Essential Complexity in Systems ArchitectureMark Mishaev
In this presentation we will into real system architectures, present essential and accidental complexity and see patterns that could help us to reduce accidental complexity.
Originally Presented at Mobile Trends 2014 in Krakow, Poland on 16 January 2014
Almost all mobile apps fail to make back even their development costs. Add user-centric tactics and principles to help you understand users and their needs, and validate your ideas before you spend the time.
An overview of how UX Research is conducted in entrepreneurial Lean UX organizations. Principles and practices of Lean/Agile UX teams in high-tech, mostly Silicon Valley, settings.
Presented by Susan Wilhite to startupUCLA, an accelerator for UCLA students, on June 7, 2012 on the campus. Watch the startupUCLA web site for a video of the live presentation.
Essential Complexity in Systems ArchitectureMark Mishaev
In this presentation we will into real system architectures, present essential and accidental complexity and see patterns that could help us to reduce accidental complexity.
Originally Presented at Mobile Trends 2014 in Krakow, Poland on 16 January 2014
Almost all mobile apps fail to make back even their development costs. Add user-centric tactics and principles to help you understand users and their needs, and validate your ideas before you spend the time.
An overview of how UX Research is conducted in entrepreneurial Lean UX organizations. Principles and practices of Lean/Agile UX teams in high-tech, mostly Silicon Valley, settings.
Presented by Susan Wilhite to startupUCLA, an accelerator for UCLA students, on June 7, 2012 on the campus. Watch the startupUCLA web site for a video of the live presentation.
Game Engines in Game Education: Thinking Inside the Tool Boox?Sebastian Deterding
Should apprentices of a craft master one tool, making themselves dependent on it? Or become fluent in many? Should they use pre-made parts? Or should they learn how to make everything from scratch, even if that doesn't reflect actual practice? These eternal questions of craft education have become relevant for game educators with the rise of game engines like Unity. This talk will reveal firsthand experiences and strategies used to deal with the opportunities and challenges of integrating game engines in game education. / My and Casey O'Donnell's talk at the GDC Education Summit 2016.
How can you innovate in large organisations? How can you handle the fuzzy front end of innovation without resorting to (grit teeth) project management? That's all in our latest slide deck. All illustrations from Thomas Hartland.
API Driven Applications - An ecosystem architectureWSO2
Today people are connected to information sources with various disparate means. PC is the least in use. From powerful mobile devices, smart televisions, wearable electronics and other ubiquitous computing equipments the entire generation is wired to one another, creating and consuming information. Today if a business wants to reach a market segment; taking the business online is not good enough. It has to innovate on how to reach customers with dozens of available streams. Simply creating a modern e-commerce portal will bring almost no revenue, the business has to innovate on creating an ecosystem around the consumer delivering value.
For this reason the developer community is now increasingly focussing on the API design and architecture practices as opposed to application design and development. Applications are now derived by APIs and now widely exists as thin but rich layers of user interfaces. API first approach have paid well when it comes to creating multiple information streams to deliver and acquire information. Today a successful business model means not only selling the product to the customer but understanding the customer and API driven design supports this business perception.
On the other hand consumer today are far more computer literate than before; they are concerned about online identity, privacy and secure conversation. Application developers need to focus on federated identity, privacy policies and establishing trusted secure communications and sharing these mechanisms with the users by building the trust as well as making the user experience seamless.
This talk will mainly focus on the aforesaid aspects of API driven application design and development. Nuwan will discuss and demonstrate key elements of API driven application ecosystem.
Pre-Con Education: Changing End Points Getting You Down While Trying to Creat...CA Technologies
Pre-Con Education: Changing End Points Getting You Down While Trying to Create and Consume Virtual Services? Using CA APIM and CA Service Virtualization Together
Build an api eco-system you can be proud ofCisco DevNet
What do you think of when you hear “Lets build an API for that”? The typical thought process is “Its easy to expose my data/application”. Everyone in the company probably thinks the same– which is great! What happens when we build these API’s though, is that they don’t all follow the same methodology and we don’t think through how to manage their lifecycle.
This presentation presents our perspective and guidance on full life-cycle management and governance of API’s – from defining with the customer in mind, building, publishing on a single platform, supporting and retiring API’s for the business outcomes you’re driving!
Top Three Take-Aways For Participants:
1. Its easy to manage API’s as long as we think through the life-cycle and have a process.
2. The RAML “Design-First” methodology works great for API adoption by application builders.
3. Managing API’s allows easy policy enforcement, security, analytics and monetization opportunities – with benefits across business, technology and operations aspects.
The API Lifecycle, from pre-production testing to post-production monitoringPaul Bruce
A workshop on software quality in the API lifecycle, presented by Paul Bruce of SmartBear Software and Andrew Fullen of Sogeti UK for APIdays Fintech London 2015
With APIs gaining momentum as the building blocks of Application Economy, an agile API platform architecture is key to aligning API based 'Dev with DevOps'. A platform that can either quickly adapt to incorporate disruptive changes and new architecture patterns like micro services/containerization on the back end or be extended to create seamless yet secure Apps and connected mobile experiences (IoT) on the front end is the foundation of a successful and complete DevOps strategy. It is also a competitive differentiators from time to market standpoint.
Collaboration within a multidisciplinary team: working together to solve design problems more effectively. These slides are from a workshop at UX Cambridge 2012 presented with Andy Morris and Revathi Nathaniel from Red Gate. The workshop aimed to promote the role of UX practitioners as facilitators and gave participants the opportunity to try out the KJ-Method and Design Consequences game.
Entrepreneurial User Experience: Improving your products on a shoestringSteven Hoober
Presented 6 & 8 January, 2013 at Kauffman Labs, Kansas City, Missouri
Many big, successful companies hire User Experience experts to help analyze and design the system from the user's point of view, and assure their users can use their digital products. But assuming you can't hire one of those yet, Steven Hoober will teach you a little about how to embed the principles of UX into everything you do, every day, and how to improve tasks you are already doing to better guarantee the right outcomes.
There will be a focus on mobile and multi-channel experiences, but the principles willapply to any digital platform. Whether you are trying to just improve the website for your product, or create an all-new, all-digital experience, come — and bring your whole team — to put these principles into practice.
Jan 6th, 6pm-8pm
What is UX, why it's not just colors and fonts, and why designing for experience matters.
Understanding your audience, their goals, and yours.
Ecosystem design. A website is not a digital strategy: finding what your experience strategy is.
Jan 8th, 6pm-8pm
Formalizing baseline analysis with heuristic evaluations.
Tactics for discount usability testing in a multi-device world.
What you should bring:
Paper Ticket for the class
Something to work on. I will provide you with a fake project for the exercises, but if you are willing to let others see your idea, or some subset or faked version of it, then go ahead.
Your whole team. We will mix and match and you can meet new people, but bring everyone in your company or department if they have the time. If you want, your actual team can be a workshop team so you get used to the tactics being taught.
Webinar: Remote Learning - How to Brainstorm Lean Six Sigma Improvement IdeasGoLeanSixSigma.com
Group Brainstorming has been debunked by countless studies, but including others in problem solving is essential. How do we address this paradox?
