.oO Tailwind

So, I’m currently down in Cadiz, southern Spain taking in part in Orange’s second Partner Camp this year. The camp is a 3 day event aimed at sharing, discussing and un-peeling Orange’s world, it’s customers and it’s business with a view to information exchange with suppliers/partners etc.

I was also at the Partner Camp held in May which was in Sarasota, Florida.

At LBi, Orange is one of my key clients and I really enjoy working with them. The work we do is mostly web and/or application based and we’ve been working right across the business at all levels for some years.

We do a lot of work with both Orange Group in the UK and with the various divisions of FT, based in Paris. now so our knowledge of where this converging business is going, really is front line.

Events like this are great because they give us an insight into other parts of Orange’s business that we don’t get to see, so we shore up our understanding even further. but what I really like is the open, discursive and collaborative nature of the sessions.

People are here to learn about Orange and Orange is here to listen.

There are a bunch of suppliers here, content, service and technology, whose reason for being here is different to ours - i.e. they want to sell something to Orange, but even so this makes for interesting observation.

Some topics for this blog are occurring to me as I attend sessions on Web 2.0, product and service convergence, product/service ecosystems, HSDPA, user generated content etc etc. The topics themselves aren’t new to me, of course, but seeing how an organisation of this size is adapting itself to a community economy is.

Being here is invaluable to my understanding as to what motivates this business and what the challenges are as well as providing me with the forum to discuss what we do and how we do it with my key clients within the company.

As we engage on day-to-day projects and issues, events like Partner Camp provide a useful forum for brokering conversations aimed at doing things better. It’s an open chat.

Good stuff is coming from this. More later.

So.. I’ve been struggling to decide which to buy. And after much considered opinion and useful advice (from people I trust on these matters), I’ve shot for the Nikon.

It’s been much of a mac Vs PC debate (and we all know who comes out top there!).

I bought a D80 and boy is it good!

Expensive, but good.

So, my post outlining my thoughts on the Euro IA generated some interest.

Kars Alrink an attendee at Euro IA and author of Leapfrogblog seemed to think that I was ‘Euro IA Bashing’, getting on my pedestal and berating my European colleagues for being 3 years behind the US equivalent.

yes, I think that the content on offer at 2006s Euro IA conference was a little safe for my liking, and debate wasn’t particularly rife during sessions, but I’m not sitting here looking down on people, far from it.

I’ve been working with the Web since 1993 and my educational background is in Product Design, I don’t consider my self an IA. I consider it part of my role, but not how I’d describe it.

In the teams which I work at within LBi, we believe in a philosophy called Experience Design. It’s fundamental basis is that brands are built through experience and that developing digital experience is a composite effort between Experience Architects and Designers and where possible (not all our clients buy build work from us) Interface Developers.

In essence THREE are three layers to realising a brand in a digital capacity:

• Visual Principles - This describes the presentation layer, the personalities illustrated, typographic hierarchy, photographic style etc and it is the domain of the ‘Designer’.

• Architectural Principles - This describes the fundamental engineering oif the site, how it works, where pages/states live within a system and where modules or interactive touch-points live with pages/views. Essentially the underlying core usability and ease of use is the domain of the Experience Architect.

We’ll come to the third in a minute.

This is where a lot of our competitors stop. They have Information Architects working through a information classification and hierarchy, which is them expressed in wireframe format, with sitemaps, process flows etc and is then handed to a Designer to ‘brand’.

FUNDAMENTAL ERROR.

Branding is about experience. Branding 101. Anyone who thinks that the person responsible for the functional integrity of a system isn’t a brand engineer, then they may as well go home now.

In Experience Design we have a third layer that sits between the visual and the architectural. Its called the Behavioural and its where differentiators are realised and branding comes to life.

• Behavioural Principles - This describes the attitude of the site, and is where through tight collaboration across EA and Design, we can contrive the behaviour to be appropriate to the brand we are working for. it’s the layer where its possible to realise brand attributes such as FRIENDLY, TRUSTWORTHY, HONEST, DYNAMIC, STRAIGHTFORWARD etc etc.

To illustrate my example I’ll use the design of a mobile phone application.

Imagine you are in the middle of writing a text message to your wife or girlfriend and during composition she calls you.

This is what I’d call an ‘interrupt’ and can be handled in many ways, but some more appropriate to the brand than others.

OPTION ONE

1. In text composition mode, call displayed
2. Call answered by clicking soft-key ‘Answer’
3. Message saved to drafts
4. Call taken
5. Call terminated

Makes sense right. Feels okay?

You could even return the user to what they were doing when the call came in eh?

