All posts tagged as "Conference"

what sort of people do you want to work with?

May 20, 2009 by steven

I love this post from Dante Murphy on… well a lot of things I think. But it’s anchored around a panel discussion of how to hire and develop interaction designers at IXDA earlier this year.

While I went no further than making snarky comments in twitter, Dante actually stood up and asked a question during the session.

Of course, it’s relatively easy, when you work for frog design or IDEO or Adaptive Path (and others) to demand only top-tier talent and turn away those with incomplete credentials, unpolished portfolios, and imperfect instincts about design. But when you’re the hiring manager at an agency without marquee recognition, or at a company looking to build or expand an internal design team, you can’t just roll out the red carpet and wait for the Josh Porter’s to come strolling up.

My question to the panel was this: what level of incompleteness are you willing to accept in a new hire, in order to turn that rookie into an all-star. Skip ahead to the 53:00 mark of the panel and you’ll see why I walked away feeling that the panelists either couldn’t or didn’t want to answer that question…

And the reason I want to post this is that I could hardly agree more with his thinking on this.

At the individual level, the only criteria I demand of every person I hire are passion and intellect. Experience is nice, and a mix of experience is absolutely necessary at the team level, but I would much rather hire a recent grad who has Louis Rosenfeld’s “polar bear book” on her summer reading list than the person who read it ten years ago, has been milling out websites ever since, but doesn’t know who Dan Saffer and Jennifer Tidwell and Barbara Ballard are. I know this is true because I’ve done this time and again.

The results have been quite amazing. Smart people who really love their job learn from experienced people at an alarming rate…

He goes on with lots of good points about collaborating and nurturing their talent. Do read this, as it’s full of good reminders (like try not to take over their design, but help them improve). But I wanted to add a little about how I’ve hired people.

Unlike everyone else I’ve worked with as a hiring manager, I am only marginally interested in people who have experience in this specific field. Sometimes, a focus on a specific area of interactive is bad, as people have acquired bad habits. I like, instead, to work with people who have the right core skills, care about the product space and are generally interested in how things work, and how people use stuff.

For me, this is artists and designers. I think I indeed prefer working with graphic and packaging and industrial designers, as they have some sort of a grasp on the real world. This also meshes nicely with the universal design philosophy that I’ve started working out. Design truths are always true, so any good design (or art) background is the same as any other. The differences between media or contexts are smaller than the similarities.

And we’re not alone in this. While a lot of places (see above) seem to insist you have all the technical skills and experience day one, lots of successful places do not. I think I first became aware of it when I heard an interview with some Pixar guys. Partly because they use internal, proprietary tools, they cannot go hire people who know their toolsets. But they also value artists, so that’s what they hire. People with passion and desire and basic skills. They then train them as needed.

And also, they let people wander between jobs. Getting stuck in one job you do well can be a terrible thing. Letting people explore other avenues has led to some of the best work – and happiest workers – I have ever had.

It can take time. One guy I hired years ago never was a really top performer while I still managed him. He’d come from a very boring technical job, and while he kept learning and trying, he never became my go-to guy for anything. Well, I heard just the other week (five years after I hired him on) he is that guy I always hoped for and is a design leader in the current team.

Yes, most folks learn faster, but – unlike many of the panel answers Dante commented on – this sort of thing pleases me a lot and gives me faith in the whole concept of hiring the right people and letting them become really useful producers for you,

Tags: Conference,  Design, Permalink | Comments (4)

Design for Mobile videos now available

May 5, 2009 by steven

If you missed the Design for Mobile 2009 conference, you still have a chance to catch up on all the sessions you missed. For starters, several slideshows have been posted (mostly to Slideshare, so you can download or just browse them). You can find them by following the links to each session from the speakers page at the Design for mobile wiki.

Get your D4M videos now!

Everyone loves watching D4M videos!

But we also took video of all the sessions, and the editing is coming along just fine. First up is France Rupert’s session on Semantics and the Mobile Web. That link is to the wiki again, where you can read about it, get his slideshow and comment if you have something you want to say.

