[from julienorvaisas] App Creep and the Case for the Mobile Browser [www.gigaom.com] – [Interesting blog post observing that apps, as they are all at the same level, create confusion and navigation issues when they start to pile up into the 100s, and wondering how app-creep will affect behavior and choices both for consumers and providers.] Contrary to what some are predicting will be a stronger movement toward native apps and a marginalization of the browser in the age of the mobile web, I see something different: an eventual balancing out. Native apps will always be on mobile phones, but as a kind of premier gallery of a person’s most beloved ones. Sooner than later, most companies seeking our attention will do so through a browser.
[from julienorvaisas] Doodle Jump Reaches Five Million Downloads [Bits Blog – NYTimes.com] – [Doodle Jump continues to leap into cultural relevance one little, tiny platform at a time.] Doodle the Doodler has appeared on the Jimmy Fallon “Late Night” show and has shown up in fashion accessories for Lady Gaga, among others. Meanwhile, Doodle Jump constantly updates with new designs to give the game a new look. The brothers recently released a soccer theme and plan to release an underwater theme in the coming months. The brothers are also looking into creating an animated series based on Doodle the Doodler and the monsters in the game. As my colleague Jenna Wortham reported in April in The Times, Doodle Jump fans can also expect an iPad application.
[from Dan_Soltzberg] Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus [Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus] – [This automated drawing machine provides a new way to synthesize and examine cultural trends. The machine uses a visual language derived from patent drawings to translate the text from best-selling books into illustrations] Seven million patents — linked by over 22 million references — form the vocabulary. By using references to earlier patents, it is possible to find paths between arbitrary patents. They form a kind of subtext. New visual connections and narrative layers emerge through the interweaving of the story with the depiction of technical developments.
[from Dan_Soltzberg] Stop-Motion Papercraft Storytelling [trendhunter.com] – [The Inventor of Onitsuka Tiger and Asics athletic footwear recounts with an origami-based video how he got started and how Asics develops new ideas. The narration is a little out of sequence with the visual, but it's still a great piece of storytelling]
I’m thrilled to be invited to speak at the first User Experience Hong Kong, taking place next February. Organized by my good friends at Apogee, the event also features a number of super smart (and super nice!) folks: Steve Baty, Janna DeVylder, Rachel Hinman, and Gerry Gaffney.
I’ll be leading a workshop entitled “Well, we’ve done all this research, now what?”
One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of user research in business is that projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. As designers increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design. How can designers and researchers work with user research data to create new things for business to do?
IxDA SF presents Interaction’10 redUX – Steve will be kicking off this Saturday's session with a 30-minute teaser of his Interaction|10 workshop, "Well, we've done all this research…now what?" (The info isn't yet up on the site as of this writing, but Steve will be the first presenter, at 2:00)
While we “delivered” our project’s results in an earlier post, in our client engagements we often have the experience of revisiting the same material for another audience. We might deliver a 3-hour interactive presentation with our core team, and then come back weeks later and share the highlights with their management team. And while we might panic at compressing the 3 hours into (say) one hour, it’s a really powerful editing activity when forced to do that. What is the core of the story? What do people need to know about? What have we learned in giving the presentation already? What has changed since then?
For Reading Ahead, we’ve been sharing this work with friends at Adobe, Blurb, UC Berkeley, and the Savannah College of Art and Design. And that’s given us a chance to revisit the presentation. We’ve refreshed it visually, focused the core message, and expanded it to include some things that came out since our initial research was conducted (i.e., Amazon’s advertising campaign for the Kindle and the launch of the Nook). We haven’t recorded a new narration (check out the full deliverable if you want that), but you can see how we’ve focused our story in this presentation.
I was struck by how the Twitter remix goes beyond reportage, not just echoing the points raised in the presentation but adding a layer of synthesis and translating the content across different media.
It’s a crowd-sourced boiling-down, and yet another of many examples of how this type of platform can be harnessed to interpret and respond to events in real time.
It’s also another illustration of how, as complex as technology has become, it so often still exists in service to the most elemental human activities. In this particular usage of Twitter, the support of tribal communication and the distillation of the group mind.
