A couple of weeks ago I attended the excellent UX London conference arranged by the equally excellent people at ClearLeft.  I went there expecting to most enjoy seeing the big names in my field speak, and I must say that I did:

• Jared Spool’s usability stand up routine
• Don Norman’s confident authority
• The eloquent reflections of Jeff Veen

But unexpectedly, the real value of the conference was in the challenge presented to some of my own long held prejudices.

1. Stop selling UxD

Brian recently blogged about UX London and said some nice things about my Future Now presentation at Bootcamp ‘09. Over the years I’ve been rehearsing my impassioned plea to give user experience design a try and now feel I have it honed to a fine point. At UX London, however, Luke Wroblewski convinced me that selling UxD is a waste of time.

Luke asked us to imagine any other arm of business doing the same thing – imagine the HR department selling Human Resources:

HR person: We have these competency models, and an appraisal system, and a whole new way to consider the business.

Me: Meh! Who cares! Get on with it.

Instead, Luke advocates that designers stop whingeing and use their design skills to acquire strategic influence in business.

1. Find data on matters of concern to the business
2. Apply design to clarify the issues in the data
3. Present your findings and solutions

As Luke pointed out, whoever can best articulate the nature of a problem is the person best placed to solve it. So I’m resolved to stop making the case for design and instead use design to make the case for business.

2. It’s time to put the design back into UxD

Many people in UxD roles, including me, have little or no formal design education. The field is comprised of psychologists, computer scientists, writers, editors, librarians, information scientists and all sorts of disgruntled users of information technology. The profession embarked on a crusade to bring a user centred approach to the software and web industries, which were dominated by engineering and marketing. But for the most part, they did so without much knowledge of design. In many cases, they were reacting to the excesses of graphic designers on the early web, UxD professionals actively devalued design.

That’s got to change.

I attended two excellent workshops that immersed us in the methods, tools and cognitive style of the design professions. Quick Sketching for Interaction Design, delivered by Mark Baskinger, an assistant professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon, and William Bardel, an accomplished Information Designer. They led us through a fun and informative half-day of sketching, storytelling and collaboration through design drawing.  It was an eye-opener for many there, me included. I came away with a renewed sense of the value of the methods and skills of industrial and information design professionals.

At Wireframing Web 2.0 for Design and Definition, ClearLefties James and Rich showed how this approach is applied in their own work, including how they use simple working prototypes to refine designs. Excellent. I am resolved to put more time into coding, sketching and the study of the practice of design.

3. Agile is out there, deal with it

On the last day of UX London, I watched ClearLeftie Cennydd run what is possibly the bravest half-day workshop ever attempted: Getting Real with Agile Design. Armed only with an assortment of slides, a flipchart and black-belt level knowledge of Planning Poker, Cennydd ran his workshop as an agile development project, which is to say he planned and executed the whole thing on the spot. Cennydd, I am in awe. Ask for a raise, or at least for an audacity bonus.

Now, I knew very little about Agile development methodologies going into the workshop, but I had nevertheless become a convinced sceptic of the practice. I’m an advocate of the Big Design Up Front approach, and consider Agile as a means for programmers to side step the paralysing bureaucracy of large development projects so they can just get on with coding. I’m with the programmers on side-stepping the paralysing bureaucracy, but I have serious reservations about rushing to code.

It has to be said that I did not come away from Cennydd’s workshop any less sceptical, although certainly better informed. However, I am convinced that I’m going to encounter an agile development project sooner rather than later, so I am resolved to stop whingeing about it and learn how to get my job done in an agile development environment.

Freedom from prejudice

I enjoyed UX London, the three days of total immersion in User Experience Design with more than 200 of my peers. But I really enjoyed the surprise: the challenges to my long held beliefs. Anything that changes your mind for the better is time well spent.

I asked Cory-Ann, who along with Liz, is planning this event of the century (or at least of 2009) what she’s been doing to get ready.

Randall: What venues did you look at for this party? And why did you choose the Source Bar?

Cory-Ann: I looked at four venues, and rang countless others. With venue inspections it’s not really about what’s good or bad, but rather what suits your event the best - the exception being the one nameless venue which would have required our guests to either climb 4 flights of stairs or brave a small, stuffy elevator with the faint smell of urine.

