I had typed up these notes with the hope that they would make it into a fully fledged blog post but over a month down the line and they are still, sadly, sitting as bullet points. I’m going to publish them as is, rather then let them wallow in my drafts for another 2 months!

I generally feel like I chose some presentations which weren’t as relevant or which I didn’t learn as much this year. Last year, I had a pretty solid run but perhaps that was due to the fact, a lot of this was still new and I wasn’t as actively involved with the UX community as I am now. Unfortunately, my key takeaway of the day was OMG! Michael Hill showed Pedobear in his keynote (I’m not going to explain what it is if you don’t know) which I feel is kind of sad. There were some gems but that sticks in my mind. Highlight of the day had to be Cindy Chastain’s session on Experience Themes.

Day 1 - IA Summit

Podcasts of all Sessions

Keynote - Mediated Cultures
Speaker: Michael Hill
Podcast: Keynote on Boxes & Arrows

• Started in New Guinea, 1999. Places that have no media at all. Very isolated and often no money, self sustaining tribes.
• Your entire identity belongs in face to face contact.
• The government took a census using GPS and assigning a number to each person.
• Their old villages were based on relationships with other people. The census changed that and they are now ordered around the census.
• People would say their name based on their relationships ie. mother which confused them. They adopted a “census name” for this purpose.
• They adopted a set of rules rather than solving a a problem in open air, as previously.
• As media changes, relationships change.
• Video on YouTube - Web 2.0 The Web is Using Us: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
• Digg is a form of User Generated Filtering.
• Delicious is a form of User Generated Organising.
• Following tags on Delicious is a form of User Generated Distribution.
• Not just a media revolution but a cultural revolution.
• The bias of media is (Nystrom 1973) - PDF available from http://disexpress.umi.com/ for $36
  • intellectual
  • emotional
  • spatial and temporal
  • sensory
  • political
  • social
  • metaphysical
  • epistemological biases
• Lee Rainie of the effect of new media “The role of the expert changes”
• Talks by Lee Rainie: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/New-media-ecology.aspx
• We designed an institution for learning but people who like learning don’t actually like it.
• Feeling of disconnect from real life. Losing individuality.
• Tv became the centrepoint of our lives, a one way conversation for conversations of significance. So you only if you have a voice if you are on TV. So you are only significant if you are on TV.
• Created the MTV generation.
• Read this book: Mediated by Thomas de Zen
• History of whatever, you didn’t mean anything, you don’t care, indifference, self-focused.
• Nirvana’s Nevermind = Anthem for a Generation.
• Barrage of imagery is flattering.
• We want to be engaged but ultimately we do nothing.
• Digital information is different.
• We use real-life metaphors to organise our digital space but often they aren’t appropriate.
• Form and content become inseparable.
• Tim Berners-Lee said “it’s not meant to be a glorified TV channel”
• With form separated from content, it’s easy to create your own content. You don’t need to know how to write your own code.
• The medium shapes the message and therefore the conversation, and the possibility for self-awareness.
• The anonymity of watching: what does this mean for community?
• Recall, re-cognition. Recognition is deeper.
• When I think of myself, I don’t think of how other people think of me.
• Freedom to experience humanity. State of aesthetic arrest.
• Cultural tension between what we are surrounded by and what we want.
• People want connection without constraint.
• Sometimes distance allows us to connect at a deeper level.
• Different meaning allows for a deeper self-awareness.
• Onto Twitter, lifecasting (everything) or mindcasting (quality)
• Twitter is like becoming a micro-celebrity.
• 4Chan is a different kind of identity to Twitter.
• Anonymity allows you to be at your most creative.
• 4Chan is only a group in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. Travelling in the same direction but at any moment it could change.
• The internet is a way to talk back.
• We can’t make our children passive again, we can only make them pirates.
• Internet is heading towards what we’ve all been saying for along time.

Designing for, with & around advertising
Speaker: Karen McGrane
Presentation: Slideshare

• Mapped history on S&P500 to her own history, quite a cool technique.
• Worked for companies with different revenue types: Subscription vs. Ad generated revenue.
• Been an IA since 1997.
• Has her own company called Bond, Art & Science
• How to stop worrying about ads “Advocate for the user, recognise and create value for the company”.
• Ads are a necessary evil.
• If we ignore the ads, maybe they will go away - Not likely!
• Information wants to be free.
• “Print Dollars, Internet Nickels” Ann Moore.
• The time spent on internet is increasing rapidly but the ad spend is still only a fraction.

