January 2005 Archives

I went to my first Experience Design meeting for the AIGA Colorado chapter last night so I could watch Peter Merholz give a great presentation on "The Power of Experience Design". I didn't take extensive notes because I'd heard parts of the presentation in other writings of his and others at Adaptive Path, but I did find the following of interest:

• User Experience is the Venn diagram of: Viability, Feasibility, and Desirability. His example of nirvana here is the iPod.
• Quick anecdote that User Experience is not a rule set, like Jakob Nielsen's usability rules, but rather a philosophy, a discipline to inject into your existing processes.
  • His example was Quixtar, a very successful ecommerce site that breaks all of the Nielsen's rules, but has a different interaction model that includes the salesman at the point of contact
• "We don't even know what else they are doing!". User experience hinges on understanding the context of use and environmental variables (baby's screaming while buying tickets to go see the parents in Arizona).
• Top down: observe users, develop mental models, derive site's main areas of content
• Bottom up: inventory what you have, develop a content model, librarianship, users participate
• What unifies UX (all disciplines) is that we all play with stickys (Post-Its).
• Group IA is an exercise and should be inclusive of users and stakeholders where applicable. UX or IA role is more as facilitator leading to answers
• A couple of great diagrams of a Mental Model/Content Map, and ROI diagram for design process
• Example sites:
  • Best Cellars - a great classification scheme that evokes experience as opposed to wine.com
  • Kohler - is a good example of faceted search
  • Gary Fisher Matchmaker - Go through the survey and you'll find some humor at the end (be sure only 2 bikes are compared so a mysterious 3rd option is available)

That was most of the points I took away. It was also really nice to just have a conversation based in UX in Denver. I can't express enough how glad I am that Denver appears to have become some level of destination for UX professionals to share their ideas, in no small part due to the work of the AIGA folks here in Colorado. In fact, I'm talking to my boss soon about getting memberships for me and my team so we can attend more events in the future!

AT&T has been my cell phone provider for years, but was recently bought by Cingular. At first I was a little hesitant about making the switch or just switching to a new company, but they came out with a great incentive plan to get existing AT&T customers over to their service...offering new service discounts on phones!

I've been looking seriously at a PDA for the last couple of months because my life just got that much more hectic recently, and Outlook seems to be running my life now with the Calendar and Tasks tools. When I saw the offer to get a Blackberry 7290 for $150 after mail-in rebate, it made too much sense. So I bought one and it arrived just last week.

The Blackberry is a really neat device. Similar to the iPod, it has a wheel to help you navigate the screens. And like any good Windows application, it has tons of keyboard shortcuts so your not reliant on the wheel. The screen is colorful and clear, and the backlight has two modes for times you don't need a lamp. Those are the physical design considerations, but its real genius is in the software that's so well thought out its already starting to change my habits.

First off, I've been using my cell phone as my alarm clock for the past three years (I'm just too lazy to replace the stupid thing). Usually, cell phone alarm settings are pretty basic with just setting a time and getting a ring. The Blackberry however has some elegant features like a setting to tell it only to ring on the weekdays (so I can sleep in!). But the best part is it has a snooze bar! I hit the space key, and I snooze for the 5 minutes (which is customizable, of course!). But a smart alarm clock is not why I needed a PDA.

As I stated earlier, I've been living out of my Outlook lately. I used to use a Priority Management book to keep track of my life, but its much easier to drag and drop meetings, appointments, and whatever tasks into the appropriate tools in Outlook to keep track of them. This had been working great until I'm in a meeting and need my calendar, but the agenda says "no laptops". Blackberry to the rescue. I installed the desktop software on my computer, made a few easy adjustments, plugged in my Blackberry and that was it! No extra work or programs, just perfect syncing on all my tasks, and appointments. In fact, since the Blackberry is next to my bed at night, I can write items into it that I remember just before I go to sleep (a little bit disturbing, but I think we all do it).

Finally, the whole point of getting a Blackberry over a PDA is that its a phone too! I've noticed a remarkable improvement in sound quality with the Blackberry, as it broadcasts Quad-band: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz GSM/GPRS networks. And the web browser is allright, but I'm still playing with it (remember Mobile Web is the next big thing!) and will report back later.

Overall, I'm very satisfied with my new phone/pda. Everytime I think I'm even remotely stuck and have a question how to use it, the developers have thought of it and built in a path to the answer, like magic. I would recommend one to anyone looking for a more affordable alternative to the Treo.

I just read my Adaptive Path newsletter today and was shocked to see that not only is Peter Merholz stopping through town to talk at an AIGA Colorado meeting, but so is Jesse James Garrett to head a workshop on applying the elements to business. Wish that workshop came about 4 months sooner because we've been applying his ideas all over the place at work!

Its nice to see our little cow-town get on the map for web, hopefully this trend continues!

The turn of the new year brings a new beginning for me almost every year, and this year is a pretty big one.

After years of laboring in a relatively ineffective post in Marketing Communications, I'm now part of a four person team in charge of turning our Fortune 500 company's internet presence around. A heavy task, but I really feel I'm ready for something like this and I'm very excited.

Lots of things will be changing this year as I work with the team to try apply JJG's Nine Pillars into a small, cross-functional team that is in charge of both the internet and intranet. And I will be sharing my experiences here with you!

So here's to 2005, a year that is definitely looking up!