Sure, but either way as our user has spoken to the person that they are sending a text to, they now want to delete the text and will have to:

1. click menu
2. click messages
3. click drafts
4. select message
5. delete

Right, now if one of the brand values or principles of the brand is to fundamentally make things easier and to be effort free, maybe this works better.

OPTION TWO

1. In text composition mode, call displayed
2. Call answered by clicking soft-key ‘Answer’
3. Call taken
4. Call terminated
5. User shown option screen offering:

• Continue writing text message
• Delete text message
• Save to drafts folder

Both options are usable and schematically okay, but one is fundamentally about attitude and behaviour. It’s a subtle brand inflexion realised within the bounds of interactive space. It’s an example of something that ‘just works’.

When you have Designers and EAs overlapping their respective disciplines in the way I described above you will realise a better product.

There will be a natural tension that exists in the product development that should exist in all great product be they physical or virtual.

So, briefly coming back to the IA Vs EA thing, sure it’s a label but its also a philosophy and outlook. I believe being an EA is about saying ‘Hey, I’m responsible for brand too’.

I propose that the IA discipline will always be there, but its as a subset of a wider more strategic approach. This was mentioned at Euro IA when Olly Clark started to talk about the ‘Strategic IA’ - someone who gets further into the business to influence design, brand and product strategy.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

I just prefer the idea of Experience Architecture as it’s provides remit for holistic user experience design across a range of platforms and services. My my language is wrong and the idea of Strategic IA is easier to swallow than Experience Architect?

Oh I forgot - at the Euro IA conference in Berlin, Steve Pemberton gave a really interesting talk on the potential of XForms.

I need to learn more about this area as the potential in seperating the ‘purpose’ from the ‘presentation’ is very interesting indeed. Here’s the W3C stuff n’ gumpf

And here’s a short intro from W3Schools.com .
The basic premise is that you can give things a role and a context, so that your standard <p> tag can be better expressed by giving it a role attribute, e.g. <p role=”note”>. This semantic information provides context to the content.

Which is quite scary when you think about it because this means that browsers will have the power to understand context and could therefore serve advertising based on this.

Who owns the ad model then? Website owners or browser manufacturers?

Eeek.

The Euro IA conference held in Berlin is in it’s second year and it is kind of like the newer, more junior version of the IA Summit. Only the newer and more junior.

That’s not a mistake, it really felt like that.

I went along with 12 other colleagues amongst about 200 or so others and I guess I came away hopeful for the future, but a little underwhelmed at the quality of speaker and content presented.

I’ve already mentioned in a previous post that I ran a session/workshop on ‘Wicked Workshops’ with a a colleague of mine, Jason Mesut. The rest of our guys had posters up and were there to attend the variety of lectures.

I hate top-down lectures. PowerPoint kills presentations and suffocates your personality.

The thing that struck me most about what I heard over the two days is that, in the mixture of backgrounds, disciplines and ideologies - there is a large group of IAs who refuse to be dragged into the interactive space and call themselves something more appropriate.

For me, the conference failed to really provoke any progressive thought or debate, and was a little ’safe’ for me. I was really hoping to have a good old discussion, rant or ‘ding-dong’ but it didn’t materialise.

I for one, am <u>NOT</u> and IA. I consider myself Experience Architect, which is lucky as that’s my current role at LBi (formerly Framfab, formerly Oyster).

I’m an architect of the user experience, not only for a single task, goal or use case deployed in a web environment, but across all channels. Our work at LBi is increasingly across multiple channels (web, wap, call centre, retail outlet etc) and to this end we feel that we are continually working in a ’service design’ capacity.

I didn’t study HCI or Information or Computer Science, I studied Product Design and then Branding & Innovation. If that counts me out of the club - so be it.

Many of the IAs I spoke with at the conference weren’t really that progressive with their discipline and were happy talking about taxonomies, controlled vocabularies and meta data. Whilst fine and appropriate, they talked in a robotic tone, often missing the subtler points of what it is to experience a system. In my opinion our raison d’être.

The ones I spoke to were from small companies where they are probably likely to be from multi-disciplinary teams, so I was further surprised. I could easily see them handing PowerPoint wireframes over to the designers to ‘colour in’ and deliver to clients, therein missing the point of their job entirely.

There were some interesting groups there, but I got the feeling that most people were there to listen and take rather than discuss and give. I picked up some new stuff, but not nearly as much as I hoped.

Personally, I consider Experience Architecture to be the engineering that supports the form. And that Experience Architecture exists in a world of tension where form follows function follows form.

My Product Design training is steeped in Bauhaus philosophies, so I guess I would think like that.

Peter Morville of ‘Information Architecture for the World Wide Web’ and ‘Ambient Findability Fame’ opened trying to convince us that there is a natural cycle and that the IA profession will once again bring order to chaos and that this was it’s charge.

