An experiment in light expression

Microsoft announced the launch of multi-touch technology with Windows 7 by 2010.

Its good to see that touch is generally becoming a more common form of interaction. Its time we got rid of the clunky keyboards and error-prone and mechanized voice recognition technology through some intuitive, instantaneous, responsive and almost-fluid Touch Interfaces.

Darwin would definitely approve…

Via Tom Stewart on the upcoming ISO 13407, a good article on the need to include the language of ‘user experience’ within existing usability standards. Mr. Stewart’s expansion to the ISO standard will define User Experience as ‘all aspects of the user’s experience when interacting with the product, service, environment or facility….a consequence of the presentation, functionality, system performance, interactive behaviour, and assistive capabilities of the interactive system….all aspects of usability and desirability of a product, system or service from the user’s perspective’.
I particularly liked the reference to the Apple Store in the article. I’ve used the Apple store as an example of stellar Customer Experience (not just individual user experience) in several of my presentations. Apple did so many things right - they followed the golden role of rapid, iterative prototyping (under the vision of Mickey Drexler and the smarts of Steve Jobs), they hired passionate Apple enthusiasts instead of the sorts of run of the mill floor staff you find at Best Buy or Walmart and they kept ‘live’ (Wifi/music/video enabled) products you could play with (which Nokia’s concept stores do a pretty tacky job of as far as I’m concerned) for as long as you want. The Apple store is a brilliant component of the Apple experience ecosystem.

All in all, the broadening of the ISO usability standard to ‘User Experience’ is a step in the right direction - Apple illustrates how user experience driven products and services can lead to significant market innovation. I hope more companies can learn from them without blindly imitating them.

As ironical as it sounds, I found myself thinking more consciously about Information Overload (a term coined decades back by Alvin Toffler of the Third Wave, Future Shock variety of futurist books) while sifting through banal, repetitive, vanilla articles describing the phenomenon and suggestions on how to deal with it.
Most articles point to email, Powerpoint and other office productivity tools as the culprits . Whenever powerful tools land up in the hands of the human race, they tend to gravitate towards the tastes, preferences and behaviors of the lowest common denominator than the highest one. Consider the Internet - 50% of it still serves the free porn bandwagon and not surprisingly the Internet porn industry was an earlier adopter of Internet technologies than most national Governments. (with perhaps the exception of Singapore!). Along similar lines, email, Powerpoint, Word and other tools in the workplace ended up conveying too much redundant information, meta-information about information, and regurgitations about actions around the information. And this is when people actually did work. Most of the time folks were busy forwarding political caricatures,  YouTube videos, creating chartjunk on Powerpoints, checking over email if anyone wanted to catch a movie or appearing busy by having an email client and an Excel sheet open on their desktop. Lowest common denominator.
I offer here two social/human perspectives on information overload:

1. Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentinian writer had a revealing (if fictional) story about what happened to the human race when we went from relying on the Spoken Word to relying on the Written Word. One of the lessons of the story was that in relying more on documenting and archiving and retaining information, the modern human race lost the meaning and essence of the original Words (Cap. emphasis mine). We went from Biblical and Vedic truisms to the random mission statement generators which every corporate citizen takes potshots at. Somewhere in the cognitive switch we made in considering the Spoken word as less important, we ended up in a trap of dead documents, email graveyards, and Powerpoint Hell. With the original intent and agency lost in transit.

2. What happens if you put a gun in a child’s hands? Well, you don’t! Most of the knowledge workers entering the information/experience economy of today have been fattened on a digital diet where multi-tasking is the form, and where the ability to surf the electronic waves while doing your Physics homework, getting Gmail alerts through your desktop gadget and searching for your soulmate on Myspace/Orkut is the norm. Young knowledge workers fully except to multi-task successfully in the workplace without for a moment realizing the serious attention deficits this digital diet has caused. Without the discipline and the perspective to handle multiple concerns with dexterity, most knowledge workers drift from area to area (email to email to Word to Powerpoint to email), doing little justice to any of the individual tasks.

One of my resolutions for 2008 is to be aware of where i find myself drowning and use simple tools (to detoxify - no less!) for managing information overload. For today, here is one simple illustration I thought I’d share:

(courtesy Ralph Perrine: http://www.ralphperrine.com/)

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.

I’m reporting this live from the UPA China conference at the Jiuhua resort in Beijing.

