Technology, Information, Experience Design… Helping you get it.

Yesterday IxDA NYC presented the 2011 Big Apple Redux at AOL. After months of hard work we were able to present a workshop and several talks from the past year’s conference circuit and an all around good time for about a hundred people from in and around New York (and from as far away as Great Britain.)

The day started off with Jimmy Chandler‘s workshop “What UX Designers Can Learn by Going Out to Eat”. We shared and explored problems, solutions, likes and dislikes from both the dining and designing world while Jimmy involved the participants in drawing parallels between what makes for great experiences in both.

After lunch we kicked off the afternoon with Kaleem Khan‘s controversial talk “Design for Evil: Ethical Design” which I was able to realize might not deserve the negative reaction so many happy iPhone owners have had. Granted, it’s tough to talk about ethics without offending someone and Kaleem isn’t necessarily trying not to offend anyone but after a second viewing of the talk and a couple of drinks and some conversations with Kaleem I do think his motivation to get designers thinking  about their own personal ethics comes from a good place.

Our next talk was Dave Cronin‘s ” Healthcare Interfaces: How Interaction Design Can Help Fix Medicine“. Dave joined us via skype from the West Coast. It was an interesting irony to be hearing about how many improvements can be made in the healthcare world by applying todays design thinking and technology after struggling through setting up something as simple as a video conference at a state-of-the-art facility at one of the world’s premier internet companies. Dave highlighted this irony and reminded us that most hospitals and doctors offices are woefully behind the times. It is surely a huge challenge but it’s also one that many designers are very excited about tackling.

Next up was Megan Grocki who explained how “Marketing is not a 4 Letter Word.” With all the talk recently about unicorns (UX designers with visual design or coding chops) I deemed Megan an even rarer Pegasus Unicorn with chops in  UX and marketing at Mad*Pow. While giving us some more insight into how marketers think and what they do, Megan also reminded us that we are all marketers sometimes and that what they do is not always evil or douchey. In fact, the better we do our job as designers, the easier their job is and the more good our work can do.

Callie Neylan presented “Beautiful Interactions: Codifying Aesthetics in Interaction Design” where she explained a system for measuring and comparing the relative beauty of the cities in which she has lived and then applied it to some examples of interaction and service design. Callie presented another lens through which we can view our work in attempt to make more beautiful experiences.

Finally, IxDA NYC’s own Lis Hubert gave an impassioned talk about “Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery“. Lis walked us through her experiences with integrating UX into the agile process and proposed a method by which strategy and planning work in parallel with development and delivery. Lis’ passion for solving difficult problems (and for beer) gave the entire audience some food for thought (or drink for thought, in this case) and spurred quite a bit of discussion to close out the day’s talks.

Following the presentations the group was treated to a cocktail hour by Tandem Seven where we were all able to decompress, share our thoughts and questions with each other and the presenters and get to know our colleagues a bit better. The party continued (as it often does) with an IxDA-sponsored afterparty at B Bar down the block.

After countless hours of planning, preparation, discussion, and anticipation the day went off as well as anyone could have hoped. I’d like to thank everyone involved:

All of the  IxDA Leaders and volunteers who made this happen

• Lis Hubert
• Peter March
• Andi Mignolo
• David Fine
• Chris Palle
• Brian Durkin
• Fritz Desir
• Kellie Leake

Our sponsors Tandem Seven, Microsoft, and Wiley Publishing

Our host, the AOL Consumer Experience Team, especially Gabi Moore

All of our presenters and every member of the interaction and experience design tribe for another memorable day, some new friends, and a bit more knowledge and insight that will make me a better designer.

Kudos all around!

I tend to be an early adopter. I’m not a camp-out-in-line-to-get-it-the-first-day guy but I tend to be in possession of the latest device before most folk. Part of me tells myself (and my wife) that I neeeed to stay up to date. It’s part of my job. It’s for my career. The truth is I just can’t resist for very long. My friends and colleagues know this about me and tend to come to me for advice on the latest gadget or web site. When it came to the iPad I was not going to be a guinea pig. I was going to wait for the front-facing camera and the non-AT&T (read.. working) 3G model. I really did try. And I did hold out almost until the second generation (I’m counting the iPad 3G as the 2nd gen.. sue me!)

What did it for me?  A combination of things.

It really is a New Platform. I design software and it’s important for me to understand how people use that software, where they use it, and on what sort of devices and in what ways.