To get the video, visit the the D4M conference page and click the button to purchase a subscription to all of the videos. When we get your payment, you get an email telling you how to download the video of France’s session. As others come out in the next few weeks, you will get additional emails telling you how to download those sessions also.

And if you are an attendee or speaker, you get a copy for free. Check your email if you don’t already know about this; there’s a present waiting for you.

Tags: Conference,  Design, Permalink | Comment (1)

inspiring articles in mobile design

April 28, 2009 by Barbara

With all of the work on the conference, I’ve not been able to keep up on things like blogging very much. That’s not because not much is happening in the mobile design world; quite the contrary. In fact, Adaptive Path’s Rachel Hinman had webinar for mobile web design during our conference + webinar, and Mobile Design UK had their monthly meeting.

So you get a tour of recent mobile design articles:

From Point & Do, 5 Questions To Ask When Planning Multitouch Interfaces is good for those working on sophisticated iPhone apps and future multi-touch displays.

John Keith of Cloud Four gives us Mobile Device Detection Results comparing four cheap or free device detection mechanisms. Good reading to improve your mobile users’ experience.

Roger, Wilco responded in a comment about my Mobile SEO post (better yet, see the wiki SEO page) with a link to Mobile Search and SEO Considerations for Mobile; he’s updated the wiki page as well.

You can vote on entries in the MEX Mobile User Experience conference mobile design contest. Perhaps more interestingly, conference organizer Marek Pawlowski asked 20 mobile entrepreneurs what the startup community could do to improve the mobile user experience. I think it’s really worthwhile to see what business folks want to do here.

And of course the UI-as-business article from Fierce Wireless caught my eye, Eye on the UI: The need to differentiate. In particular, this paragraph caught my eye:

In general, Wugofski said that the user experience needs to align with the device that it’s on and around how that device operates. “Users use lots of different applications,” he said. “For your app to be successful on that phone, it generally has to follow the same paradigms [of the phone].”

I’ve been thinking quite a lot about this over the years, and this year I’m making it one of my speaking themes. You can check out the first of the presentations in the series at SlideShare: A Foolish Consistency.

Object-oriented design is something we’ve practiced for years, even before it was “invented” in 2005. It’s also explicitly discussed in Steven’s recent book, Designing by Drawing. It’s still useful to understand and discuss, even more so now with the numerous screen size & device capability variations found in mobile, and more and more different internet-enabled devices.

In a more design-theory vein, check out A Framework for Gesture Generation and Interpretation which is a fascinating analysis of gesture recognition.

Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting brings us Smartphones as appliances: Different phones for different usages, with the great takeaway that users of different devices value different things from their devices. Blackberry users value email more; iPhone users value web more. It suggests design directions for several services.

And last but not least, fellow mobile design firm Punchcut posted an animation for Design Considerations for Touch UI, following up on a previous blog entry on the same topic.

Tags: Business,  Conference,  Context,  Design,  Design Tips,  Devices,  Messaging,  Mobile applications,  Mobile web,  Strategy, Permalink | Comments (2)

#des4mo – tweets for history

April 23, 2009 by steven

A few interesting conversations, and a lot of links to more info, got distributed over Twitter during Design for Mobile. See them yourself with the #des4mo hashtag, or add to the conversation. Anyway, I worry they will be lost, and while our Wordpressy blog is not exactly carved in stone and set in a temperature-controlled vault, it has some backup, and is spidered so a little easier to find and follow.

Also, there were a pleasantly surprising number of tweets, so I am not going to try to edit, group, highlight, tag, or comment in any way. I don't have the time. Here they are, therefore, unedited:

Yeah. The format here may have been a mistake, as it seems to take forever to load, but I am too tired today to bother cleaning it all up.

Tags: Conference,  Design, Permalink | Comments (0)

Wednesday morning at Design for Mobile

April 22, 2009 by steven

This morning had fewer technical issues, and in fact we got a gigabit ethernet line attached to some more useful internet, and the webinar is running much better.

Sadly, Christina Brodbeck, scheduled as our first speaker, had to drop out. I was terribly interested in this as I think the YouTube app is a wonderful thing, is terribly sticky and inspired this neat-o discussion of one web on the blog. Overnight I talked with Jeff and he responded to the blog entry, and we’re getting somewhere interesting with it all.