Thyra Rauch, the UPA International President just finished a short and inspiring talk on UPA, on the evolution of UPA in China, and how in the experience economy, the user experience professionals in China have an opportunity to not only grow in their respective Interaction Design and usability areas, but also be responsible for new product innovations and new market innovations.

Jason Huang, the UPA China President is now giving an overview of UPA China and how they got to where they are (to become the fastest growing UPA chapter worldwide). He described how it started as a volunteer group and eventually began working as a non-profit, while dealing with the financial and operational challenges of a company.

He shared some personal anecdotes about his core UPA China team and how his team worked extra hours to be able to put User Friendly 2007 together. Jason them emphasized that this year’s theme is more around innovation, and that in innovating for China UPA China can be a catalyst for China’s creative industry. He presented lots of charts and details on the demographics of the UX industry in China (still a strong bent towards Hong Kong), on the undergraduate programs in UX and HCI, average ages, training realities and requirements on the ground for Chinese UX professionals, average salaries and such.

It seems the average salaries are highest in Shanghai (82000 RMB) and then Beijing (70000 RMB) and are lower than 70000 RMB in other cities. 220000 RMB was quoted as a very high salary number for a Shanghai based practitioner. It appears that 70% practitioners do not think they are paid well (is that a global trend or what!).

Jason then presented some other details on how many companies have usability labs, what the levels of UCD embedding are within the software development process and such.

He ended with an overview of presentations for the day and some design competitions for students.

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

Jared Spool’s article “Surviving our success: 3 radical recommendations” in last month’s Journal of Usability Studies is a nice quick read.

He proposes 3 recommendations to deal with a common problem (backed by studies such as by Rolf Molich) that CEOs point to — UE findings by supposed experts can be very variable depending on who conducts the evaluations.

Among usability studies conducted by dozens of ‘credible’ teams across the world, Molich found that usability studies on everyday products such as Hotmail and the Flash based Hotel Penn website (which is a favorite hiring ‘test’ for some firms) had a lot of variation in what experts thought of as ‘catastrophic’ issues. Very few of the teams that conducted the usability studies had similarities on what they thought were P1 issues.

Here are Spool’s 3 radical recommendations – perhaps worth a thought:

1.    Stop Making Recommendations
2.    Stop conducting evaluations
3.    Seek out new techniques

Read the paper to see the details on these recommendations – they’re not as controversial as they appear!

I am glad to say that World Usability Day is finally taking off the ground. ( You can register for World Usability Day 2007, Bangalore at the event wiki)
After I started UPA Bangalore this summer with other like minded folks, i wanted to let things lie low for a bit and see some ‘emergence’ within the user experience community - that emergence seems to now be happening. Following the success of Bangalore Barcamp and D-camp, the design, usability, technology communities seem to be somewhat aligning and looking at User Experience as a whole - not merely from their own vantage points.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the event feel free to add a note to the wiki or email me

This November, I will head eastwards again to Beijing for UPA China’s annual design and user experience conference - User Friendly 2007. This time around I will be conducting a workshop on how design teams in Asia can shift from the traditional ‘outsourcing’ and ‘captive unit’ mindset towards one geared for product innovation and in-house product incubation. This year’s conference promises to be even more exciting  than last time - with specific sessions around the usability of public services in China, housing in Beijing for the Olympics, and the burgeoning consumer products and services sector in China.
My motivation behind conducting this workshop (other than my own experience of these challenges in the past few years) specifically in China was to involve the international and Chinese participants at this workshop and generate some collective knowledge on how those of us in ‘emerging economies’ (India, China, Brazil and the like) are coping with the challenge of cultivating innovative thinking in virtual distributed teams and find out what sorts of best practices (or worst practices) people are following. I will plan on covering (among other areas) the state of the outsourced product industry, the challenges it poses for virtual and outsourced design and UX teams, the innovation opportunity, people topics (how to hire and hold on to scarce talent, how to build partnerships and local ecosystems), process topics (how to innovate in distributed workspaces, how to deal with ambiguity), and product topics (how to apply the user centered design process in the real world without blind allegiance).
If you are planning to attend my workshop or know of interesting design and innovation thinking workshops (or have attended interesting ones), feel free to drop in a note - would love to get any feedback as i prepare my workshop materials.

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.