Web Visions 2010 Summary #wv2010

I attended Web Visions 2010, the Design Conference in Portland, Oregon. Compared to 2009, the conference feels much smaller: perhaps half as big as last year. The conference also seems more tightly focused on design. In 2009, I recalled more sessions on social media, analytics, business, and technology.

CORRECTION: 2010/5/28: Brad Smith, Executive Director of Web Visions, informed me that there were actually more attendees this year, but that the conference moved to a bigger event space. It goes to show that the context in which something happens can substantially influence your perception of the event.

I love design, don't get me wrong, but I think I liked it more when there was a greater variety of topics. I'm not a full time designer, although I do have design aspects to my work. But I also have social computing, startup, and business aspects to what I do.
Sessions I attended this year:

• Build Something, Build Anything by Jason Glaspey
• Rethinking the Link (Social Jargon) by Ward Cunningham
• The UX Driven Startup by Alexa Andrejewski
• 33 Lessons about Life, Beer, and Building a Business by Dave Seldon
• The Human Interface by Chris Fahley
• Lipstick on a Pig: Can UX Differentiate a SW company? by Gene Smith
• Designing Social Experiences by Erin Malone
• Keynote Address by Luke Williams

I tend to like both the expert topic type presentations as well as people's personal stories. In what I think of as an expert topic presentation, the presenter has deep expertise in a given field, and can draw upon many experiences and other people's research. By comparison, people's personal stories of building a business focus on a chronological unfolding of their experiences over time, and give you a very realistic portrayal of the pitfalls and roundabout way that things happen in the real world. Both are valuable, and I do like that Web Visions has both kinds of presentations.


Here are some of the themes I noticed this year:


As I noted before, the critical innovation in many cases is now the user experience, as opposed to any kind of technological innovation. Alexa Andrejewski told the story of having the idea of Foodspotting but no technology expertise - so she spent six months iterating on the design before she found someone to implement it. Gene Smith spoke about creating a good user experience on top of Sharepoint. Web implementation is cheap, it's something you can do in your spare time, Jason Glaspey explained, with many examples of businesses launched over the course of weeks and in people's spare time.


In many cases, the best ideas come when there is no expectation of profit, no goal to launch a business. This was a topic at SXSW Interface, and again at Web Visions in Jason Glaspey's talk on Build Something, Build Anything. delicious, upcoming, metafilter, even facebook were all started as sideprojects to "scratch an itch" as they say. Americans watch 100M hours of TV commercials in a single weekend - that's the same effort that went into creating Wikipedia. We could have a new Wikipedia every weekend if we just gave up commercials. A good side project should fulfill some goal completely (art, money, career), rather than be something that might be for any of those, but doesn't accomplish any of them.


User experience design has some concrete tools you can use to create, communicate, and validate your product vision. There are also some specific lessons about how to get people registered on your site, get them engaged, and get them to come back. We want to include humanness in our interfaces without making them too uncanny.


Other summaries of Web Visions 2010:

