As previously mentioned, I've been wanting to start doing remote testing, so I put together this table on features offered by the various tools that are out there. I figured it might be handy for others, too, so here you go. I haven't used any of them except for Userlytics (which I do like), so these aren't endorsements, just things I've found.

All of these tools are focused on testing mockups and live sites, which is what I'm most interested in right now.

*Note that everything marked "live" except for Google Website Optimizer can probably also be used for interactive wireframes and prototypes available at a public url, for instance something created with Invision.

In making this list I also ran across a few other tools, but I didn't look at them in the same depth:

• Ethnio: recruits participants for use in a remote test while they are browsing your site
• OptimalSort and Cart sort analysis tool: open card sorting
• Treejack: Information Architecture validation
• UserZoom: card sorting, IA validation, and surveys as well as screenshot and live site testing
• WebSort: card sorting
• PlainFrame: IA validation

If you've used any of the tools above, I'd love to hear about your experiences! Likewise, if you have corrections or additions, I'd love to get those too :)

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Peter Merholz (@peterme on Twitter). Slides are available on Slideshare.

• "Closing the delivery gap"--90% of polled firms thought they were customer focused, but only 8% of their customers agreed
• Forrester's 2012 Custemer Experience Index showed that more than half of experience are not good--Why? tech is more immediate, accessible, distributed, people are surrounded by better design
• Design processes and methods are mature, not seeing rapid methodological change like we did before
• Org chart is perceived as just how things are done, but it was originally invented to help a railroad company manage vast network of rail lines. Good for supporting mass manufacturing, replaces independent thinking.
  • The org chart has become the operating system of a lot of companies and applied (inappropriately?) to office work: the cube farm is an org chart made manifest. Max Weber: "The 'iron cage' of bureaucracy"
  • Good for industrial/information age--products, manufacturing, efficiency, ownership, silos, isolation
  • Not good for connected age--services, customer experience, access, flow of information instead of goods
• The connected age: the complexification of CPUs (from the information age) + connectedness of internet = chaos and unpredictability
  • People are really good at dealing with chaos and unpredictability if given the license to do so, bureaucracies (and pre-determined rules) are not (e.g. southwest airlines saying that they can't anticipate all problems and giving the employees the license to deal with things under their own initiative)
• Relationships (a key part of the connected age) are built on trust
  • 2011 Temkin Trust Ratings, 2012 Temkin Experience Ratings (highly correltated with trust rankings)
  • Customers are willing to trust companies where management is willing to trust the staff
    • Southwest vs. any other airline has very humanistic culture, gives staff flexibility because they can't anticipate all problems in advance--gives employees lattitude to act in favor of customers, lets customers trust company
    • Nordstrom's one rule "Use good judgement in all situations"
    • Trust makes it possible to scale empathy, strict rules with no leeway for employee judgement do not
  • How to widen circle of trust? trust the customer
    • USAA bank highest customer experience ranking in the country--they were the first bank to do mobile check deposit, which made fraud more likely but they were willing to do that because they were willing to trust their customers more than anyone else.
      • Trusting their customers to do the right thing unlocked new opportunities, the customer and the business both win
    • Collaborative consumption movement started with craigslist, built on the belief that humans are fundamentally good. Also ZipCar, Couch Surfing, AirBnB
    • Panera's "pay what you can" cafes--they put up the prices that it would cost, on average they get 80%. Most people pay full price, some can't, some won't, and some overpay
• Trust isn't sufficient: Netflix puts a lot of trust in their employees, but their pricing changes blew up on them.
  • They didn't realize that any relationship, even a business relationship, has an emotional component. Changes made people angry. Services are an ongoing relationship and emotions are especially important.
  • The decline in their stock price is the value of empathy
• Design thinking: almost everything valuable about design thinking is actually stuff you do in kindergarten
  • Expressing visually and tactilely (drawing and sketching)
  • All contrubutors equal
  • Kinesthetic engagement (cube farm mentality harms ability to create, ought to be creating and working and behaving with whole bodies)
  • TED talk: the marshmallow challenge (build a structure with some specific items): kindergarteners do better than business school grads because they aren't jockying for power and they create successive prototypes instead of trying to figure out teh best structure beforehand
  • Letting kids be kids is actually letting people be people, and the connected age requires business to embrace what makes us human. Side note: don't let Facilities dept. get in the way, have to work around them to get a more kindergarten-like experiences in the workplace.
• How can you make your organizations more human: be more social, playful, respectful, emotional, interdependent, sensorial, creative, trusting, physical

Key take-home points for me:

I liked the examples of Southwest and Nordstrom. It's something I already knew from my own community management and customer service work, but it's good to hear the reminder every now and then. It's an argument I anticipate having soon, too (right after I convince them that yes, they really do need moderation...).

