UXLX - 4: Friday Talks - Part 1

Hi,

last Friday at the UXLX a lot of interesting talks took place. Here is my overview of the first part.

Louis Rosenfeld - On not declaring victory: Going beyond user research

Insights live in different silos.
- The reports from the user research group
- Query data gleaned from site search team
- The logs from the call center
- The reports coming out of the analytics applications
- Insights from Voice of the Customer research (surveys)
- CRM data
- The insights coming out of the research center.

Louis Rosenfeld



A nasty, three-headed cartographic challenge

1. Fragmentation: Tell us where an organizations insights live

2. Differentiation: Tell us what kind of insights there are

3. Synthesis: Tell us how to combine them effectively

The organization's challenge: thinking with a whole brain.

Some recommendations:

- Get out of your silo

- Establish what's common: KPI / goals, Segments/personas

- Map it: Maps, after all, are designed objects

Put people together from different silos

Win it: Companies that integrate their silos of insight will outpace their competitors

Christian Crumlish - Playful Design

Play - all the concepts of play he's working on has something to do with moving in space.

Masks: Putting on a role

Make belive: Invent themselves online

Reimagining: Play a role

Games:structured play

Games:

- Needs to start of with an invitation: "do you want to play"

- Boundaries: You have a system you play in

- Rules

- Goals: What is the goal of the game?

- Competition

- Cooperation

"It's easy to make a game fun, but it's hard to make the HR website fun."

Christian Crumlish

Nick Finck - The Cross-Channel Experience

Nick Finck

What is cross-channel experience?

Cross-Channel experience Design is the process of designing for all the touchpoints a person has with a business regardless of channel.
- Interactive touchpoints: Web, mobile, etc.
- Human touchpoints: Sales person, hotline, etc.

What you should do...

• Know the context of use
• Attention to detail counts
• Look for hacks
• Follow the whole engagement
• Learn the business process
• Understand how employees work

We need business on the site to improve here.
- We must break down the silos.
- We must cross-pollenate (collaborate with different parts of the company)
- We must work more like a hive.
... With a unified version of what we're trying to do.

Stephen Anderson - Critical Thinking Skills for UX Designers
Critical Thinking Skills - Z-Shaped Thinkers:
○ "When everyone zigs, zag."
○ Changing what you are doing through critical thinking

Z-Shaped Thinkers approach challenges (of all kinds!) in different ways.
Skills of Z-Shaped Thinkers:

• Rephrasing the problem
• Explore many perspectives
• Synthesize information
• Embrace constraints
• Challenge assumptions
• Appreciate details

...In oder to envision unseen opportunities.

Stephen Anderson

Kristina Halvorson - Content/Communication
Problem: We still think about content as copywriting? It's just writing and everybody has Word :-)

Tools to get the writer in the room at the beginning - Content strategy
Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery and governance of content.

Core content strategy - What are we going to do with our content?
Content components: Structure & substance
People components: Workflow & governance

Kristina Halvorson

Br, Claudia

Games in applications: Try Ribbon Hero in Word!

Hi,

a few months ago (in October 2009) I wrote a blog post about "The Fun Theory" and how games in applications can help to increase the satisfaction of the users while working with an application.

Today Office Labs (a creative, future-oriented, experimenting department of Microsoft) published "Ribbon Hero" - a concept prototype that should help users to learn Word and Excel. I want to share this with you because this is the first realization using game mechanics in "boring" daily-business applications.



Try it, and probably we can share our highscore in facebook :-).

Br, Claudia

PS: Hopefully my mum likes the game and I needn't explain the ribbon anymore.

The Fun Theory or "Can game mechanics helps to improve applications?"

Hi,

today I want to talk a little bit about a very interesting topic - the power of games and how fun can manipulate the behaviour. At the beginning I want show some real impressive videos created by VW for the project "The fun theory".

The idea of the site is that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. In this video they try to increase the number of people recycling glass. (Visit the website and you can find two other nice videos.)



As you can see in this video - if you have fun using a system you will use this more often and have a higher satisfaction using it.

Very extensively the game mechanics are used by social networks - for example on flickr, facebook, twitter, youtube, etc. It's possible to collect things (friends, followers, views), to customize you view/avatar and you can rate things or you can get an rating ("Your profile is 90% complete", etc.)
And also for example on ebay as a powerseller you get points and know on which "level" you are.

The following is an interesting presentation from the Google Tech Talks by Amy Jo Kim from January 2009 about "Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software" (1h).




Also a nice example is the Google Image Labeler. To label images is a boring work, but now Google tried to make it fun by creating a game out of it (example by John Ferrara - "Extending Game Design to Business Applications" (video) ).

So I think applying game mechanics to applications is really hard to do, but if you can experimenting and test you ideas with users at the end you get a better, more fun product.

Br, Claudia