The science supports a completely different, and much better approach to coming up with solutions. Join us for this 1-hour webinar where we walk you through a new way to get more ideas, better solutions and essential group engagement in a remote world.
Game Engines in Game Education: Thinking Inside the Tool Boox?Sebastian Deterding
Should apprentices of a craft master one tool, making themselves dependent on it? Or become fluent in many? Should they use pre-made parts? Or should they learn how to make everything from scratch, even if that doesn't reflect actual practice? These eternal questions of craft education have become relevant for game educators with the rise of game engines like Unity. This talk will reveal firsthand experiences and strategies used to deal with the opportunities and challenges of integrating game engines in game education. / My and Casey O'Donnell's talk at the GDC Education Summit 2016.
How can you innovate in large organisations? How can you handle the fuzzy front end of innovation without resorting to (grit teeth) project management? That's all in our latest slide deck. All illustrations from Thomas Hartland.
API Driven Applications - An ecosystem architectureWSO2
Today people are connected to information sources with various disparate means. PC is the least in use. From powerful mobile devices, smart televisions, wearable electronics and other ubiquitous computing equipments the entire generation is wired to one another, creating and consuming information. Today if a business wants to reach a market segment; taking the business online is not good enough. It has to innovate on how to reach customers with dozens of available streams. Simply creating a modern e-commerce portal will bring almost no revenue, the business has to innovate on creating an ecosystem around the consumer delivering value.
For this reason the developer community is now increasingly focussing on the API design and architecture practices as opposed to application design and development. Applications are now derived by APIs and now widely exists as thin but rich layers of user interfaces. API first approach have paid well when it comes to creating multiple information streams to deliver and acquire information. Today a successful business model means not only selling the product to the customer but understanding the customer and API driven design supports this business perception.
On the other hand consumer today are far more computer literate than before; they are concerned about online identity, privacy and secure conversation. Application developers need to focus on federated identity, privacy policies and establishing trusted secure communications and sharing these mechanisms with the users by building the trust as well as making the user experience seamless.
This talk will mainly focus on the aforesaid aspects of API driven application design and development. Nuwan will discuss and demonstrate key elements of API driven application ecosystem.
Pre-Con Education: Changing End Points Getting You Down While Trying to Creat...CA Technologies
Pre-Con Education: Changing End Points Getting You Down While Trying to Create and Consume Virtual Services? Using CA APIM and CA Service Virtualization Together
Build an api eco-system you can be proud ofCisco DevNet
What do you think of when you hear “Lets build an API for that”? The typical thought process is “Its easy to expose my data/application”. Everyone in the company probably thinks the same– which is great! What happens when we build these API’s though, is that they don’t all follow the same methodology and we don’t think through how to manage their lifecycle.
This presentation presents our perspective and guidance on full life-cycle management and governance of API’s – from defining with the customer in mind, building, publishing on a single platform, supporting and retiring API’s for the business outcomes you’re driving!
Top Three Take-Aways For Participants:
1. Its easy to manage API’s as long as we think through the life-cycle and have a process.
2. The RAML “Design-First” methodology works great for API adoption by application builders.
3. Managing API’s allows easy policy enforcement, security, analytics and monetization opportunities – with benefits across business, technology and operations aspects.
The API Lifecycle, from pre-production testing to post-production monitoringPaul Bruce
A workshop on software quality in the API lifecycle, presented by Paul Bruce of SmartBear Software and Andrew Fullen of Sogeti UK for APIdays Fintech London 2015
With APIs gaining momentum as the building blocks of Application Economy, an agile API platform architecture is key to aligning API based 'Dev with DevOps'. A platform that can either quickly adapt to incorporate disruptive changes and new architecture patterns like micro services/containerization on the back end or be extended to create seamless yet secure Apps and connected mobile experiences (IoT) on the front end is the foundation of a successful and complete DevOps strategy. It is also a competitive differentiators from time to market standpoint.
Collaboration within a multidisciplinary team: working together to solve design problems more effectively. These slides are from a workshop at UX Cambridge 2012 presented with Andy Morris and Revathi Nathaniel from Red Gate. The workshop aimed to promote the role of UX practitioners as facilitators and gave participants the opportunity to try out the KJ-Method and Design Consequences game.
Entrepreneurial User Experience: Improving your products on a shoestringSteven Hoober
Presented 6 & 8 January, 2013 at Kauffman Labs, Kansas City, Missouri
Many big, successful companies hire User Experience experts to help analyze and design the system from the user's point of view, and assure their users can use their digital products. But assuming you can't hire one of those yet, Steven Hoober will teach you a little about how to embed the principles of UX into everything you do, every day, and how to improve tasks you are already doing to better guarantee the right outcomes.
There will be a focus on mobile and multi-channel experiences, but the principles willapply to any digital platform. Whether you are trying to just improve the website for your product, or create an all-new, all-digital experience, come — and bring your whole team — to put these principles into practice.
Jan 6th, 6pm-8pm
What is UX, why it's not just colors and fonts, and why designing for experience matters.
Understanding your audience, their goals, and yours.
Ecosystem design. A website is not a digital strategy: finding what your experience strategy is.
Jan 8th, 6pm-8pm
Formalizing baseline analysis with heuristic evaluations.
Tactics for discount usability testing in a multi-device world.
What you should bring:
Paper Ticket for the class
Something to work on. I will provide you with a fake project for the exercises, but if you are willing to let others see your idea, or some subset or faked version of it, then go ahead.
Your whole team. We will mix and match and you can meet new people, but bring everyone in your company or department if they have the time. If you want, your actual team can be a workshop team so you get used to the tactics being taught.
Webinar: Remote Learning - How to Brainstorm Lean Six Sigma Improvement IdeasGoLeanSixSigma.com
Group Brainstorming has been debunked by countless studies, but including others in problem solving is essential. How do we address this paradox?
The science supports a completely different, and much better approach to coming up with solutions. Join us for this 1-hour webinar where we walk you through a new way to get more ideas, better solutions and essential group engagement in a remote world.
These slides were prepared to introduce district leaders to the design thinking process. The design challenge we worked on during this day-long introduction was to redesign high school media centers. These slides were used to step participants through each phase of the design thinking process.
Purpose Before Action: Why You Need a Design Language Systemcreckling
Abstract: Ask two designers to design the same user interface and you will likely end up with two very different designs and interactions on the page. Ask two developers to implement that page and you will end up with different code, too! And that, in a nutshell, is why you need a system.
Have you ever wondered what it takes to build your own design language system? It sounds intimidating, but it's not!
Link: https://uxpabostonconference2018.sched.com/event/E2NS/purpose-before-action-why-you-need-a-design-language-system
User Interface Design
User Centred Design and principles, Iterative Design, User research, Building Personas, Design studio method, Prototyping basics and tools, Paper prototyping, Usability testing
Pre, Post, + Parallel Expriences: Keys To Understanding Your Customers’ Holis...Chris Pallé
Building out an innovation lab for design ideation and exploration is an undertaking. Getting the right tools, supplies, physical space and materials for inspiration to support culture and empower your design dream-teams can take much time and resources – but that’s only the beginning. Frameworks and processes are cornerstones to effectively execute and churn out big ideas. In this talk, I’ll propose a framework for understanding our customers' hearts and minds that extends beyond the engagement with our organizations. Understanding these points can give you the ability to outthink, anticipate, and innovate on demands before even your customers know they have them.