I also liked the point that the drop in Netflix's stock was the value of empathy, I hadn't thought about that before. I'm already on board with the need to understand and empathise with my users, of course, but you don't often get such a dramatic demonstration of the monetary value. Perhaps value sensitive design would be useful in making sure this doesn't happen?

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Katey Deeny (@followsprocess on Twitter). Slides are available on Slideshare.

• See vsdesign.org for more on value-sensitive design
• Value-sensitive design is not applied a lot in corporate or business environment, though it has been for non-profits and academia
• If we know what the values of intended audience are, we have a greater chance of engaging them in meaningful ways
• Different groups of people value different things--have to balance
• Values can change depending on what context you're thinking about it in (e.g. you may prioritise your values differently at work vs. at home)
• Recognizing tensions between values helps surface potential problems, informs design startegy
• Example: SXSW homeless hotspots (www.homelesshotspots.org)
  • big objection: turns human beings into pieces of infrastructure
  • how to design in a way that would be less controversial?
• Method
  • Identify value, tech, context of use
  • Identify direct and indirect stakeholders (good to surface a lot of indirect stakeholders and then narrow down to the most important ones)
  • Identify benefits and hirms of stakeholders
  • Map benefits and harms onto values
  • Identify potential value conflics (in the example below she shows listing them all out and finding pairs that conflict)
  • Integrate value considerations into your design work--you may have to privilege some stakeholders before others, may not be able to reconcile all of the values, but identifying and examining them can still help you understand what you're doing and even help you do it
• SXSW case study
  • value: empowerment
  • tech: wireless access
  • context of use: homelessness and SXSW (two very different contexts)
  • direct stakeholders: homeless, conference attendees, homeless shelter, ad agency that created it
  • indirect stakeholders: wireless provider, Austin community, conference organizers, nearby business owners with competing wifi, homeless people in general, advocacy groups
  • benefits and harms
    • homeless participants:
      • benefit: working with the public for 4 days -> values: engagement, earning, humanization
      • harm: no ongoing support -> values: stability
    • SXSW attendees:
      • benefit: wifi -> convenience, access
      • harm: discomfort dealing with a social problem -> respect, comfort
    • shelter:
      • benefit: helps tenents earn money for residents -> empowerment, philanthropy
      • harm: but no infrastructure to continue the program -> maintainability
    • ad agency:
      • benefit: publicity -> fame
      • harm: criticism -> notoriety
    • autin community:
      • benefit: positive interactions with the homeless -> empathy, change
      • harm: negative attention about the problem -> status quo
    • homeless community:
      • benefit: creates awareness -> hope
      • harm: does not create sustainable change -> sustainability
    • advocacy groups:
      • benefit: could inspire new programs -> innovation
      • harm: highlights the complexity of the problem (can't just do a cool thing for 4 days and expect the problem to be fixed) -> encouragement
    • wireless carrier:
      • benefit: brand equity -> recognition
      • harm: negative brand association (especially if it flops) -> reputation
  • list all values together and find value conflicts, e.g. humanization and notoriety, then integrate into design work

Key take-home Points for me:

I hadn't really heard anything about value-sensitive design, so this is basically an all-new method for me. It can be tricky balancing different stakeholder interests, this method seems like it might help. It also seems like this process should be part of creating anything you want people to really have an emotional connection to. I will have to try it out.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Franco Papeschi (@bobbywatson on Twitter). Slides are available on Slideshare.

