Standing room only

Bernard Salt and Rebecca Huntley were guests at the last Social Media Club earlier this month. They presented their research on how Gen x and Gen y represent themselves online. Two themes emerged in the research: superficiality and authenticity.

The research found that Gen y are not, as some might think, uncritical of their use of social media. Gen y is aware of the dangers and pitfalls of broadcasting one’s life to the network – be it inappropriate photos being viewed by the boss, or superficial relationships being had at the expense of more meaningful connections.

The research focus was on attitudes towards social media and how people build and view representation of self in this space. The view that behaviour online is nothing new was echoed by Bernard Salt.

New technology amplifies instinctive human behaviour

Salt harked back to examples where the novel and conspicuous use of technology eventuated in a correcting force of some kind. Talking loudly on your mobile phone in a restaurant in the early 90s soon became uncool.

Behavioural corrections

He sees social media as a new vehicle for public preening. The old tribal head dress has been replaced by:

1. Un-tagging unflattering photos
2. Altering photos
3. Filtering friends by looks
4. Deriving status by broadcasting a cool location
5. Deriving status by the number of friends you have
6. Acting in a way to elicit feedback and validation

Salt predicts that these ego driven vanities will be calibrated: “That fight is yet to play out. We are still intoxicated by the technology. We will see a movement towards authenticity.”

The talks by Huntley and Salt were short – I wish I could have heard more about the detail of the research and the findings. But this is Social Media Club, not a sociology class. Tip brought it all home with commercial examples. Tip described people’s engagement with brands in social media as another way people build their identity and there were examples of what can only be described as conspicuous window shopping.

Superficiality and narcissism are rewarded

The brands you like define you

Social shopping? I prefer to call it conspicuous window shopping

Tip’s talk departed from the topic somewhat but, it was interesting to think about the juxtaposition of business and our social space. Advertising is seeking and managing relationships in a more direct, transparent medium where users ultimately have control. If there is to be a backlash against superficiality toward an authenticity it will be interesting to see the shape of the behavioural correction of commercial interests in our social lives.

Opening the night

I will admit, when the evening began with everyone in the room passing the mike and giving their elevator pitch, I was worried. There were over 60 women in the room and, one by one, they shared their name, job, employ—in many cases their own small business—and their twitter handle. I feared it would take all night but in a few minutes it was over. I found the exercise creepy; there was something evangelical about it, but I succumbed and came to realise that this spirit of promotion and openness was at the heart of the event.

The MC introduced the night saying this was a forum created for women to build confidence and share knowledge. There are no gurus here, she said, you can ask any question. As if there were an imminent threat, she declared this place is safe.

Kate Curruthers was the special guest. Her presentation on private and public boundaries online was about negotiating the terrain of social media from a personal and business perspective. Her central thesis for the night was that nothing is new. There are real world parallels to all online behaviour.

No human behaviour happens online that does not already happen offline

Kate Curruthers spoke of the changing attitudes towards privacy over time and how social networking has taken everyone back to the village. Now, like before, everyone knows each other’s business. Curruthers spoke of how the web quickens and amplifies communication and of the risks of social media engagement:

• reputation—and the lack of control of others content about you
• job risks—personal and professional boundaries blurring
• personal safety—what information you should disclose publically; and the sometime vitriolic nature of dialogue online.

Her advice to those in the room, wanting to engage with and use social media was don’t do online, what you wouldn’t do offline.

Kate Curruthers slide deck - risking reputation

Carruthers also spoke of the benefits of always being connected: convenience, friendship, guidance and business benefits. The new digital divide, she said, was not whether or not you have a computer but how connected you are willing to be.  Her most pressing piece of advice for the night was around the use of social media in the workplace. She warned that one should not question a young person’s right to be always connected. An audience member recommended that all businesses have a social media policy (and referred the audience to Telstra’s social media employee guidelines). Kate agreed and added that you cannot discipline employees for misuse of social media if you do not have rules in place.