A design sprint is a five-phase framework that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing. Sprints let your team reach clearly defined goals and deliverables and gain key learnings, quickly. The process helps spark innovation, encourage user-centered thinking, align your team under a shared vision, and get you to product launch faster.
The attached narrated power point presentation explains the principles process and frame work of design thinking. The material also mentions a few applications of design thinking. The material will be useful for KTU second year students who prepare for the subject EST 200, Design and Engineering.
Provided by SchoolTechPolicies.com:
This presentation was provided for staff members to discuss electronic tools that could help them throughout their school days
User Centered Execution for Mobile UX DesignersSteven Hoober
The biggest barrier to good experiences (as well as the largest problem for most UX designers) is in getting well-intended, well-designed systems executed as the business owners and design teams intend. I present the problem, and a series of philosophical changes and specific tactics to alleviate this, and to work with implementation teams to get design executed correctly.
Slideshow I will present 29 Feb 2012 at 10 am PT as an O'Reilly webcast:
http://oreillynet.com/pub/e/2103
User Experience Basics for Product ManagementRoger Hart
User Experience (UX) has matured as a discipline and radically changed how products are delivered. It touches workflows, usability, customer needs, and of course visual design and UI. Product managers can't ignore it, even if they want to... and if they want to, they're probably wrong. The tools of User Experience can help us get closer to our customers and differentiate our products.
Similar to API First: Creating ecosystems instead of products (20)
You can’t just build a successful mobile app or website without first understanding how the user thinks and what they need from you. Everything we design and build exists as a part of an ecosystem, the physical and digital environment in which the user perceives and uses it.
In this 3-hour Masterclass, we will discuss how to think specifically about the real use cases and how to pick the right technology to meet opportunities for your organization and your users.
We will practice using existing, well-proven UX design tools and methods to understand users, and to design your mobile products to engage real people.
We’ll wrap up by reviewing the actual products you are working on, to leverage what we’ve just learned to improve them even more.
Presented as a workshop at GPeC 2019 in Bucharest. Hands on parts you have to do on your own, therefore.
It’s okay to use hamburger menus! We know how people really use their mobile phones and tablets and have developed a human-centered design system to encourage your eCommerce users to find and understand your products better to close sales more easily.
Mobile touchscreens are not new. We have data on how people use their mobile phones and tablets. We can use this to create human-centered design systems for more consistent and usable design.
In this session you will learn a very simple set of tactics to place content, create more useful interactions, and design a consistent and readable navigation and way-finding system for your eCommerce mobile app or website.
Presented at GPeC 2019 in Bucharest
It's okay to use hamburger menus! We know how people really use their mobile phones and tablets, and have developed a human-centered design system to encourage your eCommerce users to find, understand, and transact better.
Presented at Mobile Trends Conference 2018, Krakow Poland
UX for Mobile with Steven Hoober at Pointworks AcademySteven Hoober
If you work on a team without sufficient time or resources and need to do design thinking outside your official role yourself, this workshop can help. There are roles in the workshop for product owners, information architects, interaction designers, content managers, UI/visual designers and developers.
In this course, you’ll discover:
The way digital products really work; layering, the stack and back
Proven UX design tools to get to the new needs of users, and how to think about exploiting new technologies
A brief history of design; how Swiss Modernism is what we mean by flat today
Designing by zones; touch accuracy and touch preference regions are not what you think
How to conquer Blank Page Syndrome by designing interfaces using mobile OS navigation patterns
The overlap between technology and use, including how people use different devices in different contexts at different times of the day
Design considerations unique to mobile, including features and sensors that aren’t available on desktop applications
Problems of poor connectivity, and how to plan for them; it’s not just “airplane mode”
How to create task flows that account for the user and the system all as one
Everything we design and build exists as a part of an ecosystem, the physical and digital environment
in which the user perceives and uses it. Though we should always have been designing like this, your
connected city, home and wearable devices give us an excuse to think specifically about the use and
technology to make it work best.
This session will discuss and demonstrate how to use proven UX design tools to get to the new needs
of users, and how to think about exploiting new technologies.
Participants will work as teams to create new product ideas, and develop them into workable services
by using technology and considering the user, their needs, and their environment.
Presented at UXPA-China UserFriendly 2016 in Suzhou, 17 November 2016.
Today’s world is full of open, and airy, beautiful, tediously identical, and unusable designs. Trends shouldn’t be taken too far, and we can easily make modern interfaces that work. But being authentically digital doesn’t just mean removing gradients and woodgrains.
In this workshop we’ll discuss principles, define how to make interfaces that work for real people in the real world, and redesign design your website, mobile app or other interface how people expect their various devices to work for them.
Presented at UXPA-China UserFriendly 2016 in Suzhou, 19 November 2016.
Phones Aren’t Flat: Designing for People, Data & EcosystemsSteven Hoober
A session at Society for Technical Communication (STC) Summit 2015
Tuesday 23rd June, 2015 9:45am to 10:30am
We like to think phones are flat slabs of glass our users touch, but it's not entirely true. Everything we design and build exists as a part of an ecosystem, the physical and digital environment in which the user perceives and uses it. Though we should always have been designing like this, multi-screening, smart homes and wearable devices give us an excuse to think specifically about the real ways people work. We'll discuss how to use technology to build products and services—not just apps and websites—for your business and users.
We will apply this with a brief exercise, so bring along a current or recently-completed project, or a favorite (or least favorite) tool you use day to day to work on.
Presented at MoDevUX on 23 March 2015
Everything we design and build exists as a part of an ecosystem, the physical and digital environment in which the user perceives and uses it. Though we should always have been designing like this, the ubiquity of mobile smart devices, connected cities, smart homes and the flood of wearables give us an excuse to think specifically about the real use cases and how to pick the right technology to meet opportunities for your organization and your users.
In this 3-hour workshop, we will discuss how to use existing, well-proven UX design tools and methods to get to the new needs of users, and how to think about exploiting new technologies in the best possible way. Participants will work together to design connected digital products through a series of engaging team exercises.
Fingers, Thumbs & People: Designing for the way your users really hold and t...Steven Hoober
For the newest version of this presentation, always go to: 4ourth.com/tppt
For the latest video version, see: 4ourth.com/tvid
Summary in text and all the linked articles, research and references are at: 4ourth.com/Touch
We are finally starting to think about how touchscreen devices really work, and design proper sized targets, think about touch as different from mouse selection, and to create common gesture libraries.
But despite this we still forget the user. Fingers and thumbs take up space, and cover the screen. Corners of screens have different accuracy than the center. It's time to re-evaluate what we think we know.
Steven reviews his ongoing research into how people actually interact with mobile devices, presents some new ideas on how we can design to avoid errors and take advantage of this new knowledge, and leaves you with 10 (relatively) simple steps to improve your touchscreen designs tomorrow.
How People Really Hold and Touch (their Phones)Steven Hoober
For the newest version of this presentation, always go to: 4ourth.com/tppt
For the latest video version, see: 4ourth.com/tvid
Presented at ConveyUX in Seattle, 7 Feb 2014
For the newest version of this presentation, always go to: 4ourth.com/tppt
For the latest video version, see: 4ourth.com/tvid
We are finally starting to think about how touchscreen devices really work, and design proper sized targets, think about touch as different from mouse selection, and to create common gesture libraries.
