Despite all the training, the swanky Palomar Hotel, site of UX Week, isn’t able to get basic things like room reservations (ObSeinfeld: “See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation”) sorted out. I wasn’t the only one it seems that arrived (hot and dusty from a long long voyage) to find some polite confusion at the front desk. And today (after friendly but pungent maintenance men visited my room during the well-communicated fire alarm test) a polite person knocked on my door to see if my room was indeed occupied.

Anyway, more content stuff to come (great keynote by Michael Bierut). Surreal moment of zen last night when the very “guy” bartenders at the billiards bar where Google hosted a (recruiting) party poured out pitchers of shots (of what they referred to as a concoction and had us all toast – like patrons of wet-t-shirt-nite – to GOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!!!!!!!!! It was a viral-video/co-creation opportunity waiting to happen.

CanUX 2006

is announced. You can see a cheesy picture of me on that site if you click on the 13 in the banner. Geez, last year (when I was a speaker) they didn’t have a website!

Great event last year, wonderful location, good vibe. It was ridiculously cheap last year; this year it’s extremely reasonable.

User Experience Week 2006 is coming up in just 2 weeks. I’m looking forward to the event; I’ve never been to D.C. before, looking forward to seeing Michael Bierut and some of the other presenters. My talk and Jared Spool’s take place simultaneously, so I can expect an (ahem) intimate audience, I guess.

I know some of the folks who will be there (especially other presenters), but I’d love to hear from other folks who will be at UX Week?

I’ll be leading a session at adaptive path’s user experience week in Washington, D.C., August 14 – 17, 2006.

I’ve never been to D.C. before. The feedback I’ve got so far is mostly around the lunacy of going to D.C. in August. I don’t do well in California in August, so I guess I’m in for a humid treat with this trip.

I’m pretty stoked about the opportunity to see D.C. and to be on a slate with some pretty amazing people. Cool gig!

Signs o’ the times at last weekend’s Conference on Designing for User eXperience (DUX)

This type of thing seems disturbingly common nowadays: I am preparing to book a hotel for an upcoming conference. The hotel is part of a chain I’ve never stayed at before, so I decide to see if they’ve got some sort of affiliate program or bonus/loyalty/mileage thing, before I book.

I sign up for the program and get my number about 12 hours later. I tried to book online but because I was looking for a conference rate (without a code) I gave up and ended up calling.

And they don’t show my loyalty number.

I’m looking at the auto-generated email, with the number in bold text. And we try several times. They try my name, everything. And give up. Even though I have the “receipt” on hand. No dice.

So the convenience factor – not having to read out every single piece of contact info I’ve already entered, not having to specify room preferences that I’ve already entered, all gone.

They pointed me to the service number for the loyalty program, and the person I speak with explains it may take 7 to 10 days for a newly issued number to be available to the rest of the hotel systems (such as reservations). He was able to quickly put the number into my reservation for credit, and both people I spoke to were incredibly helpful and genuine (besides being forced to read some clunky scripts), so this isn’t really a complaint about bad service, but really an eyebrow-raised in amazement over bad design.

Shouldn’t a requirement of the system they design to create and issue the loyalty numbers be rapid integration with the reservation system? Isn’t a likely use scenario going to be booking of a reservation very quickly after creating a new account? IT systems in silos is scary for what it prevents.

I guess the band-aid would have been to explain this limitation in their “welcome” email but that might have been too big a peek behind the curtain. They did inform me it would take 48 hours to issue the new account at the beginning of all this (although that also seems silly, what are they doing, checking my references?)…

In general, poor interoperability is a major challenge to creating a good user experience. And this example seems highly typical.

Recently nytimes.com rolled out an integration of their home delivery accounts and web-content accounts (I think to help sell their premium access service), but they did it in a terribly clumsy and confusing way, leading to service calls to agents who had no information (I was told, after a lot of vague language like “when you go out of the system you have to come back and and when it asks for your account you enter your number” to wait 24 hours and try again) and no interest in helping (“this is all the information we have. We can only read this out to you; that’s all we can do.”)…a disaster, as far as I am concerned. Maybe it’ll be better now, but the NYT hurt their brand pretty badly, at least in my case.

Just announced: I’ll be leading a seminar on ethnographic research at Creative CanUX, the Canadian User Experience Workshop

, to be held at the Banff Centre, 9/23 to 9/26/05.

The DUX conference site is now showing my tutorial.

In this tutorial, you will learn more about improv, participant observation, listening, context, and, of course, how these things all fit together and can be used and experienced.

DUX is this November in SF at Fort Mason.

Disturbing and detailed NYT Magazine piece about the design of the slot-machine user experience.
Still, to maintain a sense of suspense in games that are over the moment they start, to increase what Baerlocher and his fellow game designers call ”time on device,” I.G.T. spends $120 million each year and employs more than 800 designers, graphic artists, script writers and video engineers to find ways to surround the unromantic chips with a colorful matrix of sounds, chrome, garishly-painted glass and video effects, which include the soothing images of famous people, from Bob Denver (the actor who played Gilligan) to Elizabeth Taylor, many of whom receive hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to lend their identities to the machines. The traditional pull-handle, if it exists at all, is nothing more than a vestigial limb; most players now press a button to start the reels, often virtual, spinning. Many slot machines don’t even pay out coins but issue ”credits” on a paper receipt to be redeemed at the cashier’s cage. Slot makers have found that their customers don’t miss handling money — coins are heavy and dirty, after all — and stereo speakers can project the simulated yet satisfying ping and clink of cascading cash. ”We basically mixed several recordings of quarters falling on a metal tray and then fattened up the sound with the sound of falling dollars,” says Bill Hecht, I.G.T.’s top audio engineer, when describing one of the audio files he programs into a machine. “