For the iQ Prize, my directions were to find a venue that was a bit quirky. The Source Bar has a really cool pipe-like sculpture that goes through the middle of the room - I was sold.

R: What else goes into planning this party?

CA: Well food and booze are pretty much the two most important things. Liz and I will get to pick the canapes, which may involve something fun like blindfolding each other and playing pin the tail on the food menu, whilst Morgan will wield the almighty credit card which controls the bar.

Unfortunately picking a “cool” venue means requirements like where to put a projector and screen. Those requirements aren’t so straightforward, so another venue inspection is in order. When we’re there we’ll also work out things like lights, PA, decorations, and where to hide the novelty cheques.

So far the only volunteer for the ipod has been yourself - should I brush up on my Michael Bolton lyrics?

[Note: I volunteered my ipod for the event because all Michael Bolton songs involve a key change, and everyone knows, climactic key changes make a party]

R: What are the judges doing now?

CA: Right now the judges are relaxing - all the work is going to take place during the day on July 8, when the shortlisted teams come in and do their presentations Dragon’s Den style.

R: What are you doing day to day to get this party ready?

CA: At the moment the main thing is informing the judges and shortlist, then it’s just about getting the word out and sorting out all the requirements that I mentioned before, plus building an extensive list of things we have to take which ranges from highlighters to 8 bottles of champagne.

R: Anything else you want to add?

CA: Come along! (but please email me first).

And so I was really excited when given the chance to work on my most recent project, the redesign of an online self-service web application. Not just one flow, but lots of intricately connected, consolidated flows and actions. Sad as it is to say this is what and interaction designer’s dreams are made of.

It’s design time

And so I tucked in, analysing the priorities of the tasks, creating an application hierarchy, optimising the processes and combining related actions. I toiled and toiled and after some considerable effort I was quite happy with the progress.

iQ Mantra: User test it

So we put it in front of some people. They really loved the spacious layout and the new shiny buttons.  But they asked so many questions:

• What will happen to my account if I press this?
• Will my plan change now, at the end of the month or when I pay my next bill?
• Is there a downgrading charge associated?
• How much is a 5 minute call to Timbuktu on my new plan?

Psst! Why questions are bad

Most notably, there was an utter resistance to progress through a flow or complete an action if even one query went unanswered. The standard response from users meeting this difficulty? “I’m just going to pick up the phone.”  Phone = Application Fail!

Just a few things that may be required

The session demonstrated how important supporting information is to self-service applications. Self-service applications are typically functionality focused. They provide the ability to change your account in some way, but provide none of the vital detail that would make you to feel confident enough to actually complete the change.

E-commerce: the role model

Self-service applications need to look to their e-commerce cousins as example. Online stores provide users with enough product information to convince them to part with their hard earned cash. Self service apps may not be selling products, but they are selling a way to self-manage a user’s account, so they must contain the relevant detail to allow users to confidently do this.  Confidence is the key to self service success.

• you’ve discussed the service with your client to understand the angle they want you to focus on
• you’ve had the chance to user test the current design with real customers, so you know what confuses them
• you’ve sketched out a variety of possible solutions to tackle that confusion
• you’ve worked with your colleagues to bring a variety of viewpoints into the design solution

And then you stop — frustrated, disillusioned.

“There’s not good solution for how to explain this service, because the service is too damn complicated in the first place. < Sigh.> It’s obvious this service itself is broken. Let me start by fixing the service. Then I can design a good web page for it.”

Or as Don Norman said (way back in 1998), “Want human-centred development? Reorganize the company.”

I think that pseudo-anecdote is shared by most of us in the web design world. And it’s a theme that came out prominently in the last couple weeks.

John Wood: “How design thinking can create better business and better public services”

The first place it cropped up was at our own Boot Camp Future Now seminar, at the start of June. There, our own John Wood gave a cracker of a presentation on just this subject:

He noted how lowly regarded the design industry is in Ireland, how even considering the small size of the country, the industry is far too small with little signs of growth, and how, perhaps most depressing of all, in Ireland designers are often just brought in to do some styling at the tail end of a project, which John memorably captured with this slide:

His talk was nothing short of an impassioned plea for how we can apply design thinking to solve a much wider range of problems out there. What is design thinking?