We replaced it at the last minute with a discussion already planned for CTIA (and even with handouts and a Design for Mobile wiki page) on making sticky apps.

Instead of trying to follow the whole discussion, you are probably best off just going to the wiki and seeing what we changed, and maybe scanning through the #des4mo tweets for Wednesday morning. And, please go back and change it yourself if you have thoughts.


After an excessively convoluted switch to his computer, Nader Nejat of Omega Mobile presented about mobile Flash. I was particularly interested in how he said they are doing a lot of work on /three/ screens. Desktop, mobile and TV. A trend worth noticing I still say, that we’ll all have a lot of connected devices, not just one or two.

Flash is important as it’s the standard for rich media. Some crazy percent of advertising is in Flash. Time to market for mobile flash is good, as it’s got a series of neat things, like audio support, built in.

The recently-announced Flash Light Distributable Player
will get us out of the current model where the operator/maker has to install it, and into the desktop model, where anyone can install it. And actually, it’s better: if a user tries to use a Flash lite thing, it will also install Flash automatically.

Better yet, the Open Screens Project means that members don’t have to pay licensing fees, and they have a $10MM fund, to encourage development. So they are pushing it a lot.

He talked about some tactical things then. How you can build mobile mockups quickly, easily and accurately. I like that it’s throwaway, so no one worries about correct coding. He encourages it a lot for presentations, testing (he said “testing” fonts and colors, but I think user testing). The example was 15 man weeks, which is pretty high to me, but maybe my budgets are just too small. Though it was damned cool, as he had live (in the app) changes to type and colors, without loading a new version.

Neat example that demonstrated how Flash can read XML, (and RSS) and of course embedded video files, that worked pretty well. It even did simple mobile things I would have expected them to miss (not having used Flash Lite myself yet) like sending the user to resident dialer and SMS programs.

To move to production development, he suggests you start with the prototyping to build your people, knowledge and processes.

He had a cute list of Mobile Flash urban legends:

  • Flash is just for animations – Did start as one, but that was 13 years ago, and now it’s more.
  • There are 1-2 million people who can do Flash – Skilled Flash developers are rare. For mobile, they need to be good craftsmen, like be able to spell well. Cowboys are good for prototypers, only.
  • Anyone can do Flash – It’s not the easiest thing, so plan ahead.
  • One file to rule them all – Technically true, but not practical, and huge. Author for screen size, processor speed, etc. But load the right set per device. This strikes me as very interesting, and maybe some of where pixel-perfect design comes from, where you have to execute in specific ways.
  • Silver bullet – Not magic, but if you are doing something it does, it does them very well. Some neat, but non-standard capabilities, like S60s let you see the native address book

Getting started: get a device that works on eBay for like $100. Get CS4. Use bluetooth to load the files. Work on 320×240 devices. Make simple “slideware” to try it.

He was surprised there were not a lot of questions about openness. Some good points about competition, and their “more open” initiative, and I think I am not worried about it as much as I was because it can read normal information sources like his xml/rss demo. Something else to talk about regarding One Web, I suspect.


And then, another panel, started by Paul Atchley, from right up the hill at KU, who spends a lot of time on attention issues and specifically on mobile use while driving, which is what we talked about. And brought slides. He started by, well, pulling up my comments saying “really, how bad is it?” and mostly refuted me point by point.


I disagree. We’re /told/ phone use is evil, evil, evil. But is it worse than any of a dozen other distractions? Research seems all over the place, and much is unreleased, sponsored by interest groups and otherwise suspect. I distrust it all partly because the reaction has been legislation that is demonstrably ineffective against a part of the issue that is irrelevant (handsfree legislation).

It seems to me to be a default “blame the object” reaction. And this is doomed to fail. If nothing else, because the value (say, in navigation alone) is high, and perceived to be high. Mobile devices will be used in environments like driving where distraction must be taken into account, and more in the future than today.

First up, he showed the video of the basketball passing and how you don’t notice something else. Then specifically pulled my comment, and focused on the part where I said research seems non-specific. So he showed a bunch of specific issues, that seem to have a 400% increase in accident risk, on several studies. Similar to or a bit worse than drunk driving.

