fill in the blank] as you can think about. Pay attention to both the order in which people list items, as well as if they take any significant pauses. The pauses indicate cognitive chunking and perhaps different categories.

Card Sorting – write content ideas on cards and ask users to sort them. You can spice it up by having time pressures, competition, or prizes.

Games for Design Teams

Idea cards – you have three piles of cards that contain adjectives, verbs, and nouns. Pick one card from each pile and then try to design the experience that is provided on the cards. Might also want to use these professional cards: http://www.metamemes.com/
Also these are awesome grow a game cards that can also be used for design: http://www.valuesatplay.org/?page_id=6
Someone in the session also recommended these: Oblique Strategy Cards

Reversal – attack the problem from the reverse direction. For example: “Going through airport security is painful, how do you make it worse?” This is a really fun activity, but can also helps you discover concepts that are important but might be easy to miss.

Design the Box – individuals or teams creates a box as if the product was going to be sold like a software package at Best Buy. Each person should design for the front, back, and side of the box. Some things to consider: the product name, the tagline, the short hook on the front to entice a consumer to pick it up, perhaps a picture. Once the box is designed, ask everyone to “sell” their product to everyone else in the team. This helps figure out the vision statement.

Other games that were suggested by session participants:

Brainwriter – come up with ideas, write them on sticky notes and put them on the wall. If running out of ideas, look over the ones on the wall and see if it sparks more. Then do an affinity sort on the sticky notes for further insight.

Different hats – design from different perspectives. For example, if I was Steve Jobs, what would the product look lke?

Reverse position statement – ask the stakeholders to come up with a vision statement that is the opposite of what they want, this might help clarify/specify the vision.

I totally love the idea of game use for design, and want pointers to more games! If you know of some, please let me know :)

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IA Summit: Managing Difficult Conversations

I am currently in Memphis enjoying the wonderful IA Summit for the second year in a row. My first order of business was taking Dan Brown’s workshop entitled “Managing Difficult Conversations”. My motivation for taking the workshop has been an increasing awareness that 10% of my job is IA/UX work and 90% is managing people and relationships, and in all honesty I am bad at 90% of my job. Although it was not immediately obvious to me, I was having trouble selling my ideas and facilitating collaboration. Also, at various jobs and from different people, I would constantly get comments about how I was coming off as too intense, too forceful, and too passionate. The situation came to a head when the boss at my latest company handed me “How to Win Friends & Influences People” by Dale Carnegie. It was pretty much a slap in the face of how 1) unaware I am of myself; 2) my inability to communicate properly; 3) my failure to facilitate open discussion. I have certainly done a lot of introspection since then, and I will continue to do so. The workshop really helped me jell a lot of things that were already floating around in my head, and also realize that it will take a few more years of work and practice to get truly good at this. I am however committed to working on improving myself. In hopes of helping others, and just spreading the EightShapes love, here are my notes from the session…

Part I

Best Practices

• rephrase negative statements
  Example: “We don’t have the requirements so we can’t start” vs “Once you provide us with the requirements, we can get started”
• rise above naysayers
• always start with the good
• openness over defensiveness
  Example: When someone is disagreeing with you, say “I think that’s a great idea. Perhaps we can talk about how it might work?”

Engage Your Audience

• Personalize the message by saying someone’s name
  Example: “John, what do you think about this?”
• Repeat the questions you’re asked
• Position your questions for success
• Use Humor

Empathize

• Know the situations, not just the people.
  People are facing pressures from others in the company, might be having problems with their personal life, and are generally situated in many layers of situations beyond the current one.
• Listen and seek to understand
  Sometimes people just need to get something off their chest, so its helpful just to listen to them and comfort them with understanding
• Don’t be quick to dismiss (even if you disagree)*
• Respond with acknowledgment of situation/emotion

Lighten Up

• Humor can be a powerful communication tool. When using humor: make it relevant; be on the lookout for material; prep and plan for jokes (don’t assume it will just come to you); when in doubt, point to yourself.

  If you are in a bad mood, feeling rushed, and are headed for a meeting, take 15 minutes before the meeting to do something to put yourself in a more positive mindset. Search for recipes, twitter, text, deep breathing, grab a snack, anything that will get out of that “zone”. Both your mind and body language will be effected and will help the meeting/discussion go smoother.