Top 10 of Ads

1. It’s all middlemen.
2. Media buyers are 25 year olds with spreadsheets.
3. Media buyers purchase top level navigation. They want to buy a section. Focus on topics. Google ads are bottom up, banner ads are top down.
4. The IAB is a canal that controls everything. Their 6 core objectives are:
   • Fend off adverse legislation and regulation
   • Coalesce around market-making measurement guidelines and creative standards
   • Create common ground with customers to reduce costly friction in the supply chain
   • Share best practices that foster industry-wide growth
   • Generate industry-wide research and thought leadership that solidifies Interactive as a mainstream medium
   • Create countervailing force to balance power of other media, marketing, and agency trade groups
5. Design your grid based on the advertising being shown above the fold.
6. You can specify what’s OK and what’s not OK. Example: Business Week’s Ad Guidelines: http://mediakit.businessweek.com/Rates/Web/Online_Production_Specs
7. You can customise the text ad placements.
8. Think creatively about your ad placements. iPhone in Pitchfork recently.
9. What get measured matters, maybe. Data is cheap but insights are expensive.
10. Forget everything, the banner is dead. Expect bigger, crazier ads in the future.

• There is a wall between advertising and content, sponsorship is just the cherry on top.
• Increasing new interest in micro-payments.
• Economist - End of the Free Lunch: Again
• Pay wall means there is less exposure to brand.
• Advertising is the worst revenue model for the internet, except for all the others (ummm what others)

A Fundamental Disruption: Moving Information Architecture into the Hands of Individual Consumers
Speaker: Peter Sweeney & Robert Barlow-Busch
Presentation: Slideshare

• Disruptive technologies tend to start off under-performing.
• Continue to support low and high end.
• Read: The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
• Semantic Technology
  • Encodes Meaning
  • Auto-recognition of Topics
  • Enables machines as well as people to understand, share and reason.
• Fits in with what is IA… Rather than producers organise information in advance, consumers will organise on demand.
• Space of semantic innovation is accelerating.

Examples of Semantic Technology

• Freebase: Linked open data & APIs.
• Zepheira: Remix: Providing data and tools to manage that data.
• Thomson Reuters: Calais: Can identify data from any URL. From an unstructured data object, works out structured data - entities.
• Clusty: Clustering related themes and concepts. Pulls out connections and relationships.
• Cosmix: Familiar with this website from research for Phoenix.
• Primalfusion: This is the speakers product. Felt like a bit of an ad pitch.
• Uses Wikipedia but can it be trusted given they are pitching to Researchers?

Outstanding Questions

• What is the value to the consumer for Semantic technologies?
• How do you separate the masses of content this technology can provide? Needs a human element to decide what is and isn’t important, separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
• Will people adopt it for all search queries or just for certain modes? (Research etc)

The Semantic Web: What IAs Need to Know About Web 3.0
Speaker: Chiara Fox
Presentation: Slideshare

• Structured data and content.
• Explain relationships between concepts.
• Ontology: Allows us to add additional data to our existing data.
• Need to convert thesaurus to ontology.
• OWL = web ontology language.
• Designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information.
• Share Ontologies and Data.
• It’s a community effort.
• Starting to see these behaviours: Tagging on Flickr, Identifying friends in Facebook photos. * FOAF project = Friend of a Friend. * Semantics is good for research queries or disambiguation in particular.

Experience Themes: A Storytelling Technique Applied to Design
Speaker: Cindy Chastain
Presentation: Slideshare

• Theme can manifest in a product but also induce pleasure, emotion and meaning.
• Book: A Project Guide to UX Design: For User Experience Designers in the Field or in the Making (Voices That Matter)
• Meaning is:
  • What is this about?
  • What this will do for me?
  • How it works?
  • Where this fits into my life.
• Three Levels: behavioural, visceral and reflective. You need to get all three right.
• We need to work on both the tangible and intangible elements of design.
• Films are co-ordinated in service, websites are not. What can we adopt from film?
• Story can be used as a frame that defines the product, service or system.
• Theme can define product and strategy as well as design process.
• To create a theme, you need analysis and creativity. Start with insights and empathy and then brainstorm on the theme.

Motivating Teams
Speaker: Dorelle Rabinowitz
Presentation: Slideshare

• No 1 reason people leave their job = Their Manager.
• Managers provide foundations for success:
  • Setting the stage, making stuff happen.
  • Understand yourself - manage your confidence.
  • Clear goals go a long way.
  • Clear obstacles.
  • Teamwork starts with understanding.
• 3 types of bad apples: depressive pessimist, jerk, slacker.
• Overcommunicate to build a sense of community in your team.
• Manage your emotions.
• Ask questions and probe, rather than giving your reactions.
• 3 kinds of reviews: peer, team and stakeholder.

Using Enterprise IA to Support Business Strategy: Driving Revenue and Brand Health with Better Information Management
Speaker: Gary Carlson & Samantha Starmer
Presentation: Website

• Always tie your UX projects to revenue figures.
• For revenue information refer to:
  • Customer interviews
  • Web analytics
  • Employee Insights
  • Industry Best Practises.