• By Steve Fisher of Network Solutions

Build Something Build Anything - Jason Glaspey at WebVisions

Build Something Build Anything

Jason Glaspey

#bsba

#wv2010

• Clay Shirky: in the 1950s, there was a 40 hour work week. people had time, and they didn’t know what to do. enter the sitcom.
• At the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo they discussed...
• How many hours did it take to assemble wikipedia: about 100M hours of effort. 
• Americans watch 200 billion hours of TV each year.
• Americans watch 100M hours of commercials in a single weekend.
• We could have another wikipedia every weekend if people just gave up commercials.
• Some side projects make it big
• Examples
• delicious
• upcoming
• metafilter
• But they can be successful even if they don’t
• Some inspiring examples
• Again and Again: 23 year old college grad. Passionate about Apple products. Like this band. Built a video for the band. Got over 1.5M views. Has since gotten a huge jump in his career.
• He demonstrated his skills. He manifested what he wanted.
• Written up in NY Times, Mac blogs. Talked with Apple. Made videos for Microsoft.
• What is Google Wave
• Video by Epipheo Studios
• Google made a 1 1/2 hour video. Nobody wanted to watch it.
• So this guy made a 2 1/2 minute video. Just to try to get an invite to Google Wave.
• Has since been hired by Google to do “what is google chrome”, “what is google tv”.
• Their company cannot keep up with demand... 
• The project they did in a day got them tons of attention.
• iPod Touch Ad
• Nick Haley: 18 year old in the UK
• He loved his iPod touch, and loved Apple ads.
• Got an email from Apple, “Would he please come to California and be the creative director to shoot a polished version of the ad.” -> which turned into the actual TV ad.
• never thought he would even be in advertising, and now it very successful
• Beyond video, and some personal examples
• unthirsty.com: happy hour finder
• was novel at the time. got written up on lifehacker, won google mashups. got a couple of thousand user-contributed locations.
• something they built in their spare time... a few hundred dollars invested. over a couple of years, it built up.
• it was not about financial success. no advertisements. just for fun. 
• this was attractive to people...
• finally these sold it... not retirement money, but decent enough.
• But it led to jobs: they never saw a resume, or a portfolio: just saw unthirsty. The fact that they built something so cool and compelling for fun, just because they wanted to build something: they just had to hire him.
• Jason on Cars
• As a perk at a job got to drive different classic and exotic cars on weekends or the evening.
• So decided to write a WordPress blog doing lifestyle reviews of the cars. For two years they would drop off a brand new car everything Thursday, and pick up the old car. He made a couple of hundred dollars a month on advertising from the blog, and got to drive all these cool cars.
• Just for setting up a blog and writing a post each weekend.
• Bacn.com:
• started dec 28th 2008, launched on January 17th.
• got bacon from all over the country, filmed content, built site, ecommerce.
• it was really fun, really novel.
• sold it in january of this year...
• got invited to speak of webvisions “we built a company in 3 weeks”.
• “wow, that would make a great book.” - a publisher asked them to write about a book about it.
• Paleo Plan: a site to make it easier and cheaper to follow paleo diet
• in 3 weeks launched a site. you get a shopping list. you get a meal plan.
• saves people about 4 hours a month by not having to do that.
• he charges $10/month to save 4 hours of time.
• he works about 3 hours a week on it, and now it’s his primary source of income.
• They don’t all work: He has 5 or 6 sites that failed
• some are bad ideas
• some have bad timing
• some are good ideas with bad execution
• examples:
• laptopia
• to smoke a cigar
• revoluton cyclewear
• snotips
• on and on
• You don’t have to broadcast your failures
• make them count
• get there fast: or fail fast
• learn from everything
• be purposeful about what you learn and how you describe
• Success isn’t cashing out.
• success is building some cool, learning amazing stuff
• Questions to ask yourself
• Is this for art?
• Make sure it fits at least one specific need: if it kind of feels like art, kind of feels like it will make money, kind of feels like a hobby... it may do none of those things.
• Make sure it really satisfies one of those categories.
• Is this for money?
• It’s OK. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s fine.
• Is this for your career?
• Get out there and make something. Let them know what you can do.
• Maybe the first one sucks. That’s fine. Do five more. You’ll figure it out.
• What does success look like?
• Am I looking for a better job?
• To get an opportunity that wasn’t there before?
• To gain notoriety?
• Build momentum: one project alone might not get you there, but a series of them will.
• Be Creative
• Will It Blend? 
• You can’t help but know about this blender, even though a blender is one of the most boring appliances around.
• Talk to everyone you know
• Learn to weed out bad ideas early
• Questions?
• Paleo Diet site: cost about $1200 to get site up. includes consultant fee to the primary expert on it, the wordpress plugin, an search adwords guy
• Q: favorite way to prototype?
• A: I’m an information architect. I make a lot of wireframes and specs. I work in person with people, people I know, and can work closely with. Most of my projects are simple enough that a couple of wireframes and specs is enough.
• Q: the sites you sold: was that an email out of the blue or what?
• A: we knew the competitor from the beginning, he was happy to help us in the beginning, and let us know over and over that he was willing to buy the site.
• A: we had a lot of calls from guys who wanted to the backend from us, and eventually a guy called who knew what he wanted to do with it and was willing to pay.