Part II

Improving your communication skills is really about introspection. If you are feeling anxious, annoyed, angry, look within yourself for the cause. Do you feel unappreciated? Not valued? Unheard? Try to get at the root cause of your problems, and figure out ways to help yourself through better communication with others. This is also a good time to learn about your own habits and characteristics, so that you can be more self-aware about your own communication patterns.

For IA’s, it is also important to understand that the deliverables are not the end product, they are there to help facilitate conversations, which in turn help make the product better. So its important to take a step back from the deliverables and understand that they are just one part of a process. When discussing deliverables, don’t look at it as a personal attack, but rather that they are doing their job of facilitating conversation and further thought. In fact, be prepared for challenges when presenting deliverables, as that is the whole point!

It is also important to understand the components of a conversation: at least 2 people, the message that is being communicated, the tool that is used to communicate the message, each person’s objective/agenda, personal perspectives, each individual’s habits and the skills that everyone uses to overcome the habits, the situation in which the conversation is taking place as well as all the external situations encompassing each individual.

When speaking with another person, it is important to understand their agenda – what drives them? what is their objective? This will help you use correct words/messages to persuade the other person.

It is also important to understand their communication habits (as well as your own). Some people prefer to converse exclusively via email, or phone, or in person. Utilize the method of communication that is most comfortable for the other person, even if it not the most convenient for you. This will put them at ease.

Part III

Characteristics

Below are some characteristics that Dan and Chris have found exist in people/clients/stakeholders, and some techniques on how to deal with them.

• No Direction – the person can’t tell you what’s wrong
  Techniques: Ask good specific questions, be mindful of the goals of the conversation, understand that these people might be motivated by fear/anxiety. Say things like “help me understand”, “I want to help you succeed,” act dumb and ask them to talk through the problem, point out how the design already accomplishes goals.
• Misdirected Passion – they feel strongly about the strangest things
  Techniques: Try to understand their perspective/agenda/passion, pick your battles, let them have their say, set expectations and explain context, do not avoid the problem. Say things like “these are really important points….
  let’s see how we can build that into design
  let’s concentrate on the agenda and address it at the next meeting
  i’ve set some time aside to discuss that
• Inconsistent Messaging – they talk out of both sides of their mouth
  Techniques: Bite your tongue (don’t call them out on it, well yesterday you said this), pick your battles, capture messages in writing, recap the decisions made in the meeting, and validate the captured decisions. Our job here is to help them find out what they want.
• Unwilling to admit ignorance – they get stuff wrong
  Your colleague or employee does not fully understand the project and produces a work that is off-track. Technique: Ask them to explain their thinking/rational, deflect responsibility onto the boss/client, avoid distractions by taking other work off their plate.

Other characteristic types not discussed in detail: no vision, no strength, no structure, not available, tunnel vision, prioritize reputation, poor communication skills, poor use of communication tools

Part IV

Situations

This part describes some of the situations that we are faced with, and how to deal with them.

• Too Many People Involved – the size of the ’stakeholder’ list is unwieldy and dramatically inhibiting progress
  Techniques: Identify the influencers/gatekeepers and speak directly to them, don’t ask quesions of the group, ask specific individuals, provide channels for individual feedback but publish for broader consumption
• Poor Team Member Performance – the performance of one or several team members is jeopardizing the project success
  Techniques: first identify all of the positive aspects of the performance, avoid explicit or implicit personal attacks, coach don’t point, use positive language, express confidence in abilities, negotiation.
• Defending Decisions – clarifying and rationalizing design choices when challenged
  Techniques: establish ‘common IA practices’ before design exercise, pick your battles, if supporting data isn’t there, explain the hypothesis, know your why’s, make sure stakeholders are on the ride for the whole way, help prioritize problems, show implications, focus on agreements – “we are not so far apart on this ..”

Other Situations: losing momentum, planning design, design reviews, defending progress, project failure, resolving conflict (internal and stakeholder.

Part V

Tricks of the Trade

• telling a good story and aligning it with your audience
• seeing other perspectives/agendas
• picking your battles: know when to turn on the passion. Getting a product that has most of your ideas is already an improvement to the product, even if you don’t get everything in.
• setting expectations/context – where you are in the project
• setting action items – the are of what do we do now?
• avoiding distractions, even if timely and relevant
• deflecting responsibility to a third party (common enemy)
• asking good questions
• letting others be right
• letting others have their say
• encouraging discussion
• finding out what stifles people – ppls mental blocks
• channeling other people – such as good critics

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IA Summit: Participatory Design

Purpose of participatory design: To understand the people using your site and uncover latent needs and desires. Then translate those needs into product.