Well, it’s:

• building to think
• failing often to succeed sooner
• observing real life to see things from the customers’ perspective
• creating choices before you make one
• and adopting a culture of critique

As with most good talks, viewing his presentation will only give you a taste of the talk; you need to see it in John’s inimitable style to get a sense of the depth and conviction of his points.

Peter Merholz: “Upgrading your mandate: evolving from user experience to customer experience”

John’s theme was, as if by design, expanded on in the first talk at the UX London conference, which was the week after our Boot Camp. Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, talked from experience of the challenges of trying to make the move up the value chain. He noted how a major hurdle was a client organisation one: to solve the problems that we’re finding means widening and deepening our exposure in an organisation:

“Customer experience is is not something an organisation buys, it’s a mindset it adopts.”

And a key point of his was a “new way of thinking about design…not just as aesthetics, or as a role, or as a thing, or as a rock star…but as an activity.”

But for me, the most memorable slide was this one: “Prepare for a slog”. Peter made the critical point that trying to have this impact takes times, take failure, requires patience, and hard work. You’re not going to get invited to the boardroom on the first try. You have to prove your value one person at a time.

Luke W: “Influencing Strategy by Design”

Getting into the boardroom to help organisations make better decisions was the precise theme of Luke Wroblewski’s half-day workshop, which took place on day 2 of UX London. (If you don’t know of Luke W, he’s the main design guy at Yahoo, and author of a couple great books on UI design.)

Luke had two memorable exercises. The first was where we paired up with someone and did a little role-playing. We each took 3 minutes to talk about all the problems in our current work — basically a mini bitch-session to a stranger. Then we flipped roles and took the position of the business owner and focused on actions we could take to deal with these problems, even just small steps to improvement. Though it sounded like a silly exercise from an Alcoholics Anonymous session, it turned out to be a mini-revelation:

Don’t let yourself accept bitching as a tolerable end to a conversation.

Or as Luke put it, be “Respone Able”. (Yeah I know, it still sounds like an AA session, but somehow it didn’t come across that way.)

Then Luke went on to map out what “design brings to the table”.

The answer: a lot. Specifically: pattern recognition, story-telling, visual communication, and empathy. The third one stood out — the ability to think visually. One stat Luke threw at us (and acknowledged could be complete BS, but that it feels right) was:

“100% of people learn visually, but only 10% of them can communicate visually.”

Brush up your drawing skills folks!

But Luke really played the point well that just by illustrating the problem in a visually pithy way was often in itself enough to get called into the boardroom. And that’s why Luke’s talk had such resonance, because he spoke of numerous personal experiences where his diagramming skills alone brought him into exec meetings at Yahoo and eBay he otherwise had no business being in.

The challenge: are you satisfied just to criticise? Or are you willing to hunker down and take on the problem?

So, going back to the situation at the start of this post, I think there’s two responses you can choose between:

1. Whinge. Gripe. Complain. Bitch to your colleagues about how smart you are and how unenlightened your client is. Then go back and do the best you can with the page and move on to the next project.
2. Do the best you can with the web page. Then go back to your client and show the user-testing clips. Explain how you’re only putting band-aids on a broken service, but you can’t get to the root of the problem. Visually illustrate the key issues. Offer to present your findings to other areas of the business. And start the very long, difficult climb towards fixing service design.

Option 1 is easy. Option 2 is hard. Really hard.

But as Don Norman said:  “Nothing worthwhile is easy.”

Is it the search?
Maybe they misspell what they’re looking for and your site doesn’t offer alternatives. Maybe it doesn’t even offer results.

Is it the checkout?
Maybe there are no related products to view or other customer voices to be heard. Maybe your store has strange and unrecognizable products names.

Is it the lack of community? The lack of continuity? The lack of professionalism?

Say you’re a high street store

Your users may start to notice a major difference between your store and your website. They wonder when the offline gloss disappeared. They wonder why they are funneled through your site with qualifier pages and barriers.

Say you’re a bank

Yesterday one of your users watched a clock ticking away their lunchtime in one of your branches and wondered why they couldn’t do this from their desk.

Say you’re a mobile website

Your users are starting to curse you when they try to input search criteria with their big finger into a tiny and misplaced form field. All they want to do is find an address while they are on the move.

Your users are starting to notice and they’re voting with their feet (and hands).