Kate Curruthers slide deck - why are we participating in networks?

At this point the talk opened up into a forum where problems, anecdotes and advice were shared. This was the most interesting aspect to the night. The event delivered on its promise of being a safe place where people can ask anything. Questions were answered by guest speaker and by audience members alike. This made me see the whole point of the introductions at the start of the event. Everyone had a sense of what each other did, be that PR professional, journalist, accountant, business coach, stylist or small business owner—and knowing the people in the room made everyone comfortable to talk.

Audience snippet from social media women

Social Media Women sits somewhere between a digital industry get together and a business networking function. Many did learn a lot of new information. I learnt about the questions, fears and apprehension some people have of social media, no doubt thanks to the thought provoking presentation by Kate Curruthers.  I’ve been to a lot of industry events. The diversity in the audience and the range of discussion about using social media made this night the most authentic and refreshing forum I’ve attended for a while.

The talks couldn’t have been more different at this weeks service design drinks. Stephen Cox, Customer Experience Manager at Westpac opened the night with a presentation on touch-point workshops. Janna DeVylder from Meld Studios invited the audience to ponder whether the service designer has a role to play in the execution of projects. The first was a talk around design education, the second a discussion about design implementation.

Stephen Cox’s workshop is taken from At-One and a more detailed description of it is available at service-innovation.org. Participants are asked to design an experience for a persona across a journey using a range of touch-points cards. To see if the freshly designed experience stacks up, participants then consider if it works with a different persona; and if the experience is still coherent if touch-points are removed.

Stephen’s team is responsible for shifting Westpac culture to be more customer centric. But it seems his team could also affect  the corporate culture itself. The sessions involve participants from different areas of the bank that may otherwise not get the chance to work together, let alone meet one another. The workshop sessions have participants design their products and services for touch-points they may not have traditionally considered to be in their remit, and to consider their output as existing within a broad range of experiences.

The next discussion asked whether the service designer should get their hands dirty in implementation. Janna DeVylder asked “How do you design for the implementation of service?“ It’s an interesting question that goes to the heart of a utilitarians view on user experience design itself—that its easy to conjure up the perfect solution when you don’t have to be responsible for rolling it out.

At first the audience seemed to be in some sort of consensus that a service designer should play a role in implementation and all that is needed for this to happen is a suitable metaphor to communicate what they are doing in the trenches, be that director or composer. As the discussion unfolded other considerations arose:

• Is it just a matter of passing on appropriate tools to get the client to the next stage?
• How do you work towards change management?
• How do you make prototypes for service design?
• How do you test concepts?

Having worked in implementing web projects I advocated that producers are needed—people that are responsible for the detail but who understand the vision. Some people thought that I was still riffing on the director metaphor, but I wasn’t. By the end of the discussion everyone agreed concept and implementation are two very different types of engagements.

The first presentation was about building design thinking in a corporate culture. The second was about the designer playing a role end to end. Advocates need to be built within organisations. Someone else is ultimately responsible for the products, services and experiences that we may be designing. They are the ones who need to take ownership of the ideas as they are the best placed in seeing them through. I don’t think that concepts don’t get implemented because a designer isn’t there to realise their vision. Concepts don’t get implemented when they don’t have people championing their cause.

If you have not been, Service Design Drinks is a casual meet-up, where guest speakers present and take questions from the audience. It’s held regularly at the Trinity Bar in Surry Hills. The fourth event was held on 18 May and was attended by 30 or so user experience designers, including a team from Different.

The last event was a panel discussion moderated by Damian Kernahan, from Proto Partners. The panellists were:

• Opher Yom Tov, formally of Ideo, now working with BT
• Rod Farmer, Co-founder and Director of Research, Mobile Experience
• Susan Wolfe, Managing Director, Optimal Experience
• Faruk Avdi, from the NSW Department of Education and Training

The opening question put to the panel was “What is service design?”