Setting up the lab

Large TV used for demonstrations (show and tell), don’t have to crowd around small monitor
Cameras set up around the room to get a variety of angles, including ceiling (to get a shot of what people are working on)
Used Austin Powers and Homer Simpson cut outs – sets mood of relaxation and fun
Large table for people to spread out and be creative
Large whiteboard for brainstorming
One-way mirror where the team can watch the sessions
Keep the session relaxed
Food – helps breaks down the social barriers

Recruiting

Use an incentive of $150-200
Communicate about the food options that are going to be available so that person can eat if only snacks are provided (and are not thinking about food the entire time)
6-9 participants
Can have designer or business person co-facilitate (take pictures, answer questions)
Recruit with specific specifications in mind (newbie, expert, mix, ect)

Brainstorming

Example: Design a coffee maker

Workflows and Features: Steps required to make coffee and/or tea
Show and Tell: Used a Similar Coffee Maker? Describe the steps to make it work
Individual Design Exercise: Sketch your ideas coffee maker
Discuss of the Individual Designs
Work as a team of 3 and and sketch new design
Discussion of th Group Design

PICTIVE

Construct designs

Can have magnetic interface elements
Post it notes
Construction paper
Glue stick!!
Have people construct designs
Seed pieces: to cut or not to cut? Cut out pieces, but not too many. Don’t make multiple copies of the same thing (ex: more than one search box – too granular).
8.5×11 for individual

8.5×14 or 11×17 for group sessions

Can give screenshots of other websites such as Amazon, Walmart, Google (without brand) and allow people to cut out elements.

Can also have a second package that is more leading and fancy such as ajax elements and competitors sites. This provides for multiple datapoints. They first work with package 1 then 10 minutes later they get package 2.

Looking for discussion and underlying content, not layout
Differences in individual and group designs
Sequence of the elements that they took out/cut out and used
Provide very specific tasks or personas for the design activity

Don’t take participants design literally! Trying to get at the root of the need.

Running a Session: Tips & Tricks

Move from general to specific to avoid biasing
Introduction (Great Greg, Magnificent Michael, ect)
Jokes
Want to be dressed better than participants (to assert authority)
Make crazy faces at people behind the mirror (acknowledge that they are being watched)
Warm up – use whiteboard to write down activities, existing features, features wanted
People talk about physical features, but we are looking for underlying motivations and roles. Probe participants to get at the “why”
Round Robin – ask people what they think (don’t do this too often)
Can have design review of group design – better if people did not design the same thing to avoid competition

Will end up with lots of data points around the artifact creation!

Analysis

It’s going to take 2 weeks (recommended timeline)

• take time off
• watch the videos again, if you hear something interesting you type it up
• reconstruct the sequence
• come up with a report and plan 4-5 insights
• Looking for worksflows, goals/motivations, interests, expectations, behaviors, mental models, features
  • features are least important, people have a hard time expression features. It is better to understand the underlying needs.
• Create roles (mini personas): motivations, behaviors, expectations, interesting in ..

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IA Summit: How To Be A UX Team of One

Leah Buley from adaptive path gave THE BEST talk ever on “How to be a UX Team of One”.

3 strategies for being a UX Team of one

1. Brainstorm, a lot
2. Assemble an ad hoc team
3. Pick the best ideas

Brainstorming

Generate lots of ideas by sketching with just a pen and paper. Have at least 5 sketches before putting down a single pixel on the computer.

You can use several tricks to generate ideas:

Spectrum, 2×2, and Grids (just to name a few). Leah used the example of Evite to talk about the different techniques.

In spectrum brainstorming, you generate designs on a spectrum from first time users to experts.

In a 2×2 (which has both an x and y axis), the horizontal spectrum is still a continuum from first time user and expert and the vertical spectrum flows between automatic invitation creation to manual invitation creation. Create sketches for all of those scenarios.

In a grid, you think about the first time user, the guided user, and the expert. You can also think about the website as being about invitation design, about friends, about tracking, about fun. Then create designs for each combination.

Aside from these techniques, you can also experiment with word associations and come up with designs from the word associations. Additionally, Leah highly recommends having an inspirational library (she uses a Firefox plugin called screengrab). You can take elements from designs that you really like and combine them to create innovative new designs.

Assemble an Ad Hoc Team

Host open design sessions with as many stakeholders as possible to generate ideas. Have an informal design session (with pizza) where everyone creates sketches.

You can run template based workshops to help non-designers create sketches.

