UXintensive Copenhagen, Adaptive Path

Monday I joined the first of a 4 day conference on user experience hosted by Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer. Each days put intensive focus on a specific subject, beeing Design Strategy this monday.

Now, Brandon Schauer didn’t reveal unknown secrets from the world of design strategy, but he delivered a professional and fluid presentation supported by this note: One of the most valuable slides in this presentation.

Serves well as inspiration…

Web 3.0 midt i red light district.

Hvis vi skal være helt ærlige, så var programmet til dette års EuroIA lidt i den tørre ende. Meeen der skal alligevel meget til før man takker nej til tur til Amsterdam, og gudskelov for det!

Konferencen var sat i smukke rammer i Tushinsk Theatre og første dag bød på indlæg så spændende som ”Content Analysis: The Hows and Whys to understanding Your Content” og ”Why Information Architects are Needed in the Kitchen”. Størst indtryk gjorde Claudia Urschbach fra BBC med sit indlæg om ”What Semantic Web and Web 3.0 Mean for IA”.

Det fantastiske ved vores branche er, at den konstant udvikler sig. Hele essensen i en Informationsarkitekts dagligdag er forandring – at skabe forandring, omstille sig til forandring og kontrollere forandring. Web 2.0 er for længst en realitet, næste udfordring er Web 3.0, også kaldet The Semantic Web.

Modsat Web 2.0, der handler om mere håndgribelige ting som sociale medier og brugergenereret indhold - kommunikation mellem mennesker - tilføjer Web 3.0 endnu en dimension til internettet, hvor computere i højere grad bidrager til mere målrettede brugeroplevelser. For at computerne kan løse nye opgaver for os, skal vi præsentere viden på en måde, som er enkel og entydig at afkode for computere - dét er semantisk web!

Tim Berners-Lee formulerede det allerede i 1998:
“The Web was designed as an information space, with the goal that it should be useful not only for human-human communication, but also that machines would be able to participate and help.”

  Nesta

De mere målrettede brugeroplevelser ligger ikke kun i intelligente søgeresultater, og ikke kun indenfor det enkelte website, men i delingen af viden på tværs af websites og applikationer. Vidensdelingen bliver mere teknisk, og kommer til at foregå mere automatisk – resultatet er en personliggørelse af hele web-oplevelsen.

Det stiller naturligvis også krav til IA’ernes viden om et nyt sæt byggeklodser (Microformats, OpenID, API osv.), der ændrer måden vi fremover konstruerer websites. Desuden skal vi for alvor til at forholde os til mobilt internet, der i øjeblikket slår alle rekorder.Tendenserne i IA faget peger således på, at fremtiden vil kræve langt flere typer specialister, hvor vi tidligere primært har set IA specialister indenfor taxonomi.

Der er allerede rigtig mange gode blogindlæg og artikler derude om Semantic Web, så google det, når du har en ledig stund.

Med på vejen får du lige et par Buzz words, der kan etablere dig som internet guru til New Media Days:
-        Ubiquitous computing
-        Linked data cloud
-        RDF, FOAF, SIOC, MOAT…

Det er ord der kan gøre en IA-chick som mig helt blød i knæene :)

User Experience Group Denmark is the formal name of a new network initiated by 1508 and Creuna. It consists of danish top agencies who work professionally with interaction, strategy and digital communication on a daily basis.

 The aim of user experience group is to share knowledge in order to profesionalize the whole area. For more info, check out this article in danish magazine markedsføring.dk. (written in danish, though).

 The responses have been overwhelming, showing a great interest amongst the invited participants. We look forward to the first meet up that will take place february 8th 2008.

Future posts from User Experience Group Denmark can be read on their blog www.uxgroup.dk

 wauv..

We returned from Euro IA summit last Saturday. We have been busy since then. That is the reason why we have not published our thoughts about it before now.

However there’s plenty of good reasons to spread the message: The conference this year was a great succes. Both in terms of content and quality, atmosphere, people and location there is no doubt that this was the best summit so far. The only thing to point fingers at - seen from our very narrow danish perspective - is the number of danish attendants. Last year Denmark was surprisingly well represented, this year we were very few.

Of course some presentations were more relevant to us than others, but generally speaking the professional/academic level was just perfect. I will not go through all the insights (and we did not go to all presentations), so this is just a brief note on the speakers who gave new ideas to include in our next projects.

Playful IA (Kars Alfrink)

Extremely interesting presentation on adapting ideas from game design to IA. We are currently designing a new intranet for a big danish company, and I believe we are going to adapt some of the ideas – eg. what happens when you think of an intranet as a game, with real challenges, tokens, rewards etc.? This could be a very obvious way to motivate users to participate and take ownership of the site.

How to (Really) localize an Information Architecture (Peter Van Dijck)

Peter presented a simple framework to address the questions that always arise when creating internatioal sites. It’s not that the content of the presentation was new to us, but it was the kind of presentation that inspired me to go back home to produce the 6 generic questions and slides to use at client presentations.

