User experience has been a big theme at The Big M - and when I say user experience I mean the process of identifying what the user requires, the business case and the execution in a simple and, to quote Aral Balkan, delightful way.
All the talks touched on this in some way - from HTML 5 to open data to innovation of mobile networks. Ultimately the development process is all about delivering a product/service/app etc that is intuitive, scalable and makes money.
What made the conference exciting was that there were a large number of developers in attendance and that the message was all about the basics of building successful services. All the talks were well received.
I spoke to a delegate who was a developer and he said that he felt developers don't tend to think about these issues (normally someone else deals with the client on such issues, for exmple) so the conference focus had been good for getting developers thinking about the wider implications of what they are doing and why.
This is exciting - design and content are being pushed further towards the developer community and that community has to respond with products that deliver great UX.
Presentation two at The Big M is on user experience.
Opening quote: 'We are now making the new everyday things.' Aral Balkan tells the audience that app development is all about the making of new everyday things.
I like UX talks because they use great examples - in everyday life - that do not work. Balkan kicks off his talk with some great examples.
He then goes on to talk about interaction design.
Graphic design, motion design and information architecture make up interaction design, but the key thing about interaction design is interaction. That is the problem, Balkan says.
For example, how many times have you misunderstood someone else? And that is with every cue available to us - voice, gesture etc. On the phone, the physical gestures are removed. Texting and IM is even easier for users to misunderstand each other.
We are losing humanity in the way we communicate, Balkan says, but we try to make up for this bu using devices such as emoticons - that is about the best we can do on text, for sure!
So, if you replace a person with a computer you have lost humanity - the visual and aural clues. Now we try and understand humans using psychology, linguistics, social psychology etc, and these elements are now becoming key in design.
So computing is commoditised. But the question is: why are we prepared to pay a bit more for some commodities? Balkan talks about the growth of Apple here. The differentiator in commoditised markets is user experience ie we pay more for something that looks and feels good.
But what is that? Hard to identify. But we know what a bad UX is.
At the very least we could design apps that don't drive people crazy. Key point: worry about the right thing and that is your users' needs not your needs. Think outside in design NOT inside out design.
User experience cuts across the whole business, says Balkan. Not just the job for one person - but it usually is - or a team. bUT, how much influence do they have?
Design perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away. Focus on simplicity.
Usable = edible. This slikde was used to talk about how we describe going for a meal. We expect the meal to be edible and we actually talk about where we want to go, type of surroundings etc. We do not go for a meal to eat edible food, we go out to somewhere nice.
Balkan talks about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - and building beyond edible - we can build something that is delightful. We must build things that are magical - his words noy mine but the sentiment is good - we need to add layers of delight to our apps.
He warns that commonsense is the most dangerous myth in what we do and makes the point that assumption of what is common sense just leads to confusion.
As we shift from an age of 'Features' to an age of 'experience' it will be the little things that make a big difference - a final and spot on thought from Balkan.
Last night, Jeremy showed me Swype on his android phone. Here is his demo. Whether this is your bag or not - touchscreen technologies are changing the way we interact with new devices and the way we interact with age-old technologies (keyboards, for example).
Here Jeremy is just gliding across the 'keyboard' to form words - no tapping at all.
A few days ago I posted a comment on occupational psychologist Sukh Pabial's blog about feedback from training sessions.
Sukh's post was timely as I am currently reading Barry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice. Although the book is focussed on the psychology of decision making and the complexity of choice in decision making it offers up some good psychological insights on behaviour based on research by social scientists and psychologists.
The quote I added to Sukh's post was this:
" . . . neither our predictions about how we will feel after an experience nor our memories of how we will feel during the experience are very accurate reflections of how we actually do feel while the experience is occurring."
This chimed for me both in the training context and also in the usability context too.
In the past I have attended usability labs which have involved eye-tracking. At such sessions, a user is guided through some tasks and their eye movements are tracked. A video also records the user's behaviours at the computer screen. Both the eye-tracking and the video are streamed into a separate room to be viewed by the site owner.
What I noticed from watching these sessions is that users' assessment of how they found the tasks at the end of the entire session (having completed all the tasks) varied from how they experienced the tasks as they happened ie a task they said was fairly straightforward was experienced as being more complex.
Users were also asked for feedback immediately after each task - this feedback seemed more in tune with what they had just experienced ie if they experienced a task as fairly straightforward they said as much.
So if I had just seen a report from what the user had said after completing all tasks it would have been quite different to what they had actually experienced.
However, in these labs, the research teams pull together both the eye-tracking/video footage and user comments about how they felt after each task and all tasks to provide a full view of the research findings. Pulling all this information together is vital for an accurate view of the user's experience.
In his book, Schwartz finishes the above quote with this line:
And yet it is memories of the past and expectations for the future that govern our choices.
What matters most, when it comes to web sites or training sessions for example - is that the memory - what the user or attendee takes away from the experience is all that counts. If it is positive then they will come back for more (and recommend) - be it more site visits, another training session etc.
If there were problems during the experience then 'in the moment' feedback would be really valuable - on sites this could come from on site feedback services/ethnographic studies etc. In usability, this 'in the moment' feedback is key, which is why usability labs using eye-tracking are so important.
Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook provide 'in the moment' feedback.
But it is creating an overall positive experience that arguably matters most - users will forgive you usability issues if they can see the overall value in what you are doing and what they are getting ie they like what your site offers and find it useful, relevant etc.
But don't rest on your laurels - those usability issues will need to ironed out because at some point they will affect the overall experience.
Here is Schwartz talking about his book (5 years ago!)