rethinking the link: social jargon - Ward Cunningham presentation

rethinking the link

Ward Cunningham

@ward

AboutUs.com

• Ward is the inventor of the wiki: the Portland Pattern Repository. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki 
• What they’ve implemented in Ruby on Rails and Javascript
• What is a link?
• Something to click that takes you somewhere
• a relation to resources : Ray Fielding (inventor of the wiki)
• is a link that goes where broken?
• Not necessarily: as wiki proved
• so Ray Fielding says a link is “a relation to resources, possibly zero”
• wiki turns the zero case into an invitation
• a link that doesn’t go anywhere is an invitation to author that topic.
• wikipedia wisely color coded the link: a red link doesn’t go anywhere, a blue one does.
• It’s pretty hard to find a red link these days on wikipedia: it’s been so successful that virtually every topic has been written about.
• bringing the state of destination page to the link avoided the dreaded “under construction” on to-be-developed pages.
• two kinds of links
• internal links: essentially a query to see if the page exists
• external links: aren’t checked
• it means every page is dynamic: even if you don’t expect the page itself to change, the state of the links can change.
• extending the wiki color code
• blue link means one (links to exactly one place)
• red link means zero (nothing there, we have to write it)
• orange link means many (have to choose)
• there are 30,000 disambiguation pages on wikipedia.
• there are people whose whole contribution to wikipedia is disambiguating terms
• happy collision / happy accident
• originally wiki (Portland Pattern Repository) was 30,000 pages on a single topic: how to go about doing computer programming
• a happy collision is when you write a WikiWord expecting to see a question mark (indicating that the page wasn’t written), but it is a blue link (the topic is already written about.)
• sister sites
• pretty early on, other sites on related topics started up.
• “let’s share our names”
• what is the Japanese word for “glitch”?
• social jargon
• part one: you have a glossary of words you use: not every word, but words you use that not everyone knows, but you want them to know.
• part two: your writing automatically links to words in your glossary. (no special brackets or action needed)
• part three: your readers learn your words automatically
• part four: your words spread friend to friend as they are used
• when someone else uses a word, it gets added to their glossary
• social jargon is a feature of AboutUs.com
• AboutUs:
• Community generated content about domains: an expanded version of whois.
• People don’t want to write encyclopedia articles
• So they focus on micro-summaries. A single sentence.
• The purpose of social jargon is to add precision to concise summaries:
• Example: “JiveSoftware moves its HQ from Portland to the Bay Area”. 
• What do they mean by Portland? Portland Oregon? Portland Maine? Portland Cement? By detecting it and disambiguating on the fly with a glossary, then others can know that Portland, Oregon is meant.
• It allows people to be casually precise. In a world where we want to write less and have it mean more.
• is it important? are names important?
• “The dominating feature in the [energetic neutral atom Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) all-sky maps] at low energies is the hydrogen, helium, and oxygen interstellar gas flow.
• super long noun: many words used to achieve full precision. 
• it’s a natural human feature to compress and utilize context to fill in the gaps. 
• context, adjectives, and syntax are all normally used to help achieve precision...
• context: “it was a dark and stormy night”
• adjectives: “energetic neutral atom”
• syntax: “meeting @ward at #wv2010”
• interaction helps:
• “By wiki, did you mean Portland Pattern Repository or collaborative software?”
• Give it a try on AboutUs.com
• The future of writing
• Wikipedia has had a tremendous impact on writing.
• And a tremendous impact on linguistics who have something to study that is properly licensed and has a full history.
• Texting trend: short messages
• Social trend: context for everything.
• We want to use the computer and language in a way similar to our colleagues and friends. 
• Tapping trend: favors choosing over typing. (e.g. better to write something short, and be able to choose the precision than to have to write something long and precise using an iPhone keyboard.)
• Impact...
• accelerated evolution of language: it will be easier for new words and concepts to propagate rapidly.
• specialize language used freely: when you find that existing words don’t work, you’ll make up new words
• hard to read offline: you’ll be able to read further from your comfort zone because you’ll be able to look up words as you go.

Web Visions: Smaller, more focused

I'm at Web Visions 2010, the Design Conference in Portland, Oregon. I attended only once before in 2009. Compared to last year, the conference feels much smaller: perhaps half as big as last year. The conference also seems more focused on design. In 2009, I recalled more sessions on social media, analytics, business, and technology.