You should also decorate your work space with sketches so that your ideas are public and you can get a constant stream of feedback and conversation.

Finally, you can create sketchboards that posts requirements next to sketches to enable conversation.

Pick the best ideas

Brainstorming is all about generating lots of ideas, eventually you need to pick the best ones to get to your final design.

You can pick the best ideas through

1. Business needs (okay)
2. User needs (better)
3. Design principles (best)

Design principles are a small number of specific phrases that describe what you want the product to be; they are your “north star” or guiding light in picking the most optimal design.

So in the case of Evite

increase registration (business need) + help manage communication (user need) = make it addictive (design principle).

The design principle is greater than the sum of business needs and user needs. By “make it addictive” we mean we want to encourage everyone associated with the event to keep coming back to the site. So which ever designs best fit the design principle are the ones that make the cut.

Finally, Leah ended by DECLARING that “I am a UX Team of One!” and asking everyone to join her in the declaration. Plus, we go an awesome pin to wear that proclaims each of us as a UX Team of One.

So I would like to sum up by saying

I am UX Team of One! Hear me roar!

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IA Summit Liveblog: Tagging Five Emerging Trends

Tagging: Five Emerging Trends by Gene Smith

Gene recently came out with a book on tagging called Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web (Voices That Matter)

[Side note: I found out from Gene that he mentioned my WWW07 article somewhere in his book, sweet!]

Trends force us to challenge and change our conceptual model. The traditional model is user-resource-tags. The model was developed by analyzing the first tagging systems like delicious.

Because delicious and Flickr were so well designed, we thought they represented all tagging systems. However, there has been a lot of innovation from other systems.

Five Trends
- More Structure
- Automanual Folksonomies
- Leveraging Communities
- Rethinking Pace Layers
- Sparking Innovating

The trends are not stand-alone, they blend together. They also show that tagging is going off in a new direction.

More Structure

In first wave, people liked the lack of structure in tags. Tags allowed differences to flourish such as people who like “cinema” versus “movies” (quotes from Shirky). Although tagging systems met people’s needs, there was still a desire for structure.

Examples:

wesabe.com – came up with sticky and non-sticky tags. Sticky tags are associated with a specific merchant, while one-time tags are associated with the transaction. This is innovative because wasabe broke up the “resource” part of the tagging triad into parts.

zigtag – introduced semantic tags. Provides definitions for each tag. They mined Wikipedia for definitions, in order to make the tags more meaningful.

Leveraging Communities

LibraryThing allows you to combine two tags and essentially makes them a synonym. The combinations are generated by the users of the system. This eliminates a lot of noise, and creates a user-generated controlled vocabulary.

A negotiation needs to happen within the community about which tags should be combined or broken apart. Interestingly, “humor” and “humour” are not combined, although overlap exists.

Automanual Folksonomies

A combination of automatic and bottom-up structures.

Etsy.com – an ebay fo hand-made items. If you are the designer of etsy, how do you create product categories when you don’t know what people will sell? So Etsy’s solution was to use tags, but define top-level categories which people had to pick.

LibraryThing – tagmash is a search feature where you can combine/subtract tags in your search. Tim Spalding used tagmash to emulate LC subject headings. This allows LibraryThing to see which books fall into specific headings. It also creates a cheap and easy maintenance system.

Rethinking Pace Layers

Pace layers is a concept developed by Steward Brand. He talked about it in “How Buildings Learn”. Peter Morville adopted this for IA.

Some layers such as taxonomies are durable and less flexible than tagging, which is adaptable. However, tags are not only flexible, adaptable, but also durable (quoted Golder and Huberman’s work on the stability of tags over time).

Buzzillions.com – created a system that leverages a product taxonomy, faceted navigation, and user-generated tags. You can use these tags to filter out products (in concert with a product taxonomy). They also turned product reviews into filtering through fragmenting text into tags, creating a faceted classification, and allowing filtering (Fragment, Facet, Tag).

Sparking Innovation

Geotagging in Flickr started with one guy tagging his photos with longitude and latitude. Then flickr build the functionality into the system, so it became automatic.

Final Thoughts

Tags are an essential component of products. This is especially evident when developers innovate with tagging, and make the product better.

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Interaction 08: Concept Models

Concept Models: A Tool for Planning Interaction by Dan Brown

My Notes:

You are trying to build a web application and you have scenarios or use cases, now what? You could do a flowchart and start thinking about steps and screens. However, this limits you to the screen approach when attempting to do interaction design. To break free of the screen, we can utilize concept models.