• Opher Yom Tov: Weaving together discreet experiences in an ongoing relationship.
• Rod Farmer: Meaningful value at the point of interaction.
• Susan Wolfe: Thinking about the broader context. Experience design is service design.
• Faruk Avdi: The ecosystem a product exists; experience design is a subset of service design.

Much of the early discussion veered around product design, defined as designing for the experience and the utility that it brings, and not focussing exclusively on the product itself.

A conversation followed about the importance of leadership and change management in service design projects. Several challenges were discussed:

• How do you model relationships?
• If the bar is always moving, how do you exceed the standard that has been set?
• Companies do not measure people’s performance on delivering a whole service. What KPIs should be set to help put service initiatives into operation?

The final question put to the panel was, who’s doing it well? This was best answered by Ant from Different who said that the best service experiences are being had at the ma and pop stores. Everyone agreed; the challenge is getting big organisations behaving like small business. (Interestingly, Mark Pollard made the exact same analogy at a Social Media Club event when asked about the challenges businesses face in participating effectively in social media).

It was a lively discussion, where the panel conceded that service design is a fairly new term. It was interesting to see that the industry is still forming its opinions as to what service design really is, and how it differs to experience design and also interesting to see how the field of user experience is expanding and defining itself.

An edited version of this post first appeared on the blog Different UX

Postscript June 17, 2010

Audio of the event has been published on the Service Design Drinks blog:
http://servicedesigning.com.au/2010/06/17/service-design-thinks-drinks-4/

Touch Design Principles

Shane Morris outlined some design prinicples when designing for the Surface, but many would apply to designing for smaller touch screen devices.

• Don’t deploy a desktop application to a new device, consider the specific requirements of a touch interface
• You may be designing for more than one simultaneous user. Users may be interacting from different directions so the app should be ‘direction-less’.
• Non functional gestures need to be acknowledged. (Vapour trails have been built into the Surface platform to orient the user and show non consequential hand gestures.)
• Use large targets. Avoid traditional controls.
• Design for the super real i.e. design digital objects using real world objects as inspiration. Think about how the object  behaves in the real world, to design how the virtual object responds to touch.

Below are some amateur video clips of me and others playing around with the Microsoft Surface.

Switching it on

The Surface is not a magic table. Under that huge resistive touch screen is a machine. Weirdly, a convenient button to switch it on, located on the outside, does not seem to have been included in the design brief.

Social

People are happy to clean up the debris left by other users on the Surface, and its all part of the fun and learning.

Hold on! Those 2 demos show it working great but …

One handed, while I was holding the camera, I was having a bit more trouble than the peeps in the Lonely Planet demo. I had objects spinning out of control all over the place but it was still fun.

The point of the Lonely Planet Surface app is to load a passport with information, like photos and videos from the store, that you can look at later online. Each “passport” has a barcode type sticker so the machine can read it. Each Lonely Planet book also has a “barcode”, so as soon as you plonk it on the table it reveals relevant content.

Resistive Screen

Touch devices are either resistive or capacitive. The Surface is obviously resistive, so the pressure you apply affects the interaction as this simple Ribbons app demonstrates.

Design for the Super Real

This wine store didn’t quite work for me. It used pretty conventional controls, and I kept trying to do something with the bottles themselves. The workflow seemed kinda busted too.

But the piano app works great.

Another learning from this blog post is that videos take forever to upload on Youtube. FOREVER!

Often it is difficult for speakers to share lessons learned in work, because of client confidentiality, and because sometimes it’s not good business to give too many secrets away. To solve this dilemma Collis delivered his presentation on how to start a web business by discussing a hypothetical case study. His words of wisdom are summarised below.

How do you come up with an idea?

• Solve a problem you have yourself experienced.
• Observe and look for audience niches that experience this problem.
• Your solution should help other people make money
  • e.g. the 37 Signals Basecamp application wasn’t making money from the consumer market but became a success when it was marketed to business.
• Test your idea with research.

How do you do good business?