I love design, don't get me wrong, but I think I liked it more when there was a greater variety of topics. I'm not a full time designer, although I do have design aspects to my work. But I also have social computing, startup, and business aspects to what I do.

I'm very curious about the factors that went into the change in size and focus.

The UX Driven Startup - Notes from Alexa Andrejewski's Web Visions Presentation

The UX Driven Startup

Alexa Andrejewski

User Experience Designer, Adaptive Path

Founder Foodspotting http://www.foodspotting.com 

• Slides available here 
• Woke up one morning with a great idea
• Why are we always rating restaurants, why not rate individual dishes?
• How can people learn about the foods around the world.
• “Yelp for dishes”
• At Adaptive Path, would help companies figure out what to build before they build it. Figure out their experience strategy. Interaction design: flow of the product.
• The only problem was....Couldn’t actual code anything.
• Ended up spending 6 long months looking for a cofounder. 
• Everyone she knew was a experience designer, didn’t know any developers.
• Critical thing: get out of your immediate social group.
• But these 6 months gave a chance to refine, communicate, and validate vision.
• Ate out a lot, carried a notebook everywhere. Asked people what they liked about their food, and how they would rate it, and what they would say about it.
• But the time she did find a cofounder, the product had evolved a lot. It started looking like Yelp, but what resonated with people was the visual aspects: the photos of the food. 
• When I did find a cofounder, we could hit the ground running.
• The cofounder was a Ruby on Rails developer. Didn’t have iPhone skills, but hired that out originally.
• What is the experience you want to create?
• The UX driven startup: Focus on the experience you want to create and let everything else support that.
     /  Experience \
    /     Business    \
   /       Product      \
  /     Technology     \
  --------------------------
• Avoid common mistakes startups make
• Building something people don’t really want or need.
• example: Segway “It will change cities and create a new world”
• reality: it’s just novelty seeking tourists who use it. it doesn’t fit into people’s existing experiences.
• A UX Vision validates the experience and its fit
• Thinking Too Small
• Investors ask questions like: How does this get Big? What does success look like? What’s your world domination plan?
• They want to hear about what you want to big ultimately. If you just focus on what you can build tomorrow, that’s not a big enough vision.
• Moving Too Slowly
• Arguments of “this is the best design” , “no this one is” causes things to slow down.
• Vision: A concrete representation of where your product is headed. Can be words, images, or prototype. But it should be tangible.
• Having that gives you something to orient your path around, so that the decisions can go faster.
• Tools
• Coming up with a vision
• Communicate your vision
• Validate your vision
• Coming up with your vision
• Originally was considering a book.
• Contextual Interviews
• “Tell me about some of the highs and lows for your restaurant.”
• Yields understanding of pain points and opportunities you may not have considered.
• Ingredients: 10 people, 10 questions, notebook & pen
• How
• Meet people in context
• Ask open ended questions
• Use cues in environment
• Use discussion aids if you can.
• Examples:
• “draw me a timeline of your restaurant. what were some of the highs and lows of your experience. now tell me about those highs... tell me about those lows.”
• Make Believe
• Yields
• an outpouring of fresh ideas
• New ways to frame a problem
• A chance to taste whether an interaction feels natural in real life
• Ingredients:
• props, a friend, the real world
• example: Palm Pilot designer carried a block of wood around and considered what it would be like to use.
• How
• Act out some ways you’d use your product, using props to inspire and test ideas.
• Get out and enjoy everyday activities. --> makes it easier to interact with the product idea, rather than sitting in a room.
• Metaphor Brainstorming