Is it worse than other distractions? Another video, with lots of stuff. And we raise our hands when we notice the 20 story apartment building appearing, or not (like me). We think the brain is this hypercomputer, but really it’s a well programmed 286. Not powerful, but cleverly designed. We have a small window of attention (the size of your fist at arms length) and we move it around.

But that system is shared with the one that talks, and so on, so gets distracted.

Navigation has, he thinks, a net gain in safety, but they do take some effort. Video of switching the person you are talking to while giving directions (funny!) to show how focus on a task takes away your ability to pay attention to other things.

He did, I think, agree legislation is probably not the solution. Design could help somehow, though.

David Heinsohn is an instructor at Flight Safety, so is approaching the attention issue from a training point of view.

He told us how (once you learn) flying is easier than driving. “I am a tenth of a second from dead any time I am going down the turnpike.” The recent birdstrike gave a lot of time actually to get the problem solved.

He can turn on (in simulators) a bright red light 3” above the radio, then has them tune the radio. Without an audio cue, they still miss it. Also, we do not get additional training, unlike aircrew, who have to have training at least every two years.

He does talk and text while driving even though he knows it’s bad in specific ways. Mic’s that are remote (vs. headsets) tend to cause people to look at the device. It’s pointless, but something we are culturally attuned to do.

Adult learning and around integrating learning with what we know now. We often want to know more than the presenter.

And then David told Bob Miller to tie it together. Bob, as Barbara said during the intro, has been vocal through the conference (plus has worked a lot of places and is an HF type anyway) so is a nice point of view with this crowd.

The phone has become the great interruptor. There became places you didn’t put phones, like you never just stuck one in a restaurant. You walk into a business and even though you are standing there, they talk to the person on the phone.

So this momentum sets a bad precedent for things like driving.

How late at night would you call a casual acquaintance, or someone who doesn’t seem to like your calls? Why do we call people who are 4x more likely to die if we call them?

Instead of thinking of the user driving, can we solve it with discouraging this on the other end of the conversation. Almost all “cell phone etiquette” is about the receiver of a call, not the caller.

Is compelling inherently distracting?

Around here it broke into a general discussion, so I am not sure who said what. Mobile use varies by age, of course; 99.8% talk and drive. The others don’t have cars. 78% sms and drive. Adoption age is going down, and usage going up.

So the 6% accident cause rate for mobiles is not high now, but it will be increasing. And Paul argues it’s preventable vs. others (Aging).

David brought up the use of the term “causing accidents” by the device. There is a tendency to want to blame the thing, vs. finding the true cause (you).

It would be hard to measure and enforce aggression, so we legislate the thing.

70% of air accidents are during the 6-7% of flight time (takeoff/landing, etc.) and so during that time there are strict rules about what you should be saying in the cockpit; they don’t have general conversations.

Social communications (even facebook, twitter, not just voice) will disregard safety concerns. “Importance” to them (if I understand this right) will trump safety though.

38% of people in some survey have interrupted sex for a phone call. How can we avoid people picking up the phone when “just driving”?

We are finding something that people love more than their cars, staying connected with each other. Is this a compelling argument for public transit?

There are strata of appropriateness for speeding. Is there a way to categorize mobile use somehow (like when people in the car stop talking to you). I narrate my phone calls (“merging, wait”), and maybe some automated system could be created.

Using paper maps (and similar) Paul is still looking into, but it’s very distracting.

First drunk driving law enacted in 1917. But not till the mid 80s, that it started getting serious. Social norms have followed enforcement, so we cannot imaging letting someone drive drunk. The social norm is that the phone is more important, but there could be a change to that in the future? Is there something socially we could do in the next few years? Movie theaters have moved to the standard of

Bob says currently receiving a call in the car will elicit a “okay, be careful” but then it continues.

Tags: Conference,  Context,  Design, Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday afternoon at Design for Mobile

April 21, 2009 by steven

Over lunch we changed the webinar connection, and got audio for the computer, so there’s hopefully now a point for anyone who wants to show video off in the room, though no one did it today.