• GDP growth in sub-saharan africa has been much more positive than US or Europe in the past 5 years, majority of population is becoming middle class: there is a technological and cultural renaissance in Africa, but it's different than the technological revolution in the US and Europe
  • Prevalence of mobile phone 53%, vs 1.4% with landlines, or 12.8% with internet
  • 5% of phones are smartphones, 25% feature phones, the reast dumb phones that were popular in the US and Europe 8-9 years ago: "dumbphones for smart people"
  • Phone number is a proxy for identity: used to label owned items, can call the number and ask to use it
  • People and workplaces are very mobile, e.g. photographer with no shop: he has a motorcycle, a portable printer, and a camera
  • Radio is a key channel in rural regions: low-density population, strong oral tradition, great way to share information among themselves. Community radios (for farmers, by farmers) used to discuss local topics
• Can't really talk about Africa as a whole, really big place. One key differentiation is 6 different large language groups, 2000-3000 different languages Secondary (colonial) langauges are used to communicate across communities.
• 63% adult literacy rate, but higher in young people. Formal reading and writing not necessarily functionaly literate, people lose it if they don't practice it.
• Some example services and applications that people are building
  • Ushahidi: developed after protests and violence of 2007 Kenyan election shut down parts of Nairobi and made it hard to know what parts of the city were safe. People report things to Ushahidi, which puts it on a map. Has also been used after Haiti earthquake, Japanese tsunami
  • iCow: helps farmers keep track of the fertility and health of their cattle, gives information and tips on how to make cows healthier, and makes it easier for farmers to keep their cows healthy when there isn't easy access to a vet
  • Taxirank: allows citizens of Capetown to compare quality, price, etc. of different taxi companies
  • M-Pesa: only 20% of the African population has a bank account (banks consider them unprofitable because there's little money and they transfer too often), so people have to physically travel to lend or borrow money. M-Pesa puts it on a simcard and makes it easy to transfer or pay at the supermarket without carrying money around. Has mvoed 1.8 billion dollars, 5% of the GDP of Kenya.
  • Esoko, a market information service (like Bloomberg for farmers in Kenya)
    • 60% of people working in Africa work in agriculture: many farmers are mostly personal consumption with some to sell to gain money and grow their business. They have to decide what market to go to to sell their goods, but they don't know where they will be able to get the best price that day.
    • Esoko employs agents to gather prices of different commodities across different markets and keeps records of trends over time so you know if you should sell all of it now or wait
    • Many groups with different needs and different communication channels
      • buyers use phones and newspapers
      • farmers have phones and newspapers and word of mouth
      • big farmers (communities of farmers) use the internet and smartphones
      • traders (who buy and sell at the market) have phones, smartphones, internet, word of mouth, but newspaper wasn't fast enough; traders need to see trends, find ways to manage your stock and flow, and manage the relationship with their customers
      • Esoko agents have smartphones, internet, word of mouth
    • They started as a service but became a platform with many modular features (prices, maps, trends, CRM...) that vary depending on context (with technology apparently used as a proxy to guess at the user group's needs)
    • Esoko's agents gather information, but are also delivering information face-to-face, that became one of their main touchpoints so they provided agent with more tools to track their informal conversations--not just phones, smartphones, internet, etc., their human infrastructure became and additional word-of-mouth channel
    • They test new features in each channel, try to see what is the impact on other channels when feature is added in one
  • Radio Marché: community radio in Northern Africa, solves the same problem as Esoko but for a mostly non-literate, tightly knit community with a strong oral tradition
    • Ethnographic studies and "technology probes" (give tech to people and see how they use it) showed that people had trouble trusting new technology that wasn't tied into existing habits and that most people don't seek out information (as with Esoko) but would rather receive it from people who are broadcasting it
    • A farmer gives price over the phone to an automated service, which automatically converts it to text and aggregates with other prices. Prices are turned back into synthesized speech and broadcast to local community radio and made available at a phone number. Each community radio has a different text-to-speech voice, and the uniqueness creates trust.
    • Shows that SMS is not necessary, can just use audio and web (however, a deaf audience member points out that it may be better to combine channels, speaker says yes, not advocating discarding channels, but perhaps necessary to move toward multi-sensorial as well as multi-channel)
    • Prioritizes community and how community works and behaves over technology
• Ask yourself
  • what channels are likely to expand or shrink the size of the audience, relationship of audience and channels
  • can you divide your service in "small doses" that are flat, combinable that allow you to become almost like a platform
  • how do you facilitate contribution and remove friction: collect information vs allow farmers to shout information
  • how do you increase trust in the servce
  • what is the consequence of your workflow on your design? Esoko agents as internal mechanism become touchpoint
  • how does your channel strategy change your business model? Esoko vs radio = different business model, costs, activities
• Tech shapes culture, culture shapes technology: need to foster both directions, see how tech is changed by culture

Key take-home points for me:

I loved hearing about familiar techniques solving very different problems and even solving the same problem in two different parts of Africa very differently based on cultural context. It's a strong reminder to research existing practices and keep them in mind when introducing something new to make sure that it's accepted. I also loved the point about the Esoko agents changing from being necessary infrastructure to a key touchpoint&emdash;another reminder to pay attention to what people are doing after a solution is introduced and evolve with evolving practices!

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Carol Smith (@carologic on Twitter). The slides are available on Slideshare.