• Yields: 
• Interesting properties extracted from the metaphors
• Fresh ideas and perspective
• Ingredients
• Core concepts on big stickies
• Lots of small sticky notes
• How
• Think about each concept in isoltation
• Write down whatever comes to mind
• Deconstruct the metaphor: what characteristcs are interesting?
• Use the characteristics to get ideas?
• Example:
• For foodspotting, uses stamp collecting and coin collecting as metaphors for collecting, and the characteristics of stamp and coin collecting that are unique
• Artifact From the Future
• A concrete representation of where your product is headed. Something you can rally around.
• How
• Imagine the TechCrunch blog post in the future written about your product.
• Imagine the future splash page
• Communicating your vision
• Experience Principles
• Yields: Concise, memorable guidelines that inspire ideas, gives you a basis for decision-making.
• How: 
• Brainstorm characteristics you want your product to embody
• Choose the ones that are unique to your product.
• Example:
• Foodspotting only talks about good food, not the bad food.
• Foodspotting lets you give a blue ribbon, not rate food.
• Foodspotting believes great food can come from anywhere, and we should celebrate it, not just from big cities.
• Experience Poster
• Yield: a pocket sized visual summary of what using your product could be like. Something you can use to sell your vision and vett your ideas.
• Ingredients:
• an elevator pitch
• descriptions of benefits
• principles, characteristics, and metaphors
• How
• Describe the benefits of your product
• Illustrate those benefits - capture the experience, not the interface.
• Thing about Nine Problems Your Product Sells: Just use stick figures to illustrate it.
• Pitch Kit
• Yields:
• a meaningful name
• a one setence ocktail party pitch
• a vision statement
• an “ah ha” reaction.
• How
• A few social events to practice at
• A few well known companies you can relate yours to (optional)
• Practice your answers to these question until you can get people to say “ah ha!” in a minute or less.
• Also, what is your bigger goal? e.g. Google is about organizing the world’s information, Facebook is about enabling people to build their social relationships.
• Validating Your Vision
• Prototyping
• Yields: a tool you can use to guerilla test your product where you go. Used: InDesign.
• Ingredients: cardstock or index cards or imagemaps + webkit
• How
• Create a lightweight, smoke and mirrors prototype of your product
• Pull it out and ask people how and why they’d use it.
• Example:
• Drew up five different rating systems, from stars to numbers to blue ribbon: and asked people how they would use it, and respond to it, and what it meant to them.
• Design The Future Homepage
• yields: 
• a concise summary of your product’s benefits in typical homepage form
• A way to test interest in your product
• ingredients: 
• blank paper and model homepage
• or typical homepage template
• instructions
• sketch the homepage of the future - include name, taglione, top benefits, glimpse into data
• show people andask “how would you use this and why?”
• KISS insights: a tool that allows you to ask people a question about any webpage.
• Throw a page up on the web, with an email signup to determine interest.
• I Love this product because...
• yields
• perspective
• a reminder of what it’s all about
• ingredients
• Write “I love this product because...” up on a whiteboard.
• how
• finish this sentence as if your mom or end user were saying it
• show people your vision and ask them how they’d finish
• Reaching Your Vision
• Building a cupcake and build to a cake over time. Don’t build an unfrosted cake and give it to your friend.
• Another way of saying it: Build half a product, not a half-assed product.
• Once you have the big vision, step back and ask what is the cupcake version of that vision.
• Pick a few most essential features, and ensure that they work really.
• Design principles should drive ideas. If the principle doesn't drive ideas (.e.g "simple and easy to use"), then it's not a useful principle. Everyone wants their site to be easy to use. Also, the principles should be unique to your product.