Judy Breck asking Richard Branham a question... about what, I cannot recall
I missed the beginning of Richard Branham’s talk as the webinar computer sorta crashed, so I had to decide to leave it alone, and then go find another one and beat it into getting on the network.

His talk was about design philosophy, as it relates to the work he does through the KU IxD program he runs.

He mentioned my workshop yesterday (and book) as a part of his “representation” triangle. He’s big on drawing to design. There are many ways to represent a situation, and it’s one of the most important skills (as a designer I guess) you can develop.

Evaluate and construct – how to represent people’s theory and understanding of how people perceive their environment. Draw a map of the city of boston, blind. This is second order of understanding.

Situation oriented, becomes situated cognition.

Stopped blogging. Can’t stand most people in IxD. Too much sizzle, by which I guess he means talking, not doing. Needs more steak.

Situation is about the way people make sense of their encounters with other in everyday live, and how these interaction between social actors are built into more stable routines. George Herbert Mead is someone you need to look up.

Was a systems designer. And the systems worked, but they didn’t /work/. Because, he came to discover, he didn’t understand the situation and meaning.

His definition of interaction meshes well with my current version of it for our work, where interaction is not the digital bit, but the space between the electronic device and the user. John Dewey was writing about Iterative design, and human centered process around 100 years ago! Interaction, from this same era, “is going on between an individual and objects or other persons.”

He yelled at one point “there is no such thing as experience design!” We can do stuff to /facilitate/ the experience, and design the scaffolding, but the person has the experience. Maketools.com, someone smart in the northern-european style participatory design movement back when, and worth reading.

“And I think Steven is starting to hit the nail on the head with his book…” as far as non-standard representations (neat!). Constructing understanding is key, how as a designer do you construct an understanding (which is where the meaning is). Reviewed some design which he did to represent in easier to comprehend manners the impossibl depth and complexity of large museums. Information Design is rooted in museum design in many ways, so I love this stuff.

All Clear is a program I’d never heard of that builds dynamic representations of relationships like this.

If this is too narrow, he also did a re-signage of the Sears tower using similar concepts. And they didn’t start by drawing signs, and picking which one they like, but the form of the signs emerged from the process.

I went to art school at KU, and knew him vaguely as a rockstar designer back then, so this was all especially cool to me.



Next up was France Rupert. I worked with him (and for some of it actually employed him) for years at Sprint, and he’s even mentioned in my book. He’s always been a great evangelist for things like style, semantics, and the right way to do things.

So after I heard some people say they had a thread (on some forum or other) with 200 responses and no definition of what semantic markup even meant, we invited him to mention why it matters for mobile especially.

Pretty much his first slide was “The good news” that good mobile web dev only really requires an understanding of desktop best practices in XMTHL/CSS, and so on. This is good because you don’t need to create mobile web developers, just make sure you have good, on the ball, desktop web developers who keep up to date.

A formal definition of semantics is “the meaning of the element or property in relation to the content which it describes.” His definition is just that “content is /in/ context.” Which I love. Anything contextual is good to me.

Markup structure can enrich the content. His examples are with gestures and intonation and inflection for speech, which is I guess not what we’re talking about as yet. But even emphasis and type and such do influence the meaning and understanding of printed text.

I think he had a pretty good walk through of why style-in-html markup is bad, and will be sending this to some client development teams in the future (if Barbara will let me).

I also thought a few other things (why tables are only for tabular data, etc.) were well done, but there was someone lost on the twitter. This made me happy, however, as others answered him /on/ twitter. Two links shared were http://www.jeffrey-shaw.net/html_main/show_work.php3?record_id=83 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics.

The blockquote discussion was a good example. Because the default browser behavior is “indent this” it means “indent this” to way too many people. But it should mean “quote.” He sorta breezed through a step by step html-elements-for designers slide, in favor of talking about the important variables and constraints that mobile encounters. And about my favorite again, context. He had good phrase that mobile users are more likely to be information-seeking. I think I like that more than my usual description, of task based.

At the break I didn’t post this, as instead I spent the time restarting all the webinar computers, so on to the late afternoon sessions.