• Even if you have the best design you won't get a good user experience if you can't negotiate and get it to happen
• You need need confidence in negotiation, and the best way to get it is to have a Best Alternative To Negotiation Agreement (BATNA): knowing what your course of action will be if negotiation fails (not the same as a walk-away point) gives you
  • a standard to measure negotiated options against and determine if you have something better than no negotiation at all
  • freedom to pursue more creative solutions (because you have that standard to compare against)
• Make sure you ask for more, and don't accept the first offer
• The better your BATNA the greater your power. You don't have to disclose it, especially if yours is weak.
• Preparation for negotiation
  • Who are you dealing with and what is important to them?
  • What are their preferred negotiation strategies?
• Separate people from the problem
  • Match culture to minimize misunderstandings (clothing, attitude)
  • Not about the people in the room--minimize emotions (positive or negative)
• Compromise is the goal of negotiation, you want to come up with the best solution for everyone. Focus on your shared interest:
  • Use "we", not "you" or "me"
  • Work toward mutual gain within constraints: cost, time, resources/people, level of insights, etc.
• Use objective criteria and standards like web analytics, surveys, internal measurements over time. Have the analysis beforehand or offer to go gather it as part of the negotiation.
• Resources
  • Measuring the User Experience by Thomas Tullis and William Albert
  • Getting to YES: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher and William Ury
  • It's Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects by Tomer Sharon
• Audience question: her boss's BATNA is "I said to do it so do it." Speaker says "I always say that when people actually see usability tests it turns their world upside-down"--make advocates in your organization, maybe in your own time (e.g. organize brown-bags and other events)

Key take-home points for me:

Having a clear picture of what I will do if negotiation completely fails sounds like a great idea and is something I should remember to do. And I should really read that Getting to YES book.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Inge De Bleecker (@ingedebleecker on Twitter). The slides are available on Slideshare.

• Remote usability testing usually has a participant and a moderator in the same session with screen sharing and audio, moderator can ask participant to complete task and ask clarifying questions
• Unmoderated--participant and moderator not sharing session, you need online means to provide tasks to the participant
• Crowdsourced--how we go about recruiting participants, outsourced to undefined, large group of people without any constraints
• Examples
  • Screenshot click test: Usabilla, Userzoom, Usabilityhub
  • Screenshot timed test (participant gets to look for only ~5 seconds, then is asked questions): Userzoom, Usabilityhub
  • Task-based usability study with online survey (longer session, mirrors in-lab testing more closely): Usertesting.com, Loop11, Userzoom, DIY
• Advantages of remote unmoderated testing
  • use of personal devices, get a nice breadth of devices
  • in own environment
  • fast turnaround time
  • cheap(er)
• Disadvantages of remote unmoderated testing
  • no additional questions
  • can't observe participant (but you may be able to get them to do screen capture and audio)
• Process same as most usability tests: recruit, task plan, test, analyze, report
• Need committed participants for higher quality, better completion rate, longer sessions
  • Compensation: if you pay peanuts you'll get monkeys
    • For one of her clients the sweet spot is $35, but may have to pay more for very specific profiles
  • It can help if the participant has loyalty to something tied to test, e.g. to crowdsourcing company that recruits them b/c crowdsourcing company provides ratings for participants and they want to keep rating up (usertesting.com)
• Tips for writing a task plan--unmoderated remote testing is high risk, you have to make sure that will go perfectly or you will lose people and completions even if they are highly committed to completing the tasks
  • Participants can't get blocked while completing tasks or answering questions
  • You only get one shot, can't observe so can't help participants work around troubles--but you can babysit results to see if the first few people can get through tasks and questions, fix test if they can't
  • Tasks need to guide without influencing behavior
  • Make all questions required so participants don't get lazy (but make sure there's an answer available for people who really don't know what to do)
  • Encourage people throughout survey to think aloud or write down: generally people are pretty good about doing it
  • Task and question types depend on tool--DIY is more labor intensive, but there are very few constraints relative to commercial tools
• DIY remote testing: put questions questions in Survey Monkey (or Google Docs), participant must open site in another tab and go back and forth
• Results are all self-reported data, have to think about how you interpret that--however, people still are explaining their thinking and you can still get a lot of information
• Can use for tests in a language that the moderator does not speak and use translator
• At least 10 or often 15-20 participants per profile (bumped up from 8 for lab test)

Key take-home points for me:

I just recently read Nate Bolt's Remote Research (highly recommended, btw) and I have been wanting to put some of that into use. What was most interesting to me about this talk was that she goes one step further, to say that yes, you can have unmoderated tests that mirror the moderated ones, with questions in some external tool like Survey Monkey. That loses even more of the ability to see what the participant is thinking, but it might be something worth trying out while I'm trying out other remote research techniques.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Paris Buttfield-Addison and Jon Manning (@thesecretlab on Twitter).

