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/

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!

The central question was how will publishing respond to e-books? Will it like newspapers loose market share? Will it struggle to find its feet in a new digital distribution mechanism like music? Page thinks that publishing, will learn from the experiences of the movie and music industries. He did not see e-books threatening publishing in the same way that the internet has threatened newspapers. Newspapers are a medium that deliver information quickly, which is something that the internet as a medium does better. But the physical book, Page argues, has an inherent advantage. A book has an aesthetic quality that cannot be compared to the experience of an e-book. People “furnish their house with them”, but people cannot fetishise an e-book. People do fetishise Apple products though. Page referred to the iPad as “a machine trying to do many things” but not a device suitable for the experience of reading a long narrative. The Kindle however, with its e-ink technology solves the problem of eye strain caused by luminous screens. Its devices like the Kindle that are more likely to grow the small channel of the e-book and offer another route to readers.

And what of the cost; presumably e-books should be much cheaper? At this point have a think about what you would be prepared to pay for an e-book version of a $15 paperback. What is the cost of a book? It is so much easier to think about the cost of a tangible product. Perhaps because we can touch it we assume the cost is in the printing, the production of the object, the transportation, the distribution to retailers. Page pointed out though that the costs of printing are a minor component in the costs of a book. A publisher has to make the investment in copyright which has its value and worth for the author. A publisher’s expertise (and costs) are in finding writers, in editors, in marketing and publicising works. At this point, Monica Attard noted that the e-book is more likely to threaten the independent book seller than the publishers themselves. It was interesting to hear Page speak of price point management; the market cycle of a book from hard cover launch to wider paper back release. While piracy is an obvious threat, a threat is also posed if retailers (Apple, Amazon) engage in a price war, so we can safely assume that publishers will place conditions on retailers and monitor pricing activity.

While the experience of a book may be hard to compete with, the digital channel can offer an amplified experience: rich content, author interviews and access to similar works. Page describes a business model where readers can be lead from one book to another; where readers can not only read but listen and download other content. Print on demand is also on the cards, and Page described a scenario of giving someone the ability to select their own anthology of poems and have that created into a book as a gift. This presents a vision of a publisher more akin to Apple’s iTunes music store.

Its great to hear a traditional business, embracing the advantages of a digital medium. I just wish Monica Attard had asked one more question of Stephen Page, and that is his thoughts on Google’s Internet Archive.

Related Links:

Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books
The Fight over the Google of All Libraries: A Wired.com FAQ

The idea for the series came about after friends, looking to change career focus, asked me about what they should study. Unfortunately for them, I am not the best person to ask, because, like some in the industry, I have no directly related formal qualifications.

I think it’s important that the disciplines, skills and theory behind user experience be clearly articulated for those looking to enter the field and for those, like me, already in the field looking to expand their knowledge base.

I hope too, that the professionals that cross paths with UX practioners such as developers and business analysts come across this series and find it of some use.

Interviews will be based on the following questions:

1. Tell me about your current role and your areas of expertise?
2. What course/s have you studied? What are your qualifications?
3. What were your favourite subjects in the course?
4. How much hands on experience did you get with research?
5. What subjects or skills do you think are most relevant to a user experience role and why?
6. What do you wish you had been taught?
7. What UX skills cannot be taught?
8. and there will be a bonus question tailored to each willing participant.

an employee’s work-identified posts fell somewhere between their little black book and the firm’s email database … they should belong to the company … so a worker could not take all the followers they had built up using the firm’s identity to a competitor.

Click for a larger image.

Tim Burrowes, co-owner and editor cited this example:

“With Rove, he has got loads of followers and when he leaves Ten they’ll all go with him”

I’m not sure this is the best example that Burrowes could have used.  Rove has his own production company and his content is licensed to Ten.

Any employee who feels that they are under surveillance will soon become uncomfortable. What this policy fails to acknowledge is the enormous benefit an employee can bring to his or her company through a contribution to an online community.

A company has every right to protect their client list and their intellectual property. However, there are too many implications to cut a hard and fast rule of ownership of a tweet:

• What if you created your twitter profile before joining the company?
• What if you already had a significant following before joining the company?
• What if the company hired you, in part for your network of followers?
• What if your tweets, work to increase the profile of the company?

Being protective of company IP is one thing, but owning conversation and commentary  is surely another. Could a company lay claim to blog comments? Forum contributions? Facebook status updates?

Focal Attractions is in the business of running social media workshops and seminars for companies. They want to be viewed as leaders in this space, hence the motivation for this PR piece. Paranoid companies would be far better advised to not allow employees to tweet during work time, or to tweet from a company twitter account, attributed to a company email address.

Companies can always set guidelines for twitter use. I can only see a policy of ownership as a way to kill morale. Does your company want employees who just do their job; or, do they prefer ambassadors who demonstrate pride, knowledge and pleasure in their work through their online networks?

Would you want to work for a company that claims ownership of your tweets?

The article articulates the role and value of the front end web developer and spurns a debate of sorts in the comments (now closed) between the generalists and the specialists.

Will Peavey’s comment cuts close to the bone, (mine specifically!) when he says:

“I think being a front-end dev should be a prerequisite to doing IA/UX work. In my experience I’ve seen lots of IA/UX/Usability “experts” that come from art school or academic backgrounds, and attempt to design interfaces that look good as Photoshop mockups, but fail in the browser.”

Ah yes, I must confess to 4 years of art school, and only rudimentary and increasingly fading HTML/CSS skills.

