Luke has become the foremost expert on form design in the design industry and has now put together all his thoughts in an easy to use book. He provides the good, the bad, and the ugly of form design with many modern examples. Finally, Luke provides straight forward advice to designers and product managers on how to approach form design with your customers in mind.

This is a must read book for anyone making forms online…

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski’s book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

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Bill Buxton [video, book] - We must embrace our unique qualities as interaction designers, respect the talents of others (e.g. developers), and together change our organization so that our talents are used. We must “stop whining!” Buxton pointed out that Jonathan Ive was at Apple for 5 years before the Steve Jobs came back–and yet made little difference on the products. Jobs first move was to use the existing design talent at Apple to turn around the company. Finally, Buxton pointed out how Moore’s Law and the Growth of Features run counter to the fact that human capacity is not increasing.

Aza Raskin [video] - Aza is the first second-generation interaction designer I’ve met which I think is pretty cool. His late father, Jef Raskin, of course is responsible for designing the Macintosh and Aza founded his company Humanized to continue his father’s work. Aza is a refreshing speaker and clearly articulates his strong point of view that the best user interface is no user interface. In other words, selection and direct manipulation in the modern GUI has gone too far and we’d be better off with a recall based smart command line (see my previous post on his product Enso). By focusing hard on simplicity and reducing interactions where possible we just may fit under what Buxton’s called God’s Law (see above).

Chris Conley - Chris spoke on how the use of dramatic features in interaction design yields more enjoyable and engaging products. He defined drama as “an exciting, emotional, or unexpected series of events”. Furthermore he described how it’s only thru drama that you create truly meaningful products. Chris described how Pixar approaches this subject thru the heavy use of storyboarding. They spend years honing the story and using a series of design critiques, until it is just right. Only then does production begin. As interaction designers we must choreograph these dramatic elements in order to delight our customers. One example he shared was how to customize icons on the iPhone home screen. When you move into customization mode all the icons start jiggling and then jump out of the way as you drag icons. Very fun indeed.

Matt Jones [video, deck] - Matt is the designer behind Dopplr and his witty British humour was a joy to listen to. My favorite quote from his talk was a definition for serendipity (something we regularly discuss at eBay):

“Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter” - Sir Hans Kornberg

He also built on the notion of delight as a key to product design. For example, one hotel left him a rubber ducky in the tub on the 4th night. On Dopplr they surprise their customers with customized Dopplr logos based on their travel history.

Jon Kolko - While Jon was not an official speaker, as a former professor at Savannah College of Art and Design he played a key role in bringing Interaction08 to SCAD. A designer on my team, Riaz, was a former student of Jon’s and introduced me to him over pizza and beer at VinnieVanGoGo’s the night before the conference. Jon cuts right to the point and is very direct about his POV on design (as well as other things). I found his attitude refreshing and it has motivated me to be less nuanced in my opinions. I’m halfway thru his book which I’d highly recommend.

Quick Tidbits:

• Bill DeRouchey: Conversations w/Every Day Objects [video, deck] - How button’s have evolved and their affordances…
• Gabe White: Ethics of Design [video] - Should we discourage addictive or compulsive behavior (e.g. twitter)?
• Sarah Allen: Cinematic IxD [video, deck] - How to use visual cues in transitions to maintain context…
• Gretchen Anderson: Concept Ideation [video] - If meeting with the CEO, tell a story about your customer and be dramatic…
• UI Design in Agile Environment [video] - How to use a design studio and team offsites to make Agile work…

List of all video available from Interaction08.

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Notably I really enjoyed Aza Raskin’s perspective on the formation of Humanized’s Enso product. As Jon Raskin’s son (original Mac team), he’s the first person I know who is a second generation interaction designer–very cool. As for Enso, I installed it today and found it to be pretty useful. For those that haven’t tried it, Enso layers a smart command-line interface onto your Mac or PC allowing you to access programs, files, windows, or websites in an instant. Perhaps my favorite feature is that they put Caps Lock to good use (instead of randomly causing you to YELL in emails).

Will a smart command-line interface take off? Well in my mind it already has with the proliferation of Google (e.g. many people navigate to their favorite websites by searching for them vs. clicking a bookmark). The big issue Enso will need to overcome is the recall problem, however with a powerful suggestion feature they’re well on their way to solving that too. Now that Mozilla has acquired Humanized, it seems that Mozilla is slowing pulling together all the pieces for a more effective operating system that just happens to run on top of MacOS or Windows. It should be interesting to see what comes next…

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Here are a few examples:

Tripit (Travel site aimed at organizing your itineraries)

• Users can forward any confirmation email (e.g. from an airline, hotel, rental car company, or travel site) to a unique email address at tripit.com
• The service then parses the email for any relevant information (e.g. flight arrival and departure times) and posts it to your online account.
• The end result is a consolidated and normalized itinerary for your trip which you can share with your friends.

Highrise (37signals tool for managing customer relationships)

• Forward an email from a customer to your special email address at Highrise and it parse it for name, email, phone, company, and anything else it can from the signature/vCard.
• If the customer is already a contact then Highrise adds it to your log of comments on the customer along with a helpful little date stamp.
• You can even BCC this email when you write to the customer so that the correspondence is added to your log.