• Piles vs files: research from the 80s on understanding software by looking at the way people manage their pysical offices and workspaces: documents, scraps of paper on desks, filing cabinets, etc.
  • A piler heaps chunks of content all over their desk, create a very messy desk (most people are pilers)
  • A filer has an organized, rigid, controlled, possibly complex system for managing stuff
• Many users prefer working in clutter, measurably more productive and efficient. This is because piling lends itself to:
  • Discovery--finding links between two previously separate topics or projects
  • Reminders--it's at the top of the pile, front and center, so you'll remember it; things that are used a lot are close at hand, things that are new are on top
• Physical layout of stuff maps closely to their mental model; piles on the desk mirror how things are grouped in their mind
• People who are messier feel more in control, that they have a better grip on how their work is organized. They don't learn rules, the organization flows naturally from how their mind works.
• The real world is not a neat little box like your application may be: contrast between clean, simple applications surrounded by cave of clutter. The workspace is not their work, the room is their work.
• Filing creates a lot of cognitive overhead in addition to the actual work
  • extra stress if fail to adhere to system, not doing what you're supposed to
  • extra stress if something is misfiled--can't find it, what if other things are misfiled
• Take lessons from piling into computer, design interfaces for clutter (none of the following is about visual design: cluttered organizational system can still be visually clean). Applications should think in piles, too.
  • People put stuff on the desktop and understand that they'll come back to it back later; if they can't find it spatially they can use search
  • iWork suite on desktop & iPad: iPad has no unified tool to represent document, each one must have its own representation of files. In Pages, most recently used stuff goes in the top left.
  • Top sites in safari: behaviorally the same as bookmarks but there is no categorization, it's generated as you browse
  • Twitter favorites: most people use to save tweets with urls to read later, it's a pile with the most recent on top
  • All of these feel relaxed and the user knows where their stuff is. There is no overhead, it's simply put there and the user knows how and where to get it when they need it. Flexible, no restrictions.
• Making a clutter-friendly app does not mean you can be lazy about thinking about organization. It's actually more work than a rigid system because you have to
  • make app conform how people really organize their work
  • make it so the user can always find where they were and quickly get to it and go
  • let an emergent structure appear; user may never notice, and doesn't have to express preferences, it just emerges from how they work
• Responsive but not smug
  • Intelligent agent is designed to work with user in semi-human approach; never intelligent enough. E.g. Siri: has a very limited set of commands that it can actually respond to even though it converses like a human and uses human voice, fails expectations
  • Safari top sites just quietly organizes sites; done well, the user never even notices
  • Pages for iPad: uses animations to move most recent document to the top left, helps tell the user about thge layout of their work and build mental model
• Fault tolerant but not lazy
  • Encourage user to make mistakes because mistakes have no consequences, allows user to relax
    • Undo: we talk about it in terms of content, but rarely in terms of organizational structure. Gives people freedom to explore without the possibility of destroying things (e.g. undo menu in the finder can undo renames, deletes, etc.)
  • Encourage user to do what they want organization-wise
    • Stong rigid organization system makes people feel like they're not living up to what the design wants them to do (e.g. Jira and other bug reporting systems--however, see comments below on shared systems)
• Attractive no matter what kind of clutter the user puts into it. Allow for organizational complexity while still being visually clean. "If you're going to let your users make a mess it should damn well look good...because they're going to make a mess."
  • People put stuff in Pinterest and don't care about organization, but the layout makes the images look nice and clean even though they don't naturally go together
  • iPhoto works out which photos belong together (gps, time) and user can just create a group: filing system is done for you, obviates the overhead of filing system while still providing the organizational benefits
• Adapt your design constraints to fit what the user wants
  • Opposite of guiding users to fit your apps constraints
  • You need mental models
• Sharing piles of stuff is trickier. If piles are the user's mental model, it's hard to transfer that between people. You need something more rigid, e.g. Jira and other bug reporting systems (however, Trello is apparently more flexible?)
• Recency effect? people will look at the bottom of the pile when presented with a large pile of stuff so the stuff at the bottom doesn't get lost
  • also stuff is related, so people remember
• Scalability: e.g. in email, the bigger the inbox gets the more you rely on search
  • piling approach is really a variation of filing, piles can represent regions of time, can create archived folder monthly, yearly, etc. and remember the rough time period (can do in a way that doesn't impact your immediate needs)
• Present need vs archival need--how do I find the tweets that I like a month ago? piling facilitates now, but need structures and models for accessing later
  • often people don't need that, but iPhoto will generate archival system for you
  • the presenters have not not really been looking into the point at which they file their stuff away
• Duplication of data--ad hoc organization doesn't solve that, but filing after the fact could