Service Design (Claire Rowland)

Service Design is in growing demand in Denmark. It was very interesting to hear that the same is true outside Denmark – or at least in the UK. Just like the presentation Peter gave, the most interesting part of Claires presentation was the methods and the way of presenting them to clients.

There was many other presentations that deserves to be mentioned: The Core and paths: Designing from the inside out by Are Halland and the one about the new site for Heathrow Airport by Georgio Venturi and Jonathan Culling were also excellent… and all the rest was good too…But this is all for now… :-)

Enjoy the EuroIA2008 photoset on Flickr

The graf above (Google Analytics - great software) points out an interesting shift in web navigation of today. The 28,87 % is the share of users landing directly on the Home Page of a Danish Trade Union. This means that 71,23% of all users on this Trade Union website skips the homepage and goes directly to sub pages of the site. Earlier on the share of users entering a site through the home page was much greater than today. One of the main factors in this change is the upcoming of search engines such as Google. Now people search for content and is directed to the relevant page immediately.  So why am I writing about this? Why is this interesting? Because this change in user behaviour should change the way we design for web.

Web Navigation 2.0, as I so webish called it in the headline, means that the need for navigational instruments and overview possibilities on sub pages is about to be redefined. I say this because users for the time being have no clue about the total content of a site when entering via a sub page. Besides what information they can get from the global navigation, content navigation and the sub page itself, there isn’t much overview. So I predict that related information, and visualisation of site content is going to be something we will hear a lot more about in the years to come. Agree?

PS. I just found this great example: Apples new homepage. Take a look to the left of the Leopard-box. A great way to offer tons of information in very little space. Try to imagine news, calendar, hot products and vacant jobs on a corporate website in this form. Cool hhm?

One of the guys behind Non-Formats’ illustrations the Si Scott is an english illustrator with a nice typographic technique go check him out, but be aware the navigation could use some adjusting.

The Precursor site is up here because of the navigation, it’s (con)text based meaning you can write directly on the site and request a specific project very much like the old days when you were using DOS and amiga, can be confusing sometimes so be sure to read how to navigate the site.

“Area 17 refers to the optical cortex of the brain where vision and creativity are processed. It also refers to our Interactive Agency where vision and creativity are realized”
Arnaud Mercier’s company in NYC. A site with great work.

For the people who havn’t yet seen Adobe’ newsletter Edge go check it out it’s excellent. This month they go behind Big Spaceship’s Nike project and other projects.

Last but not least Goodby, Silverstein & Partners + Ken Garland

(S)

Martin Thorborg, co-founder of Jubii and SPAMfigther, now unveils his experience with eCommerse. It’s published online and you can read most of it for free.

By Rudolf

We read about it all the time. The future of video and computer games. Leading specialists predict it’s going to revolutionize our world, and completely redefine how we organize our selves and interact with each other. Some even talk about games and the principles of gaming as the way we’ll organize how we work!

Obviously game design has some pretty amazing and promising aspects, but it’ll still be a while before we organize and base client and user participation around 3D-avatars and true ubiquitous computing (if this idea is still sound). I mean, in reality we are still organizing client participation around various kinds of workshop concepts.

So, what about good old board games, like monopoly? Can’t they be of some inspiration? We think they can – and we are certainly not the only ones. Since the early 70’s, different scientific groups and fields have tried applying the principles of fundamental game design to workshop activities - with promising results.

One outcome of this research is called design games. A game-like activity where participants are invited to share ideas and experiences – and contest the ideas of each other. Simple rules (like ‘turn taking’) contributes to structure the participation, and the playfulness of the game (i.e. dice and the game board) stimulates the creative potential of the participants (constraining participants to combine ideas, that at first may seem non-intuitive).

Finally the materiality of the game pieces helps visualize the state of the game and keeps the various discussions focused and on track.

As you can probably imagine by now, we see a lot of possibilities and future scenarios in this new approach, and we are attempting to adapt it and in the end make it a part of our UCD-framework. Currently we are in the process of becoming familiar with the concept, and we recently held our very first – and accustomed – design game (that’s what the picture show). A design game about future cooperation between teams and which core values to work towards. The game was a success. Although there, of course, were room for improvements. So we’ll keep playing. And posting…

This is somewhat old news, yet it is still relevant. Three of us went to the second European Information Architecture Summit in Berlin a few weeks ago. It’s a small conference and the quality of the presentations varied quite a lot, but the summit provided interesting insights on current trends in the fuzzy field of IA.

The sitemap as a deliverable, for example, is finally dying and in the future you will probably notice more websites, which looks and works much more like traditional applications. As information architects this means we are going to spend much more time doing interaction design and creating models for metadata, taxonomies and the like. The summit was keynoted by Peter Morville. He (and co-author Louis Rosenfeld) wrote what many consider to be the IA-bible and they originally coined the term information architecture. He made a great talk on ambient findability and information architecture beyond websites. Go here to see his presentation (.ppt).

And by the way, Peter Risborg had his first days at work during our trip to Berlin, so off course we did not miss the opportunity to have some… teambuilding activities during the nights . That is our duty, afterall.