Flickr (Photo sharing website)

• Email photo attachments to your special email address at Flickr and it gets added to your account.
• Your subject line is used for the photo title and if you add “tags: ####, ####” anywhere in the email it will get parsed and added to your photo.

All of three of these do a good job of integrating into your life and not causing extra work on your part. As interaction designers if we’re not currently thinking of this as an input method we should.

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I give our yodeling friends up the peninsula a lot of credit for getting this one so right. While I’m an avid Google search user these improvements just might lure as a customer.

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Letting Community Content Shine Through

How do you design a site that lets users feel it is truly “community owned and operated”? A site that supports business objectives centered around creating user-generated content, and differentiating it from company content? This panel will explore the issues surrounding a user-centric site, including voice, interaction, and visual design.

Some potential panelists could include folks from: Yahoo! Answers, YouTube, Facebook, Wordpress, and perhaps Ning. Vote for this panel.

Other panels I’m interested in:

• View some of the panels proposed by other eBay Designers
• The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems with Pictures by Dan Roam
• Design Metrics: “Better than because I said so” by Micah Alpern
• The Design, Development, and Science of Web Forms
• The State of Professional Front-End Engineering by Nate Koechley

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At the core he speaks about how companies have three ways to create a long term strategic competitive advantage: strategic M&A, operational excellence, and organic growth. It’s the last of these three that design forms the cornerstone of success for he said “Design is the skill of identifying and creating value”.

Given that design is the key to organic growth, he went on to discuss what makes a great experience and introduced the following framework:

At the most basic levels, a product or service may simply fill a need. For example, perhaps I need to buy some salt (economic need) so that I can add it to some cookies I’m making (functional need). However for a brand to become truly meaningful it must create a meaningful experience. Perhaps using Morton brand salt to help me bake cookies with my son would evoke memories of baking with my mom growing up–a meaningful experience.

I think Darrel and others evangelizing creating customer experience through the design process are right on. The companies that embrace this thinking will do well in an age where meaningful experiences create loyal customers (and thus value for shareholders).

This fall one of my courses at Haas will focus on design and how as leaders we can leverage it as the key to innovation and growth. I look forward to learning more and sharing it here on this blog as well as my thoughts on the Making Meaning book which I just ordered.

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• Documenting & Advocating User Experience — Yeah, not so much. Generic ROI arguments tend to be received as voodoo. Most agreed that sharing specific project successes was more successful, “The proof is in the pudding!” as Jeremy said. Only distention is early on to define the role of group in order to fit into the overall process. We should also avoid talking about work as a “black box” but work as a collaborative force within the org. I couldn’t agree more that we simply must deliver and the rest will take care of itself.
• UX Owning User Experience – Early on yes, but later no. Jeremy emphatically stated that everyone is responsible for quality of which UX is a part. Justin mentioned how now at eBay, the entire company is involved in defining what the customer experience should be. Richard referred to his thoughts on owning design and also referenced a quote from Forrester in Jan 07, “Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function. Delivering great customer experiences isn’t something that a small group of people can do on their own — everyone in the company needs to be fully engaged in the effort.“
• Organizational Design – More important to understand how you fit in and how to best maximize it. Executive sponsorship who can involve you in the right discussions and decisions. In my experience having an advocate on Exec Staff can make or break your org’s role–you’re either involved in the inital conversations, or not.
• Ethnographic Research – YES! Gets you executive access, builds credibility, and has a multi-year shelf life. Ridealongs and use of video is key as it gives the research credibility. We introduced these about 18 months ago at eBay and have seen it work quite effectively in focusing the organization more around customer issues and positioned our User Experience team to help solve it.

Richard also typed up some his thoughts on Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence [PDF].

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Here’s what I’m most excited about:

• Mon 8:30 - 10:30AM: Opening Plenary speaker, Bill Moggridge, who will hopefully talk more about the topics in his recent book, Designing Interactions.
• Tues 2:30 - 4PM: Richard Anderson’s session on “Moving UX into a Position of Corporate Influence: Whose Advice Really Works?” which will focus on real-world advice from UX leaders. A colleague of mine, Justin Miller, will represent eBay.
• Tues 7 - 10PM: eBay and PayPal’s cocktail party at the Tech Museum. You can get to know our User Experience team and mingle with other design professionals. If you’d like an invite to the event, just let me know.
• Wed 9 - 1PM: Marti Hearst, Corey Chandler, and I will present “Faceted Metadata for Information Architecture and Search” which covers best practices of how to design a faceted search interface. We’ll reflect on Flamenco, eBay Express, and other competitive research we’ve done.
• Thurs 9 - 10:30AM: Jeremy Ashley, Oracle, will moderate a discussion on management techniques for maximizing the impact of User Experience teams. We’ll hear from leaders at SAP (Daniela Busse) and Cisco.

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34, originally uploaded by rajsid.

A few weeks ago eBay’s user experience design team went to Nestldown off Hwy 17 for an offsite centered around effective use of personas. One huge challenge of using personas at eBay is the massive customer base of ours which essentially mimics much of the Internet. We are pioneering how a design team might scale this concept over an array of product offerings and customer demographics which is quite exciting. If others have similar experiences to share, I’d love to hear about.

In between sessions we enjoyed the blooming tulips and held a photography contest (see eBayUED tag). Above is one of the winning photos taken by Raj.

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