But despite this we still forget the user. Fingers and thumbs take up space, and cover the screen. Corners of screens have different accuracy than the center. It's time to re-evaluate what we think we know.
Steven reviews his ongoing research into how people actually interact with mobile devices, presents some new ideas on how we can design to avoid errors and take advantage of this new knowledge, and leaves you with 10 (relatively) simple steps to improve your touchscreen designs tomorrow.
Presented at ConveyUX in Seattle, 7 Feb 2014
There is a gap between the most discussed and trendy practices in design, and the way many UX professional do their work. Sketching in the browser is fine for those who only design websites (and have a coding background) but what about apps, messaging, services and systems?
In this workshop Steven will outline some of the basic principles of good tools, and demonstrate with simple hands-on exercises how to use your existing software, and other simple techniques to design for multiple screen sizes, multiple contexts and every platform.
You will learn:
- How to consider scale, and really understand portability and touch.
- Design with adaptive and responsive needs in mind.
- Specifying design, so UX speaks the language of implementation.
- Service and systems design techniques.
- Quick techniques to assure that your designs will work in context.
Presented 12 December 2013 at MoDevEast13
We are finally starting to think about how touchscreen devices really work, and design proper sized targets, think about touch as different from mouse selection, and to create common gesture libraries.
But despite this we still forget the user. Fingers and thumbs take up space, and cover the screen. Corners of screens have different accuracy than the center. It's time to re-evaluate what we think we know.
Steven will review the current state of research on how people actually interact with mobile devices, present some new alternative ideas on how we can design to avoid errors and take advantage of this knowledge, and review work you bring so we can all come up with ways to improve real world sites and apps today.
Mobile Design: Adding Mobile to Your Learning EcosystemSteven Hoober
Presented at DevLearn 2013, 24 October 2013, Las Vegas
Every platform offers unique challenges and opportunities. As mobile becomes the preferred platform, you have to address what makes it work well to assure success, satisfaction, and maybe delight. And it’s a lot more than size and touch. Mobile and desktop are very different in their principles and in the way people use them. Learn about the pitfalls and fallacies of designing for mobile and multi-platform, multi-user experiences.
How People Really Hold & Touch (their phones)Steven Hoober
Despite decades of research and years of carrying a touchscreen mobile handset around, there’s a lot of myth, disinformation, and half-truths about how touchscreens work, how users actually interact with touch devices, and how best to design for touch.
Participants in this session will get research findings and other data in order to clarify and set aside misunderstandings about user behavior and touchscreen technologies. You’ll learn the different ways and types of interactions for touch devices that will give you a solid base of knowledge you will then use to review how behavior and interaction can influence design patterns and design choices.
The Trouble with All Those Boxes: Designing for Ecosystems Instead of ScreensSteven Hoober
The desktop web has all but ruined the practice of interaction design and information architecture by the assumptions about technology and user attention, and a rigid adherence to page-based design. Mobile is different and is exposing these problems more than any other digital system. We cannot gloss over bad design anymore because it can make or break your whole organization. Many organizations, even if they address the design or user experience head on, are built to work on the desktop Web so they are having trouble really embracing mobile at the tactical level, even if their leaders set goals and objectives to do so.
During this session, participants will discuss the pitfalls and fallacies of designing for mobile and multi-platforms. You’ll learn principles and tactics for building multi-user, multi-platform experiences and you’ll learn by attempting to improve an example project. This will give guidelines for how to meet user goals, needs, and expectations in all your platforms.
In this session, you will learn:
How to recognize and avoid pitfalls in your project development, UX design, and development practices
To design your digital products as universal, extensible services and ecosystems
The principles of resilience design, and how to design robust systems that function and satisfy even when mistakes occur
How to branch design to address platform-specific features, capabilities, and expectations
Turning Boxes into Ecosystems: Successful multi-channel, multi-platform, mult...Steven Hoober
Presented as a workshop at MoDevUX 2013 in McLean, Virginia, 9 May 2013
The desktop web has all but ruined the practice of interaction design and information architecture by assumptions about technology and user attention, and rigid adherence to page-based design.
If you are paying attention to what your users expect, you'll note that mobile is really exposing these problems. And it's just getting more complex as we have to make our digital products work on TVs and set top boxes, kiosks, and now think of interfaceless devices.
Steven will discuss pitfalls and fallacies of designing for mobile, and for multi-platform, multi-user experiences. Then we will all try out some principles and tactics to solve these on examples, and discuss ways they can be applied to your organization.
Designing for ecosystems and people instead of screens and pages Steven Hoober
How successful strategies involve focusing on and embracing complexity, fragmentation and unpredictability of the way users employ mobile digital and especially mobile systems.
BE SURE TO READ THE NOTES attached to each slide. The slides themselves are mostly pretty pictures, so won't make a lot of sense.
Presented 23 January 2013 at an IXDA Silicon Valley and BayCHI event hosted by Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, CA.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
The Art of the Pitch: WordPress Relationships and SalesLaura Byrne
Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?
All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
After immersing yourself in the blue book and its red counterpart, attending DDD-focused conferences, and applying tactical patterns, you're left with a crucial question: How do I ensure my design is effective? Tactical patterns within Domain-Driven Design (DDD) serve as guiding principles for creating clear and manageable domain models. However, achieving success with these patterns requires additional guidance. Interestingly, we've observed that a set of constraints initially designed for training purposes remarkably aligns with effective pattern implementation, offering a more ‘mechanical’ approach. Let's explore together how Object Calisthenics can elevate the design of your tactical DDD patterns, offering concrete help for those venturing into DDD for the first time!
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
Neuro-symbolic is not enough, we need neuro-*semantic*Frank van Harmelen
Neuro-symbolic (NeSy) AI is on the rise. However, simply machine learning on just any symbolic structure is not sufficient to really harvest the gains of NeSy. These will only be gained when the symbolic structures have an actual semantics. I give an operational definition of semantics as “predictable inference”.
All of this illustrated with link prediction over knowledge graphs, but the argument is general.
GraphRAG is All You need? LLM & Knowledge GraphGuy Korland
Guy Korland, CEO and Co-founder of FalkorDB, will review two articles on the integration of language models with knowledge graphs.
1. Unifying Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs: A Roadmap.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08302
2. Microsoft Research's GraphRAG paper and a review paper on various uses of knowledge graphs:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/graphrag-unlocking-llm-discovery-on-narrative-private-data/
Key Trends Shaping the Future of Infrastructure.pdfCheryl Hung
Keynote at DIGIT West Expo, Glasgow on 29 May 2024.
Cheryl Hung, ochery.com
Sr Director, Infrastructure Ecosystem, Arm.
The key trends across hardware, cloud and open-source; exploring how these areas are likely to mature and develop over the short and long-term, and then considering how organisations can position themselves to adapt and thrive.
JMeter webinar - integration with InfluxDB and GrafanaRTTS
Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
In this webinar, we will review the benefits of leveraging InfluxDB and Grafana when executing load tests and demonstrate how these tools are used to visualize performance metrics.
Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
-------------------------------------------
During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
- What out-of-the-box solutions are available for real-time monitoring JMeter tests?
- What are the benefits of integrating InfluxDB and Grafana into the load testing stack?
- Which features are provided by Grafana?
- Demonstration of InfluxDB and Grafana using a practice web application
To view the webinar recording, go to:
https://www.rttsweb.com/jmeter-integration-webinar
GDG Cloud Southlake #33: Boule & Rebala: Effective AppSec in SDLC using Deplo...James Anderson
Effective Application Security in Software Delivery lifecycle using Deployment Firewall and DBOM
The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
The software team must secure its software delivery process to avoid vulnerability and security breaches. This needs to be achieved with existing tool chains and without extensive rework of the delivery processes. This talk will present strategies and techniques for providing visibility into the true risk of the existing vulnerabilities, preventing the introduction of security issues in the software, resolving vulnerabilities in production environments quickly, and capturing the deployment bill of materials (DBOM).
Speakers:
Bob Boule
Robert Boule is a technology enthusiast with PASSION for technology and making things work along with a knack for helping others understand how things work. He comes with around 20 years of solution engineering experience in application security, software continuous delivery, and SaaS platforms. He is known for his dynamic presentations in CI/CD and application security integrated in software delivery lifecycle.
Gopinath Rebala
Gopinath Rebala is the CTO of OpsMx, where he has overall responsibility for the machine learning and data processing architectures for Secure Software Delivery. Gopi also has a strong connection with our customers, leading design and architecture for strategic implementations. Gopi is a frequent speaker and well-known leader in continuous delivery and integrating security into software delivery.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
12. 12
―Sadly, no decision about
architecture is a decision, one that
will determine your success or
failure as a company.‖
– Michael Sharkey
@michaelsharkey
13. 13
―I publish a website, but tens of
thousands of my most loyal readers
consume it using RSS apps. What
should they count as, ―app‖ or
―web‖?
I say: who cares? It’s all the web.‖
– John Gruber
@daringfireball
19. 19
KJ (Post-It®) Process:
• Determine focus questions
• Get in a room
• Answer questions
• Put up answers
• Group answers, label groups
• Vote on most important groups
20. 20
Focus Questions:
• What is the product?
• What is it’s one main purpose?
• What one problem does it solve?
• How is this solved today?
• Who will use the product?
24. 24
KJ (Post-It®) Exercise:
• “What one problem does it solve?”
• “How is it solved today?”
• Put up answers
• Group answers (draw a circle)
• Label groups (write the label)
• Pick the top three (at most) groups
54. 54
―…consider the ―non-use-case‖…
Broadcasting a sound—particularly
voices—into an empty room in the
middle of the night can be both
startling and annoying.‖
– Dan Saffer
in Microinteractions
59. 59
Testing Hints:
• Test in context.
• Watch what they do.
• Encourage talk-aloud.
• Let the test drift.
• Full prototypes aren’t needed.
60. 60
Contact me for consulting, design, to
follow up on this deck, or just to talk:
Steven Hoober
steven@4ourth.com
+1 816 210 0455
@shoobe01
shoobe01 on:
www.4ourth.com
If you have been to other workshops you should understand that no amount of time really enough time. We’ll only have time to simulate exercises that take hours or days to do. So, I’ll talk a bit, you guys will work a bit, and then I will interrupt you just as it gets interesting, talk to you more, and so on. There are 4 exercises… I think... So I will stop you from doing the exercises, so we can talk about the next phase. I have arranged it so there’s no absolutely critical last lecture. If we run out of time, so be it. We’ll get through what we can as I want you to try some of this stuff yourself. … A couple years ago, this…
… is what everyone meant when they said “ecosystem.” But that was a passing fad. It’s never been really true, and Apple certainly didn’t invent the ecosystem.
Everything is an ecosystem, and good designers know this. Not just digital things either. The world is a complex, inter-related system, and physical products—especially information products—have been multi-channel for decades, at least. Newspapers and magazines are designed not just to be readable, but to be appealing to the newsstand. And, to have room for mailing labels for home delivery. Print is, in some ways, responsive.
Today, a popular magazine sells around 3 million subscriptions a week. Well, from the 60s or so through the 1990s, TV guide was vastly, vastly popular. They sold 20 million copies a week of this [IMAGE]. What is all but a database dump you pay for, and which is also full of ads. You can see why the Internet did so well. The guys who actually gathered this data realized early on they didn’t make a magazine though. They had a data product. And when the first EPGs came along, the TV-Guide channel that is the first thing that came up when you turned on the early Cable TV systems, the data they had was all ready for it. They had already been storing short and long descriptions (reruns within a week don’t get the full description, or maybe space is an issue), as well as the concept of meta-data well before anyone called it that. Derived, with some improvements for history, from http://karenmcgrane.com/category/content-strategy/ though I saw it presented instead.
Simplifying the story some, what with mergers and acquisitions over the decades, the content we see today on our much more high tech cable, satellite or streaming systems is not just the same basic format, but in some cases is the SAME EXACT CONTENT. There’s no need to write a new description for that Lawrence Welk show every time it airs, so the original 1979 description can still be pulled from the database and used. It’s all data.
OKAY,I am not going to keep talking all day. We’re going to try this out, and you will group up into teams to design your own little digital, multi-channel product. You will probably be approaching design from whatever way you are used to that meaning. Database design. Software design. Process design. But I am often going to show you stuff that looks a little different. I’ve been all sorts of things, like a FED, and a bad DBA, but you’d probably most identify me as a UX guy now. Which means design to me is something else. If we mean different things by design, how can we work together? Well, I don’t think we mean different things.
UX design is about building systems, too. We just include users as part of the system and acknowledge that they have quantifiable needs and constraints. That’s crucial to understand. Because users are the least-changing part of your system. The ones most prone to error and inconsistency, but also the one least easy to force into any particular behavior.
Making your product futureproof is about understanding the users. User centric design requires backing up, approaching problems fresh, really from the user’s point of view, and then considering what is really unique and powerful about the platforms that you are led to. It is pretty much platform-agnostic, and today with all these devices around us, we’re beginning to be freed from constraints of platforms. We are on the cusp of being able to assume the technology exists to do what we need, and we can approach this from the real-world point of view, from the user and business perspective alone.
Cities are already wired up, with utility and roadway monitoring, and stores tracking inventory, and you, at increasingly real time speeds.
People are wired. We all carry a handset, I have a smartwatch, and how many of you wore a fitness tracker at least a little in the last few days. I won’t ask you to reveal yourselves, but almost everyone with a biomedical implant (from hearing aids to insulin pumps) in the last 5 years has a wirelessly-connected device inside their body.
These are increasingly visible. This is a wired sidewalk. Okay, it’s just projected onto the sidewalk, but this is real. Subway information is projected onto New York sidewalks as a sort of ambient information radiator to remind pedestrians of their travel options. How can and will your data be repurposed, now or in the future?