Key take-home points for me:

I think the most interesting part of this presentation was not just that the applications I develop should allow people to organize things how they want, but that it might be possible to create a no-overhead filing system that symply emerges from the stuff being organized so there can be benefits of both piling and filing without any of the extra work. I love the example of iPhoto creating groups automatically using data embedded in the photos, and I'm going to think about how I do things like that in my future projects.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Peter Stahl (@pstahl on Twitter). A reduced version of the slides is available on Speaker Deck.

• Tools and processes for static screens came out of print media and architecture, but user experiences do not sit still anymore. We need to adopt vocabulary and methods that support desiging experiences over time.
• Interactive rhythm--interactions with the object form a particular repetitive pattern, e.g. drums, channel surfing, driving especially with a manual transmission (accellerate and stop), forms (enter a field, fill it in, repeat), youtube (get to end of a video, watch a new one), etc.
  • what makes rhythm
    • simple enough to repeat
    • repeatable
    • steady tempo (relatively)
    • reason to continue
  • when is rhythm appropriate
    • one job with repetition, no errors & exceptions (or quickly and easily recoverable)
    • interrupt to make users think--can be hard to get out of rhythm
  • some tasks don't have rhythm
    • photoshop can have rhythm, but mostly doesn't--not repeating tasks
    • turbotax--it could have the form rhythm, but it is missing steadiness: some items can be recalled quickly, others take a lot of time to collect
• Flow: state in which people are so involved in a task that nothing else matters, people continue for the sake of the activity itself, and every action follows naturally from the previous action
  • dimensions of flow
    • goals and progress tracking (feedback)
    • balance of challenge and skill
    • sense of control
    • focused concentration
    • loss of selfconsciousness, becoming wone with activity
    • time distortion
    • self-rewarding experience
  • web design is frequently missing flow
    • Assumes visitor knows goals, but people hope to be led somewhere. You need to remove distractions.
    • Missing feedback, the site doesn't tell you (or care) if you're progressing toward a goal (exceptions: LinkedIn profile progress, Mint progress, well designed wizards)
    • Missing the balance of challenge and skill
    • Lacks hierarchical goals that build on each other
• Motivic rhythm: animations in response to a user action, e.g. timing of a popup to open after hover, speed of an animation of a page change or window opening
• Artifacts and deliverables
  • Wireframe inherit from architectural diagrams. You must know the language of wireframes to understand what they represent and what it will be like to move through them. They do not (readily) convey action.
  • Wireframes show the computer part of computer-human interaction, but flow happens in the human part. How can we induce flow in people if we leave them out of our designs?
    • Can show pictures or comics (or storyboards) of person using site, e.g. ux testing videos often include video of user using site (eg. silverback vids)--include sketch of users using site with wireframe, can help interpret whether actual user reaction are on target with intended reaction
  • Movies use storyboards with the timing indicated
  • Games use animatics: rough cuts or sketches that have been animated at 2-3 a second, used to get timing right for interaction or to hand to composer for background score
  • Dance uses movement notation, for instance lines on a musical staff representing body parts and direction
  • "Protocasting": comic book of scenario with video walkthrough
  • Choose different artifacts for different parts of the design process, e.g. video to convey the overall experience vs something more detailed like a table of animation timings to hand to the engineers
• tools
  • adobe director
  • flash (easier to get started)
  • expression blend
  • axure RP
  • keynote/powerpoint

Key take-home points for me:

User interactions with a site and site animations have rhythm, but that can't be conveyed with wireframes. I should consider some other method of conveying animation or timing (for instance animatics or storyboards) and the user's emotional response to those actions in my next design.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Emily Wengert (@wallowmuddy on Twitter).

