EUROIA 2009 - Day 1, Copenhagen - Part 1
Scott Thomas (Simple Scott) - The Power of Design
I really enjoyed Scott’s session, purely because it focused on the real world experience, in an area that not many of us have experience in. Some salient points about getting things done.
Designing Obama from mas / menos on Vimeo.
- Obama Online Experience
- Apparently furry pink unicorns were the key to the online Obama experience
- Having an emotive quality within the design is the most powerful thing. Sparking emotions and intellect.
- Rather than having multiple messages for a political campaign, just had one.
- It’s tough to allow other people to bastardize your logo. We should invite people to participate in the brand.
- Whatever you call yourself, it normally doesn’t fit in with politics.
- Their audience was diverse. They had to design it for everyone, including llamas!
- IA - we aren’t talking about IOWA.
- Like floor plans to a building, executives don’t look at them before the building is built and then realize it doesn’t suit their needs.
- IA is becoming the UX communities own baby. We are wearing too many hats.
- Obama is a product, we are trying to persuade people. People in the campaign got scared about making a political candidate ‘a brand’.
- Scott wasn’t concerned about the fold, used a standard one wide, narrow column.
- There should be no distinction in the different part of the website. mybarackobama.com was the personalized section of the website but people weren’t aware they were there. The log-in was seamless.
- There was numbers related to activity in mybarackobama.com
- “Our campaign looked like an internet start-up company”.
- Their video team focused on people around Obama, since that is what the election is really about. Telling a narrative. Their blog reflected this.
- Our campaign was about getting people to participate. Registering to vote was a really difficult process.
- Simple Vote was about recreating the physical experience of someone helping you fill out a form. 75% success rate.
- Making something successful and simple, often means you need to think lots about it.
- Our passion and enthusiasm for Barack Obama, kept driving us. We had one finish line.
- The answer is already there in some physical form. Good example of using White House architecture to create a grid.
- Travelled to Japan after inauguration, to have a break, look at things differently.
- Each thing is an interaction. All things we can learn from.
- Scott was writing a book and funding it through Kickstarter, it’s now available for pre-order.
Cennydd Bowles - Wayfinding
As you can see by the amount of notes, this was a great talk. Cennydd really packed in lots of great information and I highly recommend having a look at his presentation. He’s not put his presentation online but there is a great write up on Johnny Holland’s Blog.
- In 2001, after the twin towers fell people lost their way in NY.
- We need to understand how we wayfind. Using spacial awareness, mental models etc.
- Survey knowledge. We break things into smaller pieces.
- Procedural knowledge. We understand the procedure to get somewhere but if the procedure breaks, we don’t know where we are going. Specific route to a particular resource which may be broken in a redesign.
- Landmark knowledge. Twin towers are an example but anything that is memorable or recognizeable.
- Legibility can differ on the environment. NY has IA baked in, London does not.
- Through language we can express and codify geography.
- Folksonomy vs. Taxonomy when labelling areas.
- Navigation tasks can be separated into three types: naive, primed and exploratory.
- How have we tried to improve wayfinding over time? Town planners have tried to help us over time by using urban density. Architecture has given us consistent flooring to highlight a route.
- We think more often of wayfinding as signage, essentially environmental design. It’s not limited to signage but a number of things which guide people.
- There are a number of rules for designing maps.
- We denote all the different things that contribute to understanding orientation.
- We show where you are.
- We have upwards as in front of people.
- There are limitations.
- It’s important to supplement maps with signage. Five types: indentification, directional, orientational, regulatory, vernacular.
- Signs use icons and symbols. AIGA & DOT is particularly recogniseable in signage.
- GPS was originally released from the US Army because a Korean airliner was shot down in Soviet airspace. It was released with a margin of error to protect the US security.
- Satnav only shows routes but not suitability.
- The web has changed the landscape of maps. It has mostly been used as a preparation tool.
- However it’s mobile that has really brought digital maps and GPS into the real world.
- A trend in wayfinding is UGC wayfinding. If unknown to us but local, emotional to someone else. A la cart is actually using this as an antidote to glossy city guides.
- Communal wayfinding takes us into the territory of flocking. Things like safety and density of groups.
- The user is becoming a destination but we move. Our location right now, is not as interesting as our location in a few hours or days. Again, it lacks intent and context.
- AIl wayfinding using things like Roomba. It assesses the size, then does a spiral, then bounces off the wall. It’s most interesting journey is the one back to the docking station, as it must have the right amount of charge.
- We end up with ubiquitous inputs and outputs. We could make our environment the canvas to help us with wayfinding.
- It’s important that wayfinding is accessible.
- Spimes introduce the concept of time to wayfinding. We don’t need the presence of others as the digital trail left by others over time can guide us.
- Real world digital techniques can pull the semantic web into the real world.
- The two world API. Does it correspond between the physical and digital world? This is where wayfinding merges with information architecture.
- Cognitive load is going to limit our ability to wayfind. We need to embed information and tasks into one another. Communication should be subtle and unobtrusive.
- Our design vocabulary is going to have to adapt to the changes.
- Then, finally ethics will come into play. We need to play it safe, build in fuzziness.
- Does accurate wayfinding remove the joy of a new city? What happens when wayfinding doesn’t work in critical systems?
- The future of wayfinding is here but distributed unequally.
Andrea Resmini & Luca Rosati - Bridging Media
There was some interesting points in this talk but I didn’t feel like the time was enough for it to really get off the ground.
Bridging Media
View more presentations from Andrea Resmini.
- Talking about a booking a trip, there are a number of tough points, loops and obstacles in the process. Talking about how the digital process isn’t much different. Can’t we make this seamless? What happens when we get further in the future?
- Who is the designer? These are human information interactions.
- Currently as information moves to physical spaces IA is used to design the entire range of shared information spaces, places, services and processes.
- In the future, IA becomes the connector between different media and different contexts and provides experiential continuity to products and services. It becomes an ecosystem.
- Nothing stands isolated in the system. Everything is connected and related. It has to be designed as a seamless user experience process.
- We become intermediaries in this ecosystem.
- The boundaries separating media and genres gets thinner. All experiences cross environments.
- The horizontal prevails over the vertical. The focus shifts from designing experiences spanning processes rather than single items.
- Ubiquitous ecologies connects media and environments across an experience.
- Cyberspace is no longer a destination but a layer integrated in the world around us.
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Book to read: Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