Thinking of systems means thinking about how information works agnostic of channels. It means thinking of Information Architecture, data architecture, even storage technologies and what’s in the API, first. Think about some really successful products. Twitter, which is SMS based, but you use as a Website, as an app on your computer or handset, or tablet… Or take Evernote. Who used some competing tool to keep track of stuff like that a few years ago? SimpleNote, Springpad, WizNotes, Google Keep, FetchNotes, Onenote, NotionNote, SimpleNote,… ? Well, most of those disappeared or are much smaller. Why? They were great websites. Or apps. On iOS only. But Evernote is a platform, more than anything. They built not a website or an app but a product around people’s needs to capture, store and retrieve. Their platform even has a name (Trunk) and teams work on that as a product in and of itself. Thinking of their product as a service meant they could move into new platforms immediately, without re-thinking their business model, or re-architecting their systems. Being user-centric means they made decisions good for their product, and their business instead of what is comfortable or easy to build.
Some people have trouble moving past TheWeb always equaling The Internet. We use http for lots of data transfer, and what with webviews almost all apps are actually a little hybrid.If that helps you, just think of it this [QUOTE] way. At least in digital output, your Web content is going to be re-used in many, many ways, not just on your Web Site.Content is how many of us live and breathe. If you aren't asking hard questions about your content strategy, and that means reuse, tagging, promotion, archiving and use in multiple channels, you are going to die.Quote from here: http://daringfireball.net/2014/04/rethinking_what_we_mean_by_mobile_web
Even if you find it hard to think you have anything to do with traditional publishers, you do. This leaked strategy report from the NYT is FASCINATING. You all want to take the time to read it, or at least the analysis of it that’s actually at the link here. Write this down. Read it tonight. Full article link: http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/05/the-leaked-new-york-times-innovation-report-is-one-of-the-key-documents-of-this-media-age
Okay, how do we do this? How do you move from “Software Driven Design” to product-centered, or user centered design?
Things change, but keeping it simple and for now this is a good set of touchpoints to hit on to make sure you are designing for users, and for use on every platform and interface needed. Today, we’ll treat it as a process, and step through it one by one, but many of the steps are done over and over, repeatedly, or constantly.
This is a workshop. We’re going to do actual hands-on work, to start the design of a digital/physical product of some sort. And we’re going to do it by teams. BREAK UP BY TEAMS. 5-6 ON A TEAM. PM/PO + DEV + UX + ??? WRITERS? VIZD?Instead of giving you something, I want you to come up with the product we’re going to design. If you are working on one, tell your team about it. If not, or you /really/ cannot share it, then everyone throw out ideas. Remember, you can just hate your smartwatch or smart thermostat and have a better idea. We can explore existing niches. Do that now. Give an elevator pitch, no more than about 30 seconds, of your product idea. More than one is fine, then the team votes.
What did you do while deciding on your projects? One of you talked, and the others listened. You asked questions, I hope. You had a conversation, but you didn’t really spend time designing. You didn’t draw (I hope???). Keep doing this. Even when you have a week, instead of two minutes, don’t get ahead of yourself. Listen, ask, listen more. Research, read, analyze. I came to this not from some philosophical understanding, but from failing in the distant past. I am one of those “genius designers” (as Jared Spool described it more or less in an article, though I hate that term) who did really well actually interrupting explanations and coming up with solutions on the whiteboard. But, when I stop, listen, and think, I always come up with better solutions. I have done both ways at places with robust success measures. It doesn’t just make you more friendly and popular, but yields better outcomes. Jared Spool article: http://www.uie.com/articles/five_design_decision_styles/
If you get a team together who have been working on similar products, or have been talking to customers on the first or failed version, they have a lot of knowledge in their heads. Annoyingly, it’s inside their heads. And people are bad at analyzing and sharing really. But, we can use this technique to extract the information and find really, really interesting answers as a result. And, quickly. Ideally, we have a couple hours, but you can do something in a few minutes. Which is all the time we have.
These are some questions I like to ask, though I don’t always find them by this process. If some like “what is the product” seem simple, I have never asked this of a team — even a team three years into a project — without getting multiple answers. You have to know what you are working on, and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Incidentally, you can gather this without getting everyone in the room. Send out emails, internet surveys, or get people on calls. http://shoobe01.blogspot.com/2012/02/client-questionnaire.html
But we’re going to do it live. And we’ll shorten it. Let’s just answer two questions- What ONE problem does it solve. - How is it solved today?Everyone write that answer on a post-it, and put it on the whiteboard. Now I said ONE, but I mean one per Post-It. Have more ideas? Write two. Or five, or fifteen answers. That’s fine. Start doing those now, as I keep talking at you. Assume that you are the project team, and everyone’s answers are valid, so whatever you got from the elevator pitch earlier is what the project is. 20 MINUTES IF POSSIBLE.
Mark data/systems with a box or star or something. I often use different colored Post-Its, stickers, etc. but I forgot to ask for such supplies. We’ll make do. Question the truth. We are getting to core needs, so is your technology or system needed, or just convenient? Remember to judge based on ecosystem impacts. If using something due to familiarity, not so much. But because you are extending an old system to new platforms, that is good!Data and content are the same things to me. Whether someone wrote it or its something like weather data, it needs to be understood and planned for in similar ways. 20 MINUTES IF POSSIBLE.
LET THEM WORKSTOP WHEN I SEE THEM ABOUT TO CIRCLE, ETC. DONE: When you do this for a client, or your team, pick a moderator to make sure you are doing the exercise right and to keep track of time. You can’t spend more than about 5 minutes per step. You can in reality discuss this stuff for hours. If you are the designer for a real project, you won’t generally write on cards, but will just organize and moderate.
One of the things I like about this exercise, or any exercise I use now, is that it isn’t a dead end. You don’t congratulate yourself on the team building exercise, but transition it directly into the next step, and eventually to actionable or testable items. You should be able to define and measure if you meet these goals when you have launched the product, and work towards them as you progress to specify, design and build it.
Objectives and key results, or OKRs provide a nice guidance on the sorts of goals we're looking for, but they are found though a formalized process that could be seen as competing with or duplicating the exercise we just did. If it helps, think of this as a product-level version of success criteria. You will evolve this to each feature, or define features to assure you are building the right thing, as you go along. But we do NOT mean the TDD centric sorts of technical measures you may be used to if you are an Agile shop. These are much higher level.OKRs can be read about here http://www.eleganthack.com/an-okr-worksheet/
Another thing I think is critical is knowing your audience. And, It’s crucial to define the user as broadly as possible. Not just all the types of end users who will use your product, but internal users like administrators, content creators, and the people responsible for system maintenance. Whether you’re porting legacy systems to new platforms or creating all-new technologies from scratch, beyond the digital technology, there are business processes and objectives that you need to address as well. …Now, classic slow-as-molasses UCD types of teams can spend literally years and hundreds of thousands of dollars creating personas. Forget budgets, speed alone makes this impossible. By then, the world has changed. There are many ways to speed this up.
This term I got from Kelly Goto, and I quite like it. You have in mind for your project — and I mean all your projects, and by “you” I mean everyone on the project — what type of users it will address. You do, but mostly you don’t actually say that out loud. Simply running an exercise like the KJ, with post-its and everyone in a room (or questionnaires, etc.) can gather all the information everyone presumes, and much that is actually known from previous projects and monitoring user behavior like sales. You can get an 80% persona with information on hand in a few hours.