33 Lessons about Beer, Life, and Building a Business

33 Lessons about Beer, Life, and Building a business

Dave Selden, 33 Books Co.

• A graphics artist by background. Starting a business stretched his comfort zone.
• Background
• Went to art school and journalism school. Main lesson: beer is awesome.
• Ended up in advertising.
• Art/Journalism school is great, but doesn’t teach you everything.
• They teach you critical thinking skills and art skills, but none of the business skills.
• But you can teach yourself...
• Started a blog (Blog Sober Brewing Co.)
• But art school taught him how to see possibilities.
• Scout Books: 32 pages, 100% recycled. You can customize the cover. Local, family business with emphasis on sustainability.
• Gave idea that he could create a book for beer tasting.
• Made a spreadsheet to estimate costs and profits.
• “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
• “33 bottles of beer book”
• 3-pack is 99 bottles of beer
• Each page has:
• a flavor wheel with characteristics like: linger, body, bitter, sour, burnt, toffee, alcoholic
• stats like IBU and ABV
• notes
• beer name, brewer, etc.
• http://www.33beers.com  -> website to sell beers. nice looking, emphasis on how much it costs and where to buy it.
• But building a website isn’t enough... You need to get people to go to the website.
• PR doesn’t have to start with bloggers.
• Simple intro letter to bloggers with link to website, low-key solicitation. Every person contacted took the free sample.
• It’s a given that you should avoid stupid stuff like attaching a 3 mb pdf to the email.
• Some of the blog reviews were totally awesome... but it generated at most a dozen orders after each post. Good, but not enough.
• But seeding blogs like to some other sites picking it up: an online beer site reviewed the product, and that generated 150 orders in one day.
• And that led to traditional print publications like Food & Wine, and Sunset magazine reviewing the product, which has led to even more reviews.
• “Beer can be tax-deductible”
• blog project to taste 999 beers in 999 days.
• the blog draws search traffic, which helps sell the product.
• so the cost of the beer is an advertising expense.
• E-commerce can be simple...
• Just string together a little PayPal and HTML.
• USPS is great, and easy.
• Pricing isn’t easy.
• Subsidizes shipping to keep it simple.
• Shipping out books takes 30 minutes to an hour every night.
• Retailers are important:
• He gives them a free sample. Of those, about 75% will actually decide to sell the product.
• He makes the display stands himself from recycled wood.
• The other thing that is awesome is that as a web person, he felt like he missed the green thing. Now actually making a physical product, he can make a green product.
• The time to expand is when you have orders.
• 33wines 
• You don’t want to run out of stock. Especially you don’t want to run out of money to reorder stock.
• His wife is very supportive, which is critical. She ships when he has to go on business.
• Other facts:
• Hops and marijuana are 99% genetically similar.
• Q: How does it work with retailers?
• A: When I first got started, I asked to put the book in the store, and they paid me only if the book sold. Then later, it worked out that I sold the books in bulk at discount price to the retailer, and then the retailer sells it for profit.
• Q: Are you continually doing marketing and PR, or does that diminish?
• A: Doing less now than I was before. I’m spending more time doing fulfillment than marketing. I used to have a sales week, in which I would approach retailers, and then a marketing week, in which I would approach bloggers.
• Q: Are you doing any affiliate marketing on the website?
• A: Oh, that’s a great idea... I should do that.

