Down to business. Adam has been asking for my distilled thoughts on the conference. Here you go, in true consultant fashion, five salient points. These definitely aren’t the themes the conference aimed to communicate. They’re simply my personal favorite snippits. (And what are salient points without all kinds of muddling details? Sorry this one’s so long.)
- The power of a freshly sharpened No. 2 – I’m going to start sketching again. When I did my short stint in the GSD’s architecture program, I started to get good at using fewer words and more gestures in communicating thoughts. That’s the thing though – gestures, not drawings. I have to get over the self-consciousness that I feel about my notebook. Sketches should be fast and meaningful more than precise. I usually like my drawings to look good. I’m not an artist, so I have to labor over them. It takes time. It usually involves an eraser. My peers from the conference can sketch. As a result they can communicate and capture ideas really effectively. Practice makes perfect.
- Solicit design concepts and hang them on the wall – One of my final sessions was about bringing a “design studio” (studio = facilitated workshop) into the typical interface design process. This is a compelling idea for me, and one of the few actionable pieces that came out of the weekend. Basically, design and development team members are asked to contribute quick design concepts addressing the core business problem. These concepts and sketches are tacked up for everyone to see. The group then discusses and critiques the designs and ends the day with a single concept that merges the best ideas, and is agreeable to the group as a whole. There is nothing negative about this approach. The design team gets a head start on design. The development team understands the reasons behind design movements, and feels ownership for the work.
- Way less than six degrees of separation – For me creative inspiration comes from my colleagues and the impressive work that they’re doing around the globe.
- I spent time with a girl that I’d originally met at the UPA conference two years ago. Maryanne is from the Ukraine, but working for an agency in Los Angeles now. We also discovered that we have a mutual designer friend that used to be with Accenture.
- The closing plenary was given by a professor from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He’s an architect turned interface designer and taught one of the classes that I took during my summer in Cambridge. He also wrote a book on the intersection of design of online and physical spaces, which I own, and have now pledged to really read.
- Over Thanksgiving I skimmed a book about interaction design that was sitting on Marty and Doug’s coffee table. Two nights ago I had a cocktail with the (heavily tattooed) author of the book. We talked about Guitar Hero instead of something smart, but whatever. Speaking of Marty, I sat with two of his former students through the better part of yesterday. He comes highly regarded indeed :)
- Bill Buxton, Alan Cooper and Jared Spool (big wigs in my professional world) were among the lineup of speakers this weekend. I’ve been reading their blogs for ages, and have their books in my TV room and office. They really are real people.
- I spent most of my weekend with two amazing women from Toronto. I’d not met them before this conference, but I hope to sometime again soon. They are doing cool work for a small consultancy. I introduced them to cheese grits. They taught me how to say “aboouut.”
- Make it wiggle – There was a lot of talk this weekend about creating designs that delight. To be successful, we should connect with users in human and emotional ways. One good example (from Apple of course) is the wiggling icons on the iPhone. The idea here is if you want to rearrange the icons on your homescreen, you press and hold one of the icons and they all begin to wiggle. They’re restless, itchy. They are calling out to be rearranged. And as you slide the icons around, kind of like one of those puzzles from when we were kids, the other icons scoot out of the way. It’s fabulous. But this all sort of begs the question for me, should healthcare, government, and financial services sites be delightful? Is there a place for this in my current medical treatment cost calculator project? And if everything delights, will anything delight? Where are these teams with these really cool projects and ideas? Do I have to move to Cupertino? How many total busts happen for every brilliant wiggly icon?
- Designing for a groove – Every once in a while (unfortunately for me, a great while lately) I fall into a state of pure productivity. I’ll be fully immersed. I’m not tired or hungry or suffering from neck cricks or fanny fatigue. I’m alert. Work is getting done, really good work. There is an intrinsic sense of reward that comes with this kind of flow. I almost wouldn’t even have to be paid. One of the presenters this weekend took the position that we as interface designers have a near ethical responsibility to deliver applications that lend themselves to this uber-productivity. Does achieving this state even have anything to do with the design of the tools with which we’re working, or rather is it simply the perfect storm of outside forces - interesting work, enough sleep, and few client interruptions? I’m hesitant to believe that RIAs bring on workplace nirvana.