I think the generalist/specialist debate really depends on the type of business you work in and the projects you work on. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the last three years working in a great team of developers that includes a dedicated front end dev. We all bounce off each other’s specific skill sets and are constantly sharing and learning from one another.

I appreciate this article all the more as the front end dev is considering what he can do to broaden his skill set and shape his career. Not that he isn’t busy enough already.

Enough of me, read the article and shout your friendly front end dev a drink.

webDU logo

May 21 and 22 was the 7th webDU and my 3rd as part of the Daemon team who organise the event. WebDU is a technology conference, primarily but not solely, focused on developers. Amongst all the code and whiz bang-ery this year was an entire track dedicated to the consulting and planning side of projects: Team/UX (user experience). The room was packed for the whole two days.

As a non developer, the theme I took away from webDU 2009 was prototyping. Delivering prototypes be it a wireframe or design, that are closer to the final web page or web application.

Both Adobe and Microsoft debuted products at webDU. Steven Heintz of Adobe talked up the re-branded Flash Catalyst. Anyone familiar with the Creative Suite can now deliver interactive wireframes and designs to developers. As Steven put it in the keynote Flash Calatyst seeks to “make interaction more of a design experience“.

Shane Morris of Microsoft switched off the microphones (the recording) at the end of his talk, for the Australian debut of Sketchflow; which is all my dreams come true. It’s Visio on steroids and is more of a drawing tool where interactive elements can be produced easily. Not only does Sketchflow provide stencils for re-usable elements like controls and buttons but it lets you use and repurpose data, for instance creating different views. Information can be exported by developers for use as their sample data.

It was interesting to me that Adobe and Microsoft were both on such similar tracks. Both products get the prototype looking more like the design and both the wireframe and design behaving and functioning more like the application. Or as Steven Heintz put it “build[ing] high fidelity earlier in the process and bridging the gap between designers and developers“.

It wasn’t all new product releases though. Richard Turner Jones showed us how to use Fireworks for prototyping. He used it as a hybrid Visio/Photoshop tool. I love seeing how other people work. Richard went from sketch to wireframe, to design, to interactive prototype in an hour. He shared lots of tips and tricks. I had long forgotten Fireworks but Richard’s demo of the Pages utility in Fireworks to walk a client through each stage of the design process was compelling.

Simon Reid bought it back to the user defining user experience as a wholistic change to workflow not a redesign. He took us through his four pillars of user experience in his session “Pixel Envy: The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper” emphasizing that aesthetics should be the last step to avoid mimicry. He then spelled out his seven step design process which included people watching (contextual research) and persona development. My biggest take away from this session will be incorporating a process map to illustrate what a user is thinking at each step and not just drawing application workflows.

Since I am part of the organising team I wont speak to the atmosphere or awesomeness of the conference. I am clearly biased ;-) So I will instead leave you with the following reviews to check out more details of the event from impartial third parties.

• http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/webdu-2009-that-geeky-rock-con.html
• http://blog.magda-stremeski.com/2009/06/webdu-2009/
• http://artselearning.wordpress.com/2009/06/02/webdu-2009/
• http://portal.lacaterinca.com/w-w-webdu/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/05/28/the-future-of-flash-and-the-return-of-coldfusion/
• http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/06/04/webdu-2009-how-to-be-a-rockstar-developer/
• http://dalerankine.com/index.php/2009/05/thank-you-webdu-2009/
• http://www.actionscript.org/resources/blogs/29/WebDU-2009-Day-One.html

I cannot wait until next year.

I thought I would start with my job title: Producer. For this post I am republishing an email I sent in September 2008 to a student of a friend who teaches Online Journalism at UTS.

Hi Exxx

Here is a little run down for your student who is interested in being a web producer.

Where do I start? The role of a web or online producer has to be one of the vaguest job descriptions going round. It depends on the size of the organisation and the nature of the business. Most commonly you can be a web producer at a development/design company, advertising agency or media outlet. You can also be a client side web producer working in house for corporates or anyone with a significant web presence. This sort of role can sometimes be called “Online Coordinator”.

At an advertising agency a web/online producer is a coordinator. There may be various levels of producers (senior, junior) working alongside a technical producer, information architect and the design and development teams and under an account manager. You are a coordinator. You make ads, flash sites and campaign sites.

I work for a web development company with a technical focus so my role is that of a producer/information architect (IA). My job is split 50/50 between the two roles. As an IA I make wireframes for websites. These are basically blueprints of the site for designers and developers. As a producer I liaise with the client and manage the build. I work for a small company which means my work is a lot more hands on than an ad agency where roles are more specialised. My background before this was as a graphic designer so I had some web experience and do know HTML/CSS. This has helped a great deal because I know how to make websites. That being said my focus is more technical/UI focussed and this is definitely not the case for all web producers.

A Producer client side may be someone with a journalistic background or web background. An in house client side producer may or may not have an in house development and design team. If not, they will write briefs, liaise with external agencies and be responsible for the project. A client side web producer is often responsible for collating, writing and publishing content.

This brings me to the last home of a web producer which is the media outlet—think MySpace or Austereo. Here your role is about bringing together the product with a heavy focus on managing the content. This is quite different to what I do which is defining and managing the build. Media outlets have a heavy advertising focus.

Many jobs will expect you to know HTML, but you dont have to be a master coder. This is still a relatively new field — the popular internet has only been round since 1995 give or take a year so loads of experience is not essential. In all roles I have described you are dependant on others. You must agitate and advocate constantly.  People most often do not cooperate so be prepared for the management part of the role. This could be short campaign management or longer project and timeline management.

…

So, did I get it right? Did I give the right advice?