Session notes from Chris Fahley - The Human Interface / wv2010

The Human Interface

Chris Fahley

http://graphpaper.com

@chrisfahley

• Cyborg: embedding or attaching technology to our bodies to make us better
• contacts, glasses, jotting things down to remember them
• The history of humanity is the history of becoming cyborgs
• This isn’t always a good thing, sometimes the technology falls short
• The Uncanny Valley (Masahiro Mori)
• Two dimensions: how comfortable humans are around robots, and how closely the  robots mimic humans
• Lessons So Far
• Don’t replace humans
• Don’t replicate humans
• What childhood experiences brought you into design?
• Take things apart to see how they work
• Fixing broken things
• Creating Little Worlds
• Lots of design stuff is not new. Example of multitouch display from 25 years ago, of Apple pad demo video from 25 years ago that’s like an iPad with AI
• Jef Raskin: “An interface is humane if it is responsible to human needs and is considerate of human frailties”
• Alan Cooper: If we want users to like our software, we should design it like a likeable human being
• We make better products when we think of them as human beings
• Future
• We’ll see a return to command line interfaces: not necessarily arcane commands, but typing or saying what we want, rather than pointing and clicking
• We’ll see more physicality of user interfaces
• Not merely mimicking human behavior but reflects it.
• Software that mirrors behavior:
• Chat and IM reflect the immediacy of face to face community
• Social networks mirroring the structure of the special primacy we give our close friends.
• The Human Interface
• is about persausion and seduction
• is smart and has awareness
• is empathetic and feeling
• is physical and embodied
• is linguistic, poetic, and narrative (creates compelling stories about our interactions)
• has a name and an identity
• has a personality
• Paul Dourish: Where the Action Is
• Embodied Interaction: the intersection of ubiquitous computing, tangible computing, and social computing.
• Reeves and Nass: The Media Equation
• Experiments they did on users and machines to figure out how we perceive them
• We tend to personify the interfaces we interact with
• Ergonomics of the mind
• Cups designed by the other Masahiro Mori, such that they each have their own personality
• Human-ness
• Christopher Alexander: The Quality Withou a Name aka The Phenomenon of Life
• Fifteen properties of Living Structures
• http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/fifteen.htm
• Examples:
• level of scale
• strong centers
• thick boundaries
• Katherine Isbister: Better Game Characters by Design
• external characteristics of personhood: bodies, faces, vices
• internal: ...
• The Three Qualia of the Human Interface
• Sentience
• Intimacy
• Personality
• Sentience
• The system is about to collect robust sensory data from the world and make sense of that data
• voice recognition: e.g. google voice recognition mobile apps
• image and face recognition: e.g. google picasa
• touch and gestures: touching a screen, moving a controller
• Not always that great... fitbit counts how many steps you take. It’s not perfect, but they can discover a lot about your motion and activity.
• Microsoft Project Natal: just observes your body.
• Artificial Intelligences
• all of these things have artificial intelligence in them
• the difference between these and HAL is that they are not trying to do it all at once.
• (they are no danger of falling into the uncanny valley)
• Even simple things can be unnerving: 
• e.g. search results that are uncannily good. 
• Search that pops up microsoft bing advertisement with search term prepopulated
• Intimacy
• Emotional Intelligence
• Proximity
• Presence
• Social Web
• Personal Informatics
• Multiplayer Games
• Real Time Web
• Conversations
• Examples:
• We noticed you haven’t called your mother later.
• Your email is using more stressed words this month than last month
• Status indicators shows people where we are and what we’re doing
• Big Ben Clock on twitter
• Conversations...
• Efficient and fast? Or elegant and graceful?
• For a long time, the answer was that interfaces should be efficient. But maybe elegant is the new efficient.
• Politeness is something all people do, but not machines...
• Don’t reject
• Don’t interrupt
• Say hello and goodbye
• Use people’s names
• Praise people
• Example: spell checker that praises people for writing difficult words correctly, or writing an error free emails. Yes, it takes longer, but people come away feeling more satisfied with their experience.
• Personality
• The system has a distinctive character, with recognizable cultures and habits
• Interpersonal Circumplex
• 
• Example:
• Max Train comes to a station. How to let people know which doors will be opening when the passengers could be facing forward or back: “The doors will be opening on my right”
• Culture
• Casting - Role they are in (copilot who is subservient vs. engineer)
• Names - People associate meaning with names
• Things to try
• Use pronouns for your product: he, she
• Give your application a name
• Do more visceral prototypes
• If we don't humanize our products, then our products will mechanize us.

Lipstick on a Pig Session Notes from Web Visions 2010

Lipstick on a Pig

Can UX Differentiate a Software Company?