Jeff Sonstein had a neat something (twitter?) feed before his session started, and brought us all conference swag. He runs a (new, rough) Center for the Handheld Web, and is on the W3C mobile web best practices. So I guess I should mention my recent blog post series if I want a big discussion.

The web of tomorrow will /not/ be the web of today. So he’s here to talk about that. He thinks widgets (most of them) are web apps, because a browser is not key to it. Structure is key. HTML, CSS and JS are the holy trinity of the web.

Here it is again, context. Mobile have a small screen, intermittent connectivity and the different way of interacting (small buttons, etc.). But also additional features and scope, location, personal data, etc.

After a pause for more technical issues, Jeff explained a distinction between a resident app, and a non-resident app, meaning a web app. Every developer should be able to make a cross-platform web app.

The mobile web app best practices all look good, but I was too caught up in the continued technical issues to type them out. He had some good notes on the UX stuff, like design for multiple interaction methods, improving /perceived/ performance and preserving focus within a page on reload.

Anyone who develops websites and doesn’t think internationally is dumb. Put +1 in your phone number links (for US residents, of course).

Ensure as much consistency between desktop and mobile web. The catchphrase is of course OneWeb, not one for big things and one for mobile. I still think I am in favor of some n-web level, to allow for content, ia and interaction customization for different device classes. But I can see myself getting there if smart enough rules sets can be set up.

He touted SVG, which would be good, and the canvas tag, but I’ve never heard of that one. Have to look it up.

He says WURFL sucks, because browsers lie so you can’t trust the UA string. Client side capability detection can be useful, and DOM injection can allow “graceful improvement.” Ask him for code to do this.

Big proponent of XHTML+RDFa as a solution to semantic html as France just presented. Read more at www.w3.org /TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/.


I decided it might get in the way of my presentation if I stopped periodically to take notes, but it went better than I’d have expected. I didn’t go over time, but the questions had to be cut off. And they were good questions, like Judy asked about the future of home pages as a whole concept.

Check the slides out here if you want to know what you missed, except for the notes that make it make sense, and my dynamic presentation.


Madhava Enros reviewed Fennec (and shared his #fennec hashtag as well as the #des4mo one). It is a codename. It’s a small fox for anyone who didn’t know. Get it? Will be “mobile firefox” or similar when launched for real.

Nice set of sort of design requirements, their vision is shown here htttps://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/FennecVision though he had it in a nice bullet list format. Follow on “initial design themes and goals”
-Max screen space dedicated to content
-Minimize typeing
Give primacy of interaction to fingeroriented touchscreens
-Support the quick lookup scenario

Pretty rapidly decided to merge the URL and search fields. All these designs are available on their site if you want to see it without the whole slideshow: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mobile/UI/Designs/TouchScreen/Proposal6

Chrome disappears at idle, and they solved it with gesture, mostly touch and hold, to bring items back into vision. Yes, it all has tap, swipe, double-tap zooms. Tap and hold both shows the title bar and one of those pie menu things if you click in the middle (these usually annoy me), tapping and holding in the corner pulls a menu like a softkey and so on.

Decided to toss it because hold starts feeling like it takes forever after a while. Also, they were worried about how add-ons would work.

The touchbar was another proposal, where the bar scrolls with the screen and tapping these corner things pull up a wide-curved bar across much of the bottom of the screen. The actions button opens a series of other items, so that’s the add-ons.

Decided not to go this way, because they were getting tired of overlays. As soon as they made the corners small enough to get out of the way… they were out of the way. And then someone else was working on ZUI, or zoomable UIs.

In this, there’s a series of tabs in space, and you click to get a full-screen view of each one. Spatial relationship, not just a carousel, is interesting here.

They ended up with a lot of focus on their “awesome bar” and sharing between desktop and mobile history and other intelligence (via Weave) to shorten typing and predict what you want to do. And, by allowing dragging sideways, so like where you see that gray frame side effect on mobile Safari, they put stuff there. Not bad.

Using CSS3 allows them to use (so far, it’s still experimental) programmatic buttons, progress bars, etc. instead of making zillions of things in Photoshop. Also, smaller, and zoom readily available in each browser.

Tags: Conference,  Design,  Mobile web,  speaking, Permalink | Comments (0)

Older Entries »
Next Page »