• Not all businesses are equal. The Envato network has dual business models of publishing and market places.
• Don’t underestimate marketing. While its essential to have a good product, it’s vital to have great marketing.
• Spread the word. Present and blog about tangential topics that appeal to people who want to use your service.
• Build your user base with free content then add paid services.

Collis was one of the highlights of weDU for me. Keep an eye out on the webDU site. They will be publishing audio of the talks in coming weeks.

Flash 10.1 beta talking points:

• touch apis
• improved audio support
• performance improvements
• Flash mobile applications run on various platforms and devices.
  App stores for flash developers on these platforms are more open to developers than you-know-who.

The touch capabilities of Flash were best illustrated by this video, developed by Struck Axiom, that I crudely caught on my camera.

In the keynote Mike Chambers went on to demo various tablets and mobile devices running flash applications including a live demo of Wired magazine running on a resistive touch tablet. Mike hinted at some sort of workflow from the publishing suite to create interactive flash. At least, I hope this is what he was hinting at.

Greg Rewis, the Creative Suite evangelist went on to outline more flash goodies such as:

• improved text handling e.g. text boxes can be linked for flowing text
• full support of 32 new character sets e.g. asian character sets and left to right, vertical text layout.

Greg was most passionate about the new code snippet library which tackles the learning barrier of action script to newbies. This is best exemplified by his quote: “All the Flash bashing that goes with actionscript 3 — shut up now!”

• Libraries can be imported and exported. This should be a boon for flash communities
• The sample code snippets are generous and code can be exposed and includes instructions

I have been to 4 webDU conferences and this was the first year that I was not on the Daemon organising team. It felt strange to not have to do anything but enjoy myself, and that I did.

In the Day 1 keynote Mike Chambers from Adobe came out at the gates in defense of Flash (hi Mr Jobs). Acknowledging how CPU intensive flash video can be he spoke of Flash performance improvements on mobile and the desktop. He also demoed the new flash touch apis on tablets, phones and larger screens. Microsoft were there and to the delight of many brought along a Microsoft Surface. It was a blast to play with. It was interesting to hear from Shane Morris about what constraints were put into the behaviour of the Surface. In his talk Shane outlined design principles with case studies of applications designed for ANZ, Lonely Planet and Cochlear. This was my highlight of the conference. Other more technical sessions that I did not attend talked more specifically about touch technologies e.g. Dmitry Baranovskiy demonstrated the gestural capability of his Raphael javascript library.

I am pretty much a wannabe geek, i.e. not very geeky, so I left the tech streams up to the developers and spent most of my time in the UX/team stream. There was a good mix in this stream of usability, design sessions, specifically design for mobile, wireframe design, and a mix of broader project sessions. These included:

• Robin Hilliard introducing a framework to define problems and come up with sound requirements
• Mathew Hodgson evangelising agile. This is a hot topic, but especially relevant to a developer audience from where the concept arose. It was helpful to see this explained through a warts and all case study; and
• Tim Buntel from Atlassian talking about managing developers.

What was great about this year’s webDU was that it was not a tutorial conference, nor were the sessions so general that you came away with nothing but a new vague idea. The sessions introduced applicable principles and approaches that rang true with real life case studies and inspirational examples.

Anyone who knows me knows I take A LOT of notes so instead of trying to summarise my favourite take outs from WebDU in one post I will try and publish a series of webDU posts over the coming days. OK. Weeks.

Until next year!

Manoj Vekaria and Sushant Verma of Rocketboots were manning the desk in the sponsor’s corner at webDU. In this video they show me and some other onlookers their impressive prototype for an augmented reality changeroom. It’s in the early stages now, so is very much a proof of concept but towards the end of the video Manoj talks about future physics simulations that will better represent the look of clothing on the wearer.

Sushant Verma and Manoj Vekaria also presented Need for Speeed, a talk about the future of Flash platform development and a comparison with related technologies at webDU this year.

Posted via email from everyday eri