What is the process?

You take your requirements document and circle relevant nouns (concepts). Then you create relationships among concepts. The hardest part is selecting the right nouns and relationships. It is important to think about which concepts/relationships are important.

A concept model bridges the gap between requirements and design, especially if the requirements are not clear and you need to have a solid understanding of the design problem.

In the least, a concept model will allow you (and your team) to agree on a vocabulary, and at most you will learn something interesting or new.

So, a concept model is bunch of circles connected by lines. Concept maps are graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge (Novak, originally came up with concept models)

What are concept models for?
To Analyze and Understand
Synthesize and Design

Creating Concept Models…

Gather concepts through research
Make a list of nouns
Start with most important concepts
In the beginning, more is better
Ask questions
Start creating connections
Research and elaborate concepts
Validate concepts and connections
Economize connections
Eliminate redundancy

Sharing Concept Models…

Determine purpose and objectives
Set expectations and keep an eye on the crowd
Remember the purpose of the document – why are you creating it?
We are going to look at something abstract, but here is how it can help
Go into the meeting with a set of questions – trying to generate a conversation
Be transparent with client
Generate questions and explain implications
What’s missing?
Are these relationships correct?
Do these relationships matter?
Can we enforce the relationships?

If A has a relationship with B, A will always be in the context of B on the webpage
If we take away this node, users will lose X

Final Ideas

Use concept models to clarify underlying structure (when product or feature is unclear)
Use concept models to escape the “page” metaphor
To bridge the gab between understanding a problem and solving a problem

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Communities and Technologies Conference

C&T Conference, held in East Lansing, Michigan. June 28-30, 2007.

I presented at the Public Practices, Social Software: Examining social practices in networked publics workshop.

Below are a some notes that I made from the workshop, mainly around interesting questions or quotes:

Gina Walejko asked whether attitudes towards privacy have changed as a result of media influence or other influences?

David Gurzick wondered if SNS sites/identities will become more universal? Will we be able to break free from walled gardens and communities?

Zeynep Tufekci provided a very interesting perspective on SNS by framing them in terms of “grassroots surveillance” (other scholars call this “lateral surveillance”). This is evidenced by coaches checking up on athletes, employers checking up on students, and campus police using SNS to find out party locations. Will this kind of surveillance cause identities on SNS to be constrained as people will be conscious of the surveillance?

Lee Humphreys conducted a study on mobile SNS. She wondered how social software empowered its users and/or contributed to a “participatory panopticon”

I am not sure where I got the following (Bernie Hogan perhaps?)
Inductive software design is making changes to software based on user interaction and playfulness with software. Users will often repurpose technology beyond the original or intended design, especially social software. Both systems and designers need to be flexible enough for change.

Here are some books that Marc Smith recommends:

Evolution of Cooperation by Robert Axelrod
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom
The Presentation of Self in Everday Life by Erving Goffman
Hidden Dimenson by Edward Hall
Communities in Cyberspace by Marc Smith (coming out with a new book soon)
Anything by Tufte

I also had the distinct pleasure of meeting Michael Muller at the workshop. Michael works for IBM labs in Cambridge and does research on Dogear, their internal tagging system. From Michael I got the following tagging resources:

“Tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution” by Sen et. al. presented at CSCW 2006

“Dogear: Social bookmarking in the enterprise” by David Millen

“Social Implication of the Internet’” by DiMaggio et. al.

“Why we blog” by Bonnie Nardi

Finally, after listening to some of the talks, I learned that tagging is often used to provide indirect contextual information. For example, in Slashdot, the tags are used by Rob Malda for moderation. While on Flickr the tags are used as part of the “interestingness” score and also for location specific information.

Technorati Tags: cct2007

Filed under: Conferences

OII Day 5

Copyright 2010: The Future of Copyright presented by Brian Fitzgerald, Wendy Seltzer, Bill McGeveran

This was an incredibly interactive session on copyright. It went really fast, and so the people that did not have previous knowledge of copyright/ip fundamentals might have been a bit lost. However, the discussion was fantasically recorded by Wendy Seltzer on the Wiki.

