Extra! Extra!

New York Times dot com designer Khoi Vinh discusses the 37 Signals manifesto, Get Real (Subtraction: C’mon Feel the Signalz) and the ensuing discussion in his blog’s comments illuminate the controversy Fried and company’s increasingly strident calls-to-arms have stirred up. Vinh tends to admire where the 37s gang is coming from:

[I]t’s hard to deny “Getting Real” as, at least, important documentation of this particular point in the evolution of design and development for the Web. You could say that historically, it’s not to be missed, and that would be true; if you want to have a first hand look at how this industry’s working methods are changing, this is the book to read. But if you’re resigned to being passively buoyed by shifting trends, then you can skip it: before too long, anything of consequence to be found between its digital covers will be fully dispersed in standard practices. It’s Jason Fried’s world, after all. We just develop in it.

Shimone just sent this guide to printing sections of a web page around to our developers’ list with the comment, “You know this is going to come up.”

Having met Rashmi Sinha at SXSW and again at the IA Summit I’ve been interested in understanding what she’s working on. She’s brilliant so her work product must be equally compelling. Sure enough, her company Uzanto makes a product called MindCanvas that’s used to conduct user research in a game-like way (check out the testimonials on the linked page) and then present them in various compelling interactive formats.

Something to keep in mind when you want to understand what your users expect or care about.

uploaded by erin_designr.

Erin Malone took this nice pic of me at the IA Summit.

The summit was great. Learned a lot. Met very cool people. I’ll probably write up some key takeaways as I digest my thoughts over the next week or so.

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

I just spent all day in a seminar led by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao, both currently at Yahoo! Local, on the subject of Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques and I came away from it with some great ideas about how to communicate web interface and functionality ideas at the early, prototype stage of a project using comics.

The presenters articulated the problem this way:

At Yahoo!, we’ve used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.

The solution offered was to use comics as a relatively cheap and easy method intermediate between video and static sketches, and avoiding the problems of traditional storyboards which, by “detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.”

They taught us some principals of communicating with comics, and some key elements of a visual vocabulary and then assigned us in groups to brainstorm, script, and illustrate a scenario using storytelling and the comic-art techniques we’d just learned.

After lunch we paired up with other groups and acted like user focus-groups, giving feedback on the scenarios and suggesting what we found useful, confusing, etc.

The workshop taught me a lot and I can think of a few ways we could employ these techniques at Extractable to get buy-in for some hypothetical user-interfaces, both within our multidisciplinary teams and with our clients.

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Tanya Raybourn (Pixelcharmer) points to Waterfall2006 in her Field Notes blog:

This one, Waterfall 2006, sounds unmissable.

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You’ve always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.

Seems like there are some great sessions planned:

• Very Large Projects: How to Go So Slow No One Knows You’ll Never Deliver
• User Interaction: It Was Hard to Build, It Should Be Hard to Use
• User Stories and Other Lies Users Tell Us

As you would expect, there’s no concurrent sessions.

Be sure to check out the description of the keynote: Put Testing Where it Belongs - At the End.

Register now, while seats are still available!

I’m headed up to Vancouver tomorrow for my first IA Summit. I’ll be presenting two posters there this time (one was submitted on our behalf by a former colleague). For posterity (and in case I lose the poster tube on the plane) here are links to the Acrobat files containing the two posters.

• Social Software in the Enterprise (description)
• A Case Study for Architecting to Users’ Concerns (description)

tags: iasummit2006, iasummit, presentation

I know it’s probably just because I’m racing around to get a bunch of things done between trips (to Austin, Vancouver, and Utah), but this article (Be smarter at work, slack off) sounds like the perfect advice to me right about now.

If we accept that it’s true that these are the “four modes of seeking information”:

1. Known-item
2. Exploratory
3. Don’t know what you need to know
4. Re-finding

Then Donna Maurer’s recent article in Boxes and Arrows offers some excellent advice on how to accommodate each of those four modes.

(I say if only because I am inherently suspicious of all such ordinal systems - there are 12, no seven personality types, no nine, no two - but having said that, I still love any such organizing scheme, if only for the sake of argument.)

Here’s a snapshot of my panel at South by Southwest Interactive (D.I.Y. Media: Consumer is the Producer). Now I’ve got a few days to be productive before I’m off to Vancouver for the IA Summit.