I don’t mean that Google has started offering a persona service. I mean using simple internet search to fill one out. I have done this, so successfully that others pointed it out in a meeting where one of these 18 month efforts was being presented: “but Steven made 4 pretty good personas in 3 days last week.” I did it by taking that presumptive persona information, then searching on terms that came up. This was a professional role, so I used LinkedIn groups, job postings and resumes. But you can do the same by stalking forums, blogs, and other internet properties where people of the role you expect hang out. A couple days can immerse you in the culture so much you can start to understand it quite well.
There’s a lot to be said for taking even a little bit of time to do real research. Seeing how people really work in their natural environments is enlightening. This is a good example. As part of just testing a product related to this [MFV dongle] I was on site with these truck maintenance guys. Years into this project, I found this. They are, after many failed attempts like the thing he’s holding, disappointed with digital recordkeeping and data collection, so have a room of cubbyholes with paperwork. That had never come up. They didn’t think it was worth mentioning. I just stumbled across it. What are you missing by making assumptions about your users?
The exercise we did that’s all over these walls, is supposed to be basically technology-agnostic. It’s about users, and to some degree benefits your organization can gain. Well the next step is to start modeling the process. But I want you to stay technology-agnostic, as much as possible. There are assumptions about the scope of the work that are based on technology, how your info is stored, what sort of wearable it is. Ignore those. Don’t throw them away, but assume the previous exercise covered them,…
And build a user task flow. This is about designing truly from the user’s point of view. Think about them, their motivations, their goals and the real, broader environment. About what they already do with their day. If it is raining, or they are driving vs. walking.
There are many ways to draw this. But most of all, make sure you talk about services, data, sensors, networks and users. Not screens, pages, buttons.
It doesn’t have to be pretty. Just start with boxes, or even literally take post-its off the wall and start the diagram from the previous exercise work.
If more comfortable with thinking about the user and their environment directly, this is a good place to use the storyboard. And, feel free to use several methods. Not just in your work, but now. Someone can draw the flow of all the data and all possible processes at the same time someone else is drawing a storyboard. But collaborate. Everyone talk, and grab the pen to take over if you must.30 MINUTES, BUT LIMITED!
But you may be wondering, how do we think about data, and systems and connectivity? Well, do that also. None of this is just about users, or just about any other one facet. Ideally, you never again make a document that disregards other layers of the stack. In this case, your data and interconnectivity is critical. It might be hard to see, or to make everyone understand that a box is not about UI but process. You may need to extract it more explicitly like this.
Or, boil it down to the fundamentals. At the data model level I find lots of developers missing out on doing deliberate design, and assuming things that may not be the best choice. This describes an integrated system, with synching to remote servers, and only using the capabilities each device type has.
20 – 30 MINUTES
The next design artifact you will build is going to get much more specific. And if we have the time, we’ll even start making one. But before you can get there, you have to stop to understand again, and make sure you are designing the details the way the user will actually consume them.
First, always work at device scale. Don’t do all the drawing on the computer. Don’t show off your designs on PPT to a conference room. A simple way is to draw on printouts the same size as your device. Any device. The Pebble guys had printouts the size of the expected watch screen.For mobile interfaces, take your digital drawings as you progress through the design, and stick them on the handset. [SHOW EXAMPLE ON PHONE]
I assume you all know the story of Jeff Hawkins, even if you don’t recognize the name. One of the founders of Palm. He carried around a block of wood — supposedly this one, wrapped in tape and a paper printout — and pretended to take notes on it when he would want to use it. He got to try out the concept, in context, in much the way a real user would. He specifically focused on the form factor as a previous project had failed, he believed because it was too big to be pocketable.
Me, I would have actually written on it or something. Which I did. This is me working on an eReader, before the iPad. Using my windows tablet wasn’t great because it was so big, and without a general-purpose computer to put screenshots on, I made a plywood tablet instead. We wrote on it, taped printed designs to it, and it was used when presenting early concepts to the clients even. Recently, working on a wearable I cannot otherwise discuss, we make sure there are mockups of the wearable around all the time. Mockups. They do NOTHING. Chunks of metal and plastic. But it provides not just an anchor for discussions, but you can really get into the mind of the user and think about how they will wear it, and how they will refer to it when it blinks and buzzes at them.
Behind everything, there are wires, radio antennas, batteries, sensors, ICs, resistors, films, adhesives. If you are building for the real world, and don’t plan for when the world intrudes, you will fail.
Understand your technology, and check yourself. There are many technologies you have to use. And all of them I see misunderstood very often. You will probably never use GPS for your app, but location, which is derived from many sources. Or displays. We like to pretend they are made of pixels, like when you zoom in to Photoshop, each one a square of a different color. But display technologies are not like that, and they vary. Even simple technologies often matter a lot. Do you want to use all of the phone’s battery in an hour? Better understand the impacts of what you do on the technologies.
Radios are a favorite of mine, I hear lots of talk about how mobile networks are slow, but that’s not /really/ true. They can be, but the best are broadly as fast as your typical home network. But they do have horrid latency. For various reasons, you can loose half a second per request. So, how’s that responsive site with a couple javascript files, every image loaded separately, some webfonts, etc? How long does your site take to load if you have 41 files at half a second each? Let’s do the math: Oh, too long. So, you don’t just cut down page weight, but you use single js files, or embed them. Single CSS files, or embed them. I have even made stuff with Base64 images, so the whole web page is one call. It works. It is worth the effort to optimize for your technology.
Connectivity may be such an issue that no client level work can solve it. Here is a diagram I made describing how the only way we can get the needed product to work in Africa is to build (or lease space on) local data centers and get them piped straight into the mobile network operators.
In case you think this is all on the implementation side, so you’ll worry later, wrong. The software design, the interaction design, and even the information architecture and data concepts can induce failure if you are not careful. I’ve already mentioned Evernote’s competitors, but there are many other cases. Twitter keeps the numbers close, but thought they were a website for a while, to the detriment of use rates on other platforms. Right now I am working on a revision of the system that uses this [MFV dongle]. This is a prototype, and the real one will be much, much smaller. Anyway, we built the product to live read a remote system. Much, much, much later we found out it cannot be live, but gets snapshots of the remote system. Like, after it was built.
We tested it, and even with a few tweaks, it didn’t work. The concept of the app design didn’t make a bit of sense in fairly fundamental ways. We have video, which I cannot show you as the app is secret, of people failing to do what we expect. I am just finishing a moderate redesign of the interface to reflect the way the system works. These are non-trivial differences, as it turns out. You can’t add a button or explain it, but have to build the interaction around the way the system works. Tab bars went away entirely, the menu items all changed. The first several pages we show people every time they enter the app… gone. Serious changes.
So with those fears in mind, let’s design a system. Not an ecosystem, but a single system. You are going to take the task flow, and now we’ll make it platform specific. In reality, we’d branch it to the many platforms needed, and should even make as part of this exercise identifying the various platforms. Here, go ahead and assume one exists. Whichever was posited during the elevator talk at the beginning, whether smart shoes, or a thermostat better than Nest, that’s the platform we are using, not the desktop website or the mobile app. Go through the task flow, and mark all the points where you are sure the connected device will have some input or output. Then, pick two or three of these vertices, as again we only have a little bit of time, sit down, and design the interface and interaction that goes with these.