My favorite part of this discussion was when we broke up into three groups: the content industry, the company (ex Google), and the future. I was in the “future” section which was tasked with figuring out what the future of copyright ought to look like, in any terms including economic, social, or legal. My main contribution to this argument was that we should not erect barriers just to keep old business models. The content industry needs to adapt their business models to the changing world, not attempt to stifle and choke all channels of innovation and distribution. I wish the content industry would learn from its own history and thus try not to reproduce it. For example in 1984, Universal Studios sued Sony who created the Betamax machine (early version of the VCR) for copyright infringement. This became known as the Betamax Case. The Supreme Court found that the Betamax (and VCR) were not liable for infringement because many people were using the technology for non-infringing purposes such as time-shifting tv shows. According to Wikipedia,

“The case was a boon to the home video market as it created a legal safe haven for the technology, which also significantly benefited the entertainment industry through the sale of pre-recorded movies.”

During the 90s, the video market made up more than 70% of the entertainment industry’s profit. Unfortunately, the industry has not learned and are once again attempting to stifle technology, and potentially new sources of revenue, in order to hold on to old business models.

Obama Girl Confronts the Future: New Media Literacies, Civic Engagement, and Participatory Culture presented by Henry Jenkins, Carrie Lambert-Beatty

I introduced Henry Jenkins of this talk. I am a huge admirer of his work (Read Convergence Culture now!), so it was an incredible pleasure both to meet him and also to get the chance to introduce him. I also got him to sign my Convergence Culture book (and was giddy like a fannish girl). In my introduction, my main question of HJ was: How much of the participation and engagement with democracy through popular culture gets translated to action offline? Does engagement and play online invoke a soft activism, whereby people feel that their online participation/engagement is enough involvement in the democratic process?

Henry Jenkins talked very fast and his brilliant ideas shot out at me 100 mph, so I was not able to transcribe as much as I would have liked. Here is what I was able to accomplish:

What images of democracy do we have?

• Images of founding fathers/colonials
• In 1930’s, around FDR, citizen participation
• Same images recirculate today (uncle sam)

The infusion of popular cultural gives us the chance to reinvent images to move towards a democracy that looks to the future instead of in the past. The new images of democracy could look like avatars from video video games or second life.

What does is mean for a country to use massive multiple player games to have protests?

Henry mentioned a case where 10,000 people in China protested inside a video game. We can make an analogy to the masking of identity in history to enable political action. Games allow for the masking of identity in countries where bodily protests would be too dangerous.

What is the mechanism of democracy when we draw a comparison between American Idol votes and Presidential elections ?

    Citizen activism with the power to negate – keeping bad singers on American Idol
    Testbed for Chinese democracy with American-Idol like program

Henry Jenkins highly recommend Steven Duncombe’s book “Dream”, and said that it addresses many of the issues of participatory culture and how the language of popular culture can be used to manufacture dissent. Some quotes from the book which I was able to type out fast enough ..

“Our spectacles will be participatory: dreams that the public can mold and shape ourselves…”

“Spectacles will not cover over or replace reality but amplify it”

Henry then went on to talk about the ideals of progressive popular culture:

• Participatory
• Active
• Open-ended
• Transparent
• Transformative

He believes that skills are being learned from play that will later be applied towards more serious ends such as participatory democracy. He says that kids in a hunting society play with bows and arrows, kids in an information society play with information, that could be potentially be harnessed for political ends.

Additionally, much of the language we use to talk about politics shuts people out, its too cold, and well boring. What could we do to enable the same principles, skills, and social affiliation that people feel towards video games worlds towards politics? Perhaps we can develop new language to help engage young people in politics. There is also a question of the viability of long term engagement in our current “snack culture”. Guilds in video games provide different models of engagement, but we need to learn ways to move from guilds to real world. Henry Jenkins does not know how to accomplish this yet, but feels it is an important area of research.

He also mentions that in a hybrid media culture, there is a blur between top-down and bottom-up creation (ex: astroturf, top-down media that is producing fake bottom-up videos). Therefore, new literacies and competencies are required to be able to understand videos that mix up knowledge of both politics and popular culture.

Finally, the Internet is about spreadability, moving from sticky culture to a movable culture. The cultural object gains value from being moved, as from YouTube to being embedded in a blog. We can thus be informed by the locations to which do people move videos (blogs, journals, myspace, ect), what kind of discourse springs up around those videos.

At this point, Carrie chimed in with the loss of the sense of radically itself. Because of the quantity of material that is published there is a form of radicalism fatigue. In the pre-Internet days, underground groups would attempt to provide a big punch of resistance. Now resitance is less about disruption (Adbusters, Cultural jamming) but about participation.

Technorati Tags: sdp2007

Filed under: Conferences, Thoughts