This wasn’t the main thrust of his talk but there was a point when he compared IAs to trees and that leaves fall to the ground that would once again make trees stronger - or something. Not his words, my summary.

Either way, I disagree hugely with what he was offering us. I think IAs that refuse to become more progressive and start thinking about the ‘experience’ and less about the ‘information’ will fade and die.

Fade and die.

Creating digital experiences is easy, making them appropriate to the brand is difficult and to do this you have to be a cross-over, hybrid IA who understand brand, design, affordances and semantics. You need to work very closely with Designers. Even to the point where as the EA you can have a valid opinion on typographic hierarchy, photographic style ident lock-ups, etc etc.

I’d expect designers to have an opinion over the engineering of what I’ve done because it’s the underlying tone of the experience if not the visual representation, and therefore a vehicle for the brand to express itself.

Actually, come to think of it, of late I’ve worked with too many designers who take a similar stance with their discipline. They consider their art to be that of presentation and refuse to get embroiled in the cross-over of working with collaboratively EAs.

These people are Graphic Designers and not Interaction Designers. They think ‘branding’ is about logos and colourways. They call themselves the ‘Creatives’. They miss the point.

How arrogant is that BTW? Why do those labelled with the badge ‘designer’ consider creativity to be their sole domain? I know some very creative Developers. Actually, I know some creative Project Managers (!).

In a world of healthy tension, EAs will push onto the design discipline and Designers will push onto the EA discipline. This will result in better experiences, delivered in a way more appropriate to the brand. This symbiotic relationship is called ‘Experience Design’.

Maybe this is something I should take to the Grand-Daddy IA Summit?

Hi - and sorry for being away for ages. I’ve had one of those months where everything seems to be happening at the same time, lots of client work, conferences abroad, company merger, freelance work, new baby at home, 3 birthday parties (myself, and my two daughters) and sadly a family loss.

So anyway, I’ve not long got back from the Euro IA conference held in Berlin where I was a speaker and my colleagues were presenting posters. I ran a workshop session with 200 people with a colleague of mine (Jason Mesut) and the others had posters up on:

• Agile User Experience Design - Andy Braxton, Matt Shannon
• Using Comics to describe holistic user experiences - putting the Zap & the Pow into User Experience - Stephen Barber, Jewell Niccolls
• Creating the Perfect Client - Jason Mesut, Iain Hinchliffe, Bersi Kueper
• Design Patterns in Practice - Natalaie Currant, Sarah Morris

Our workshop was called ‘Wicked Workshops’ and we did an energetic session on how best to prepare and frame a workshop session. The aim wasn’t to stand there and bestow a whole host of workshopping techniques on an audience after lunch on a Sunday (man - could there be a more difficult time to run a workshop?). No, we introduced people to the concept of EPIC-Fun.

Our view is that ALL workshops, neé, meetings should be EPIC-fun. And anyone who knows anything about any good business tools, knows that they all need an accronym (yes - in jest):

• E - Engaging
• P - Practical
• I - Inclusive
• C - Credible
• Fun - well, what do you think?

I’m not going to duplicate the content over here as we set-up a blog to discuss our framework afterwards and it is over on Blogger.

Please feel free to join in the discussion and give us your view of what constitutes a ‘Wicked Workshop’.

BTW - I hate Blogger.

..and BTW again, I’m SO not an IA! I’ll summise my thoughts on the conference on Monday.

Just a quick note to let you all know that my company has changed its name from Framfab to LBi following the merger between the two companies. We now size-up at about 1500 across the globe and in London alone we have 50 User Experience Architects and 40 Designers, giving us the largest group of Experience Design professionals in Europe.

Yadda yadda - there you go.

The small privately owned company I joined has become massive.

The advent of digital cameras into the mainstream has seen a behavioural change in the way in which people take, store and share photographs. A conversation with parents over the weekend at my daughters second birthday party confirmed what I already knew, in that people are taking more pictures than they did previously as its easy to do so with a digital camera.

Being able to easily shoot, check and delete encourages a less efficient behaviour when framing and taking shots. I still use my 35mm SLR and know for a fact that I take more time over my shots, speed, aperture etc.. I have to, because you only get one shot, or 36 per roll, but you know what I mean.

• Storage will become and issue
• Sharing is easier
• Future could see time and location factored into EXif Data to create smart albums in smart frames

But think about this; forget the european fridge mountain, we’ll have an image mountain as people continue to amass images. What are the storage solutions? Will this finally be the tipping point for network storage? Are the folks at Yahoo/Flickr already designing services that make it easier for people to add and manage their entire library?

What are your thoughts guys?