Gene Smith

@gsmith

• Story of transformation from user experience design to product design
• Retrospective of what worked and didn’t work
• Wanted to transform from a services company to a licensed product
• Great user experience team, great development lead, great development team
• Idea: we could bring web 2.0 design to Microsoft Sharepoint
• You could go to one spot, see all your sharepoint sites, docs, etc.
• Sat on top of sharepoint
• Everything designed to be very simple to use, straightforward, very easy
• Mint.com
• Founder had used Microsoft Money and Quicken, found them to be very tiring to use. A lot of work to enter all transactions.
• Mint is a thin user experience layer on top of Yodalee. 
• Had:
• Engaging experience
• Clever solution to common problem
• Amazing Timing (right at recession, people needed tools to manage money)
• Way to make money
• Flickr
• Relative to competitors, was a step above everyone else
• Interesting social features was novel
• Flickr became popular just as digital cameras were booming
• Before flickr, people were sending an email with 25 photos attached.
• Pro account had unlimited storage
• Had:
• Engaging experience
• Clever solution
• Timing was right
• Way to make money (pro accounts)
• Slideshare (bit of counter example)
• People tweet about how hard uploading, annotating, and sharing presentations is with Slideshare
• It meets most of the criteria (engaging experience, clever solution, etc), but the experience isn’t quite there from an engaging experience
• However, Slideshare reaches over 28 million monthly people. It’s a top site, ranked  in the top 400 sites in the US.
• Getting Starting...
• “What if we built BaseCamp on Sharepoint?”
• This turns out as a terrible way to start an idea
• Will: I don’t believe this.
• Sharepoint is a billion dollar product today.
• Sharepoint ecosystem is a $13B system.
• Market that we were entering was massive.
• And we know that companies out there were having problems using Sharepoint. You could have hundreds or thousands of sites in a network. Companies wouldn’t know what was out there. People would spend 60% of their time giving people permissions. Another company was spending hundreds of thousands on training for Sharepoint.
• You know something is wrong when a person who uses Facebook for two hours a night needs a two day training session to use Sharepoint.
• Product: kiiro
• Make a product that focuses on getting your work done, instead of endless tuning of Sharepoint.
• Make a central dashboard, so you could see everything relevant across multiple sharepoints.
• UI Design stripped everything away... very clean.
• First idea was to have a two way sync between Microsoft Project and Sharepoint.
• This wasn’t so good. 
• Project health metrics and so forth made for a very good demo, but doesn’t match how people actually do project management, which is much more messy.
• Then decide to focus on social stuff... an activity timeline of what you and your coworkers are doing.
• Took twice as long to build on top of Sharepoint as opposed to a regular web application like Django. Regular web apps have easier databases, security, etc.
• We wanted to make this thing a black box. Organizations have trouble with people continually customizing sharepoint. We took most of that way. 
• We wanted to have a very purpose focused interfaced.
• Market Response
• Not particularly good. 
• Products like Mint, Flickr --> the buyer is the user.
• Even if they don’t pay money, they make a decision to invest their time
• The person who is evaluating the product is different than the person who will use the product
• Enterprise market
• The buyer is not a user.
• What benefits does the buyer get?
• They want hard benefits like increased revenue, decreased cost
• And soft benefits like increased effectiveness and efficiency
• e.g. we can save 10 minutes a day x 2000 employees x $57/personhour = $xM savings
• Not really true, because if people have 10 extra minutes a day, they will just go on Facebook...
• Problems...
• It was hard to make the business case for the product
• The Buyer, the Business Owner, IT, and the User all different...
• The marketplace is complex: independent software vendors, system integrators, buyers
• Finally did a market analysis of which companies would be a good match for their product. About 24,000 companies were a good match. 
• But the next problem was diffusion: the companies were spread across industries and markets.
• Next problem... system integrators.
• Companies with complex sharepoint needs go to a system integrator, not directly to 
• 1:3:5 Rule
• For every dollar an independent software vendor makes...
• Microsoft makes 3 dollars in licensing fees...
• system integrators want 5 dollars to integrate the software
• And system integrators don’t encourage companies to go directly to an independent software vendor: “oh, you don’t want that software, we could build that for you...”
• 2:1 Rule: Marketing vs design and development
• You need to spend twice as much on marketing vs. design and development
• And which means that about 10% is left for UX design
• Conversion...
• If you have a $5K product, and $500,000 in costs, then you need to sell it to 100 companies.
• If you have a 1% conversion rate, you need to pitch it to 10,000 companies to sell it to 100 companies.
• Because the product was strongly differentiated... it allowed them to more easily get companies into the funnel.
• But because the product limited customization, many companies, once they learned about the limitations, wouldn’t use it.
• And one of the biggest potential customers would be system integrators (who would resell it)...
• Except that because it was a black box and limited customization, the system integrators wouldn’t really use it. (their specialty is customization...)
• Kiiro Had:
• Engaging Experience
• X Did not have Clever Solution
• X Bad Timing: in the trough between SP 2007 and SP 2010
• Way to Make Money
• Market Opportunity (good)
• X Market Fit was bad...
• On the scale of fidelity and functionality:
• I would spend as much time with low fidelity and low functionality as long as possible researching and learning.
• When I was ready, I would go for maximum fidelity: Mock-Ups (and then add functionality)
• As opposed to going for maximum functionality: Working Product (and then improve design)
• Going beyond... New Version of kiiro
• Highly customizable
• Better Sharepoint Integration
• Targeted to System Integrators
• And created a new tool... Parachute
• Backs up Basecamp Files
• Complete HTML Export
• Low Cost
• Releasing something out there in the world is thrilling. User interaction design is fun, and it pays the bills, but releasing product is exciting.