Draw at least two platform interfaces. Three is better. I mean different platforms; desktop, mobile, TV, or different interfaces that use the same data in different ways. Print or email or packing labels are fine also. Think of where content appears.Only do about one page for each. Make it the same one for each platform.Then draw, next to it, by marking with letters on the drawings themselves, the data. I want you to get a sense of the content or data you are using by scale or context.
Then, and mostly, I want you to describe what is happening. You may also draw. Not just flows, but interfaces and interactions. But then describe the interactions. This is where I get ranty about not prototyping, but drawing and describing. As we move to these all-new and arbitrary devices, you can’t code them up. They might not exist as you create the hardware. You have to be able to draw and specify things like the lights, the blink rate, the way the user shakes or waves at it.
Remember when I said you need to design in multiple ways? Well this is where it’s time to start thinking really seriously about things like content and data design.If you don’t integrate this thinking into the design early on, the implementation teams for each platform will go off and create their own solutions. You will end up with a fragmented and expensive to maintain product at best, and much more likely a broken one. Do you think it’s reasonable that your bank’s website takes up to 24 hours to reflect a deposit you made at an ATM? It’s the same system, isn’t it? Don’t be like that. 20 MINUTES
When you get out in the world and start drawing like this, remember to think of this step in the process as an extension of the previous drawings you did. This is a mobile phone app, but that’s the only one I can show you now. You don’t have to, ever, jump to “now we’re doing wireframes” or worse “comps.” Keep with the user-centric methods. Here, it’s screens, but the user is shown walking down the streets of Nairoi. And it’s not all the app. The first screen is SMS, then he goes to the Website, where he’s enticed to download the app. You can show flows and interactions and user context. You probably should.
And, to think of both what is a good feature, and what is an anti-good feature. Are you making your users do too much work you can do for them? Are you making them mistrust the system? Are you actually scaring them with how your system works? Origin of the quote: https://readmill.com/admitonetojl/reads/microinteractions/highlights/ggn3gg
The developers here especially may be familiar with something called SIT, or some variation of System Integration Testing. It’s an end to end technical test of the system. First, it’s increasingly a lie. Are you testing on the real hardware, on mobile networks other than in your corporate office? Outside? With noise and glare and distractions? Because those all matter. The system includes people. We’ve traditionally broken than out as a usability test, if we even bother to test them. But users and their context is the most troublesome part of the experience it turns out
First, yes, you should understand. Make sure the system basically works. Check the hardware and make sure your fundamental assumptions are correct. Here, we’re trying out the UI on an ePaper device. There’s very little info out there on design for ePaper, so we had to do it all experimentally. Using this view camera and trial and error to make just the colors readable. There were many other parts to test of this.
Test, test, test. Test on real devices, not just emulators. First, in your office, like this maybe. This is me trying out a responsive app, to make sure it works right on as many devices as I can. If you have a multi-screen experience, get the phone, desktop and smart watch out at the same time, and do end to end testing to make sure it doesn’t just work, but makes sense. Wear it around, try it. Does it work in reality?
Test in the field. With real hardware, in real circumstances. With real users if you can. And, you can. User testing is not that hard. In fact, I find that not having a lab makes it easier and cheaper. You have to know how to test — how not to mess up the results with your opinions — but you go to the users, so they are easier to get ahold of. Here, were testing this dongle on trucks. The photo is from the user’s point of view. He wore these video glasses so we can review the work later. Even the data gathering is literally from the users POV. That helps, and you see stuff you couldn’t get later. As you see here, we also are getting off the screen. We capture everything the user sees, not just the handset.
Test in the context of their environmentWatch what they do, not what they sayGetting people to talk is easier than you would thinkThe best ideas come from unscripted threadsA complete prototype isn’t needed to test your conceptshttp://www.usabilitycounts.com/2013/08/20/five-things-ive-learned-from-usability-testing/
If you miss these addresses, just Google my name and you’ll find me. QUESTIONS – WHAT DID I NOT COVER
Just trust me on this one: Everything you do is too complex to adequately model and map. Assume you have always missed something, so you are prepared to deal with the unexpected, both in design and so you can modify your product over time to take advantage of new ways you find people using your learning information. You could just remember instead…
I say there’s something called Resilience Design. Or there should be. Here’s a simple example… I also still wear normal watches. One is a dive watch, because it’s shiny, not because I am a diver or anything. It is one of those with a twisty ring around the outside. That part with the numbers twists around. If you don't know, and I didn't until recently, this is used as a simple timer. But on mine, and on all dive watches (vs. Aviators watches), the ring only goes one way. The clicky detent lets it go counter-clockwise, only. WHY? … Because it's for timing remaining air. The ring might get bumped and change it's setting. Having it show less time might be inconvenient, but going the other way might kill you. And, you don't even need to know this. It just works. That's the sort of brilliantly-simple answer I am talking about with resilient design.
You need to make your designs resilient because users will never, ever do what you expect. You, or others in your organization, probably draw diagrams that assume everyone starts at the home page, drills down through a preferred path and gets their information. It’s not true. People bookmark, share, and search. They use your process in unexpected ways, and your system returns errors or data you didn’t expect. If you try to design to accommodate these, or to test for them in the traditional use case model, you CAN’T. For one project I worked on, I did some quick math and to create the use cases for all variations would take approximately the remaining life of the universe. Really. These are arbitrarily complex products, so don’t lament, embrace the complexity.
On a typical website, I find that home page as the entry point is rarely over 10%, and is often so low as to be ignored; hundreds of visits a month when hundreds of thousands visit the site. This is real data.
This is even more important with the way people engage on mobile devices. People seek out and consume content sometimes a few seconds at a time. They get interrupted, and come back to read a bit again so it has to be ready for them. Does your information work well and make sense if set aside for a few minutes? A few hours? Make sure session expiry and other technical things don’t get in the way of users coming back. And, remind them to come back. Use SMS, and app notifications or reminders within the site or app of items that may be interesting or that they didn’t complete. Or emails. Or postcards. Or whatever fits the way you have a conversation with your customers or users.
YOUR PLATFORMS ARE INHERENTLY FRAGMENTEDMany U.S. companies assume or extrapolate their experiences onto the rest of the world. Not only is the rest of the world different, parts of it are radically different. I worked in San Francisco for a year, and it is not the US, so is sort of terrible that this is where everything is supposed to come from. This chart is smartphone OS penetration by region. The legend hardly matters (but is obvious for some… Android is green, iOS is white), but instead look at the wild variations between regions. Local variations, by region, or by type of user within a region, are radically different.
An astonishing 1.8 billion people regularly use the mobile internet. Mostly, that means web browsing, But look at this.There are 7 billion humans on earth. Remember, that’s everyone who is alive. So, essentially everyone who can feed and clothe themselves uses SMS. FIVE BILLION users. If you think Facebook is the killer app of the internet, that’s SIX TIMES bigger. And SMS is a great engagement engine, with ten times the response rate and 100 times the response speed of reliable things like email. Oh, and nowhere near that many people actually have an email address. More people subscribe to SMS news alerts than get a newspaper. Does re-engagement mean SMS? Yes, probably.