It’s a legitimately usable Digital Sketchpad. I am a visual thinker and communicator. If I don’t have a pad in my pocket there’s about a 100% chance I’ll be drawing in the air with my fingers as I talk, either trying to understand something or communicate it. When I started to see some of the sketching apps and what people were doing with them, I knew I had to be part of it.

It’s also an eBook reader. I love to read, and I love to do it on the subway… when I have a book on me.

It’s awesome in the kitchen. I like to cook. I have about 20 recipe books and a stuffed folder of olive oil soaked handwritten or printed recipes.

The iPad lets me do all of this on a little slab of glass. I know lots of people like to go right for the swiss army knife metaphor but that’s not quite how I see it. My mind goes right to the concept of tabula rasa, or blank slate.

It’s a device that has the potential to be filled with capabilities that will allow us to do things we haven’t even conceived of yet.

Of course it comes with a set of apps that allow us to email, read, surf the web.. already an impressive set of capabilities. I guess it’s hard to call it a blank slate.

Adding a set of well-known apps quickly brings the utility up several notches to the point where you’re doing much more advanced things and starting to get the nature of the new platform and what it can do.

I’ve had mine for a few months now and by now I have a pretty good set of apps and am getting much more facile with it in everyday use. I’m going to give you a tour of how I’ve set mine up and how I use it. It’s a constantly changing picture.

Read more

Want to brainstorm, solve problems, and communicate ideas more effectively using pictures?  Sure you do…!

Join us on Weds, May 19 at 6:30pm for a fun and interactive exploration of visual thinking and problem-solving based on the revolutionary work of Dan Roam.  The event is free, no experience necessary, and we’ll even supply the napkins!

In his groundbreaking book, “The Back of the Napkin,” Dan brought visual problem-solving (made-simple) to the masses.  If you’re not familiar with his work (or even if you already are), we highly recommend checking out his website which contains a generous assortment of information, tools, and resources:  http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com

(*Note:  While our VizThink NYC event will be touching just the tip of the iceberg of his work, you might be interested to know that Dan Roam will be delivering his 2-day workshop right here in NYC in September.  You can find details of Dan’s training conference here … http://www.thebackofthenapkin.com/events/)

Back to our VizThink NYC event…

Facilitated by our VizThink NYC team, we’ll discuss some of the key tools from “The Back of the Napkin,” and together explore how we can apply them in the real world.

Also, our following (follow-up) event in June will be a discussion of Dan’s accompanying hands-on workbook “Unfolding the Napkin” with the UX Book Club NYC, so you may want to pick up a copy of his books and dig in…!

Please RSVP asap for our fun and informative VizThink NYC event, as seating is limited and we expect a full house.  Please RSVP with you full name in order to get into the building.

Also, we ask that you please be considerate of your fellow VizThinkers and sign up ONLY if you’ll be able to make it.  We’d hate to have an empty seat while someone else is sitting at home napkinless.

Date & Time
Wednesday, May 19, 2010, 6:30 PM — 8:30 PM

Location
Liquidnet
498 Seventh Ave, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10019

At last night’s UX Book Club NYC event we tried out a little experiment.

In keeping with the subject of our book, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, we wanted to see how the people that attended the event connected and what the network that formed would look like.

To do this we gave each attendee a sheet of stickers with a unique number on them.

We asked that each attendee exchange stickers with anyone they “linked” with and stick that person’s number on to the back of their sheet.

At the end of the night everyone turned in their sheets and I entered the data into Many Eyes, a new initiative by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience Visualization Lab whose purpose is to “democratize visualization and to enable a new social kind of data analysis.”

Looking at a visualization of these results is all the more interesting as I think back on the event and remember that each of my links was a real life connection with a real life person. For me, this is one of the awesome powers of visual communication. The image itself conveys information in a way that words simply could not. But on a more personal level graphic representations of ideas or memories provide a depth of understanding I just don’t get any other way.

As with most of the other people who read the book, I wonder how this new perspective and understanding about how networks form and work can be used in my design work. Will it allow me to devise a way for a network to grow or to remain healthy and vibrant? Can I use my new knowledge to make myself into a well-connected “hub” or identify existing hubs to become a more active and connected part of an existing network?

One thing I certainly got from the book was a new perspective on how the world works and there’s not too much more you can ask of a book, right?

Finally, to wrap this all up in a neat bow that ties together networks and the book club, head on over and join the new UX Book Club NYC Ning social network.

Looking forward to connecting with you.

- Ray