Stereotyping people by favorite authors – In our Reading Ahead research, we heard about how people were both exploring and communicating identity through their choices of reading material. Identity is a complex internal and external mechanism, where we (explicitly or implicitly) project outwards to imagine how we might appear to others…an internal act that feels or draws from the external. So the existence of lists like this, while tongue-in-cheek, validate that this process is real. (via @kottke)
Scott Baldwin on the fine art of listening – Try changing how you listen. Try to capture the message (listen with your ears, mind, eyes and heart). Make eye contact, use an open posture and be attentive to body language, volume, tone and pace. Look deeper than just the meaning of the words and try to understand the reason, feelings or intent beyond the words. Be empathetic, objective and analytical.
An iPhone app for ethnography – Really? I haven't tried it but I am not encouraged by the description. What we're looking for doesn't always fit into predetermined categories (indeed, how are you to be innovative if the type of data you are gathering is already classifiable?) and there's a danger in conflating data with insights (or as the blogger here writes "outcomes"). Raw data is overwhelming and takes time and skill to process, if you want to find out anything new. Now, we spend a lot of our time just wrangling (copying, renaming, organizing, sharing, etc.) all sorts of data, so I'm up for tools that can help with that; but I think it's easy to go overboard and create tools for uninteresting – or unreliable – research results
Lisa Loeb Eyewear Collection – Not an SNL parody ad from 1997, it's a real product line for 2010 (via @CarlAlviani)
I’ll be leading my Well, we did all this research- now what? workshop at Interaction10 in Savannah, GA, in February. (Check out audio and slides from an abbreviated form the workshop here).
If you’re going to sign up before the end of the year, you can use my discount code: IxD10Special and save $50 off the conference registration.
One of the most persistent factors limiting the impact of design research is that research projects often stop with a cataloging findings and implications rather than generating opportunities that directly enable the findings. As designers increasingly become involved in using contextual research to inform their design work, they may find themselves holding onto a trove of raw data but with little awareness of how to turn it into design.
Participants in this workshop (a sell-out at last year’s conference), collaborating in teams, will learn an effective framework for synthesizing raw data (to be gathered before and during the workshop) into insights, and then creatively using those insights to develop a range of business concepts that respond to those insights. While the framework includes a step to identify key filters that will ultimately prioritize across all generated concepts, the emphasis in this workshop will be to think as broadly as possible during ideation, truly strengthening the creative link between “data” and “action.” By the end of the workshop, participants will have developed a range of high-level concepts that respond to a business problem and integrate a fresh, contextual understanding of that problem.
Project 10 to the 100 – Google crowd-sourced 150,000 "ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible." They've boiled then down to 16 'Big Ideas' and now are going to decide (they are taking votes but it doesn't seem that is the actual decision mechanism) which one to fund. But the process looks random, the results appear ill-defined, and the next steps are murky. I'm not harshing on Google here; this is the process we see in most engagements, moving from insights to opportunities to actual next steps. It's very challenging to do what. Google has done here and make this a public-facing activity, without the benefit of people sitting together in a room developing a shared understanding. We also don't have as much of a stake in what Google does as we would in our own business; we're the public, not members of the team.
(Updated to include slideshow with synchronized audio track)
We’re very excited today to be posting our findings from the Reading Ahead research project.
Lots more in the deck below, but here’s the executive summary
Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading
We sat down yesterday in the office and recorded ourselves delivering these findings, very much the way we would deliver them to one of our clients.
Usually, we deliver findings like these to a client team in a half day session, and there’s lots of dialogue, but we tried to keep it brief here to help you get through it. (The presentation lasts an hour and twenty minutes.)
It’s been a great project, and we’ve really appreciated hearing from people along the way. We welcome further comments and questions, and look forward to continuing the dialogue around this work.
We’ve been hard at work synthesizing the Reading Ahead data. There’s a great deal of writing involved in communicating the results, and sometimes it makes sense to develop a visual model that represents a key idea.
Here are several partial models evolving through paper and whiteboard sketches, and finally into digital form.
We’ll be finishing synthesis soon, and publishing our findings on Slideshare, with an audio commentary.
All This ChittahChattah is the Portigal blog, bringing you observations of daily life, disdainful snark over bad design, updates on my activities, and info about user research since 2001.