• 2002 had simple world--intranets and websites. Since then have added phones, tablets, devices in cars, stores, augmented reality--just 10 years later: "I think we're all in trouble. I don't think we can keep up with this much longer."
• How we approach new channels now (slow ramp-up to understanding the channel)
  • first understand the physical constraints (e.g. screen size)
  • then try to add the user again, try to align it with something we already know and oversimplify ("mobile is on-the-go!")--see Josh Clark's mobile myths
    • Myth: mobile is just used when people are on the go. "I think we got confused by the word 'mobile'" Maybe was initially was true but not anymore.
      • Better: mobile is the lazy man's computer. People just reach for the device in their pocket, hope they can finish the task there. 89% at home, 86% watching tv at the same time.
    • Myth: people want less on their mobile phone than on their desktop.
      • Better: shift priorities, don't remove features.
    • Myth: tablets are just an oversized mobile device or a simpler PC
      • Better: tablets are a content consumption juggenaut. They have created new behaviors, people will spend more time with tablet than on other devices
      • Tablet is replacing paper more than it is replacing other channels
• We stop thinking about channel and start thinking about context: for instance, in coffee shop cream and sugar sit side by side, but they aren't next to each other in a dictionary or in a grocery store
• Some example contexts
  • Place
    • Starbucks sign in airport: steam points to starbucks location. Someone had to know where the sign would be located. Print (generally) knows how to use location better than digital does.
    • iPad "augmenting" a department store is worse and slower than just walking around the store. Instead of adding to the store experience it is trying to merely duplicate it, but the users are already having the store experience and the device doesn't do it as well as the original. It could be telling people where items are, if they're in stock, if they could get an item in another location, but it's just the at-home iPad app that doesn't even know the person is in the store.
    • Think about:
      • Where is the user?
      • What goals do they have there?
      • Why are they accessing digital in that place?
      • What other (digital or non-digital) channels are around them?
    • Example: store planning vs visit
      • are they in my store or not?
      • store planning is making a list, finding store, research product, inspiration, inventory check...
      • store visit is checking off list, wayfinding, quick decision making (price, ratings, but not researching lots of items), price lookup, additional sizes and colors
      • change features you want to bring to forefront based on where the user is and what their priorities are at that location
  • Mindset
    • Pandora: set station and walk away
    • Turntable: more social than Pandora, dj wants to show off and get points
    • Pinterest: "I want to be endlessly entertained"
    • Baby registry: fear of making bad decision that would kill their kid--if you only think of as a place to add products miss opportunity to add reassurance, comparative studies, etc. that addresses the fear and uncertainty of having a child
    • Think about
      • what state of mind will my user most likely be in?
      • How might that affect their success in what I'm desigining?
  • Social
    • subset of mindset in many ways
    • Wedding registry: "I don't want to be judged" for having registry at all or for high price points, picture what each group of people are going to want to give--very different from the baby registries
    • Public kiosk: people worried e.g. about seeing weight entered on treadmill
    • Who is around you, e.g. mom's kid--what that means for patience, etc.
    • Facebook social as a platform--JCPenney duplicate their store in facebook but doesn't leverage or pay attention to the context of facebook; Target allows you to contribute to birthday present purchase
    • Think about
      • could there be any peer pressure in the mix?
      • How public is your user? How public would someone want to make what they're doing?
      • Is your user alone? with others? Kids?
      • Are there any expectations that social will be present?

Key take-home points for me:

People have different priorities, attention, and various limitations based on where they are and who is around them. Make sure to consider that when creating experiences for multiple channels. The context is more important than the specific limitations of the devices that they are using, so even though lots of new devices are coming out that we haven't even though of yet we can get up to speed faster if we consider in what context the experience we have in mind is going to happen.

This is part of a series of notes from the Information Architecture Summit from 2012. All posts will be tagged ias12. This talk was presented by Karen McGrane (@karenmcgrane on Twitter). Slides are on Slideshare.

• We need structured content to adapt to multi device future
• Publishers are like a bellweather or a canary in a coal mine. They are forced to adapt to content problems more quickly than other companies
• Publishing companies don't have enough people or resources to populate all devices with customized content: "we cant afford to be creating content that will appear on only one platform"
• Case Study: Conde Nast
  • Paul Ford: This is the golden age of PDFs on the iPad
  • Conde Nast creates custom ipad versions of major titles (GQ, Glamour, etc)
    • not searchable, not selectable, cant save it: it's a giant heavy graphic
    • They are translating all of their art direction into digital twice for portrait and landscape layouts
  • Sales of iPad issues have dropped precipitously since initial novelty. Glamor (their most lucrative print tilte) sold only 2,775 copies in November.
  • Conde Nast changing to more flexible strategy: create once and distribute everywhere, start with workflow to support all of their designs
• Case Study: NPR
  • COPE: create once publish everywhere. API lets them get content out in variety of different contexts.
    • creates clean, well structured, flexible content
    • no custom development for multiple platforms
    • text, images, audio from CMS runs through API
    • Can see exact same story in NPR.org, mobile site, app, user generated NPR app, public radio player (pulls in from 500 public radio stations), etc. Platforms talk to the API and make the design decisions appropriate for the device (and not how the content is structured by the CMS)
  • NPR pageviews have gone up 80% because of api
  • Biggest impact is mobile strategy: they put the work into structured content and API up front instead of lots of custom development for each platform so they are able to get new apps out quickly
• Future of adaptive content
  • Set up a reusable content store from the beginning--don't know where content will go or how it will look in any particular channel, but will have the flexibility to reuse it on any new channel in the future
  • Case study: TV Guide
    • in 80s realized in content business, not magazine business
    • required writers to write 3 versions of descriptions: small, med & large
    • didn't want all of their content locked up in files, wanted a variety of flexible content to use in the future
    • company that publishes magazine sold recently for $1--no value in magazine publishing business anymore, their value is the reusable data to sell to variety of platforms
  • multiple sizes--headlines, summaries, etc.
  • meaningfull metadata--platform needs to be able to query content for size and characteristics, platform can make decisions about what it wants to show
  • written for reuse--don't think about use in just one context
• why are the news organizations able to innovate
  • news organizations already have structured content: journalism students are tought to create packages of content: (headline, deck (short summary), lede (put the most important ideas in first paragraph), photo, captions (of photo) & cutlines (summary of photo), nut graph (bulleted summary of article)
  • however, in a magazine content and form are tightly integrated and publishers have a hard time imagining content set free of appearance
    • hard to think about content broken into little bits, hard to imagine where content lives because it's in so many different places
    • hundreds of years of print primacy have built a particular culture, process, workflow, values
      • Case Study: New York Sunday Review was designed for print first (with very large images) and then handed to developers. Desktop version of website is bad because no one thought about it, mobile site is actually broken
• We are making the same mistake by designing for the desktop web first!
  • Case study: Amazon product page--most A/B tested page on the internet, but on mobile robot goes and gets data and puts up content until it runs out of space
    • truncation is not a strate...
• *Content* first
  • not print first
  • not web first
  • not even mobile first
  • clean, well structured, reusable, flexible content
  • designed from the start to go into variety of contexts, even those you haven't thought about yet
  • break up marriage of content and form
• WYSIWYG CMS infrastructure that lets you see in desktop webpage context, leads you to believe it is in fact "what you see is what you get" without any consideration that it might not be in any other context
  • content developed that way has to be retrofitted for reuse
  • we need a sematic content publishing system so chunks of content can be combined as appropriate for each particular platform
    • content templates encourage reusable chunks content, but that doesn't make it into the CMS
  • break apart content from its appearance on the page
  • people will write better content if they have better tools that fit their workflow, mental models, and metadata needs: "content management is the enterprise software that UX forgot"
    • if you are in the business of producing content, the content management workflow is just as important as the ecommerce workflow, but people don't have metrics for it, they just assume the content writers will learn to deal with it
  • need to take content management workflow usability and fitness to your content writers' needs into account when choosing a CMS, not just requirements like security and support: this is not a luxury, it's a requirement for adaptive content
• demystify metadata to content writers
  • use metadata to programatically build pages: you are not an editor crafting every pixel on the page, give up the control that you think you have--but you get control back, too, by using metadata to show this content for this reason on this platform
    • metadata is the new art direction (Ethan Resnick)
  • use metadata to help prioritise content
    • How do you take content from the desktop site and put on mobile, where do things fit in overall hierarchy of page
    • Case study: The Boston Globe uses it to rank story importance and make sure their "top story" is interesting, not just the most recently published
    • Designers were already doing this work, but it was getting lost with redesigns and context changes. Metadata stays with the content.
  • use metadata to personalize content based on what you know about user--people have been talking about this for 15 years, and the database part is easy but we need to actually write that metadata to be able to do it
  • use mobile as a catalyst to get all of these benefits: "the more structure you put into content the freer it will become" (Rachel Lovinger)

Key take-home points for me:

Create packages of content including content chunks like title, short blurb, longer blurb, full text, image, and other metadata that lets you pick and choose what you want to display across different devices and different designs. We can use the metadata for other things too, like generating personalized pages full of content of interest to a specific user. Mobile is a wedge to get that to happen, but we need better tools too, the CMS workflow as it stands is not good enough.