The consequences

Search engines can teleport users anywhere online. They can turn your customers into someone else’s customers quicker than you can say “brand loyalty.” Successful companies have done their homework: they’ve employed analytics methodologies and separated their keywords from their buzzwords. So when your customer decides to go elsewhere, the successful company’s site is only a click away.

These days the bar has been significantly raised. Anyone operating beneath it won’t get much more mileage out of their internet presence.

However tolerant your current users still are there is a whole generation of intolerance on the way. If my son is anything to go by, there is an army of 8 year olds soon to be brandishing credit cards at your front door. If you’re not up to scratch they will take their limited attention span and potential spending power elsewhere. These users are banner blind, brand disloyal and would trade their Nintendos for the next shiniest thing available. And why? In my sons words: “Because it’s class and it does better stuff.”

Playing the blame game

You can blame your back-end and your infrastructure and your development team and more. You can fire and hire product managers, build and demolish sales teams, spend money to fight fires, light fires to raise money. But really, it’s all very simple. All your company has to do is listen to your customers.

I have worked with many organisations that trumpeted usability to customers during sales pitches and skimmed them over during team meetings. I’ve heard developers argue that usability is an entirely subjective field. But those are the companies that aren’t up to speed.

Make your website better, make more money

Support your users goals:

• Create meaningful and rewarding experiences
• Make your interfaces intuitive
• Entice your users with compelling functionality
• Empower your users with relevant features (not creeping featurism)

Educate them with content, make their lives easier through usability. Anything that you don’t do, someone else (your competitor) is doing.

It takes a lot of work: user, stakeholder, and customer service interviews; analytics; personas; user journey maps; accessibility; content development; information architecture; iterations; tests; etc. But it will pay.

The return on investment in our current climate is staying in business and building lasting relationships with your customers. That relationship starts with listening.

How long does it take to create a new website?

You’re right. It’s a stupid question.
Like the proverbial ‘piece of string’.

OK, let’s define it a bit better.

Suppose you first have to clarify the website’s strategy and identify its target audience.

Suppose that the output of that process is a plan for a brochureware-type site of about 250 pages.

Imagine each page contains 500 words (more-or-less) and 1 image. All this content needs to be compiled from existing online & offline media, with heavy editing required.

As that work progresses, a full design cycle must begin – from organising the sites structure to deciding on colours and imagery.

Following that, the HTML templates are created and integrated into a Content Management System. Content is then inserted and formatted.

Finally, everything must be tested, signed off and made ready for golive.

So how long did that take?

Here’s my guess. 5 months minimum.

Seems a long time doesn’t it? Yet, experience indicates that is the time frame we are dealing with.

For some this might seem intolerably long. Can it not happen faster?

Well, yes it can . . . if you work in a small organisation with lots of skilled people, loads of money, huge commitment and no distractions – you can probably do it faster.

But let’s not kid ourselves.

So why does it take so long?

Let’s look at 2 elements.

Content

For 1 person to rewrite, edit and get sign-off on a single page of the type described, can take up to 4 hours. (And that’s a conservative estimate.)

Do the math. It adds up to 26 man-weeks for 250 pages. Half a year right there.

Even if we assume corners can be cut, we are still talking about several months of work.

Design

This site is being made from scratch.

It needs an Information Architecture, as well as wireframes and visual designs for at least 3 (probably more) template types. For example, a homepage, a gallery page and a standard content page.

Several weeks of work there too.

Sure, some activities can occur concurrently. But it all adds up.

And guess what. We made loads of assumptions to keep time to a minimum.

For example, we assumed:

• A project team is in place, including a project manager, designer, content writer, code developer & technical administrator.
• Everyone has all the skills needed to implement a website of the type described
• The web infrastructure and all technical solutions have already been chosen.
• There are no finicky security, technology integration or other issues to handle.
• Everything goes smoothly.

The lesson is time.

Making a website takes time. So plan for it.

Where it all began

Thomas Barnardo was born July 4th 1845 in Dame Street, Dublin. He finished school aged 16 with few academic successes to his name, but his life was soon to change.

In 1862, aged 17, Thomas decided to become a medical missionary. After being introduced to Hudson Taylor (a pioneer missionary to China), he volunteered and went to London for training.

An outbreak of cholera shortly after he arrived introduced him to the suffering of poor people: 5,548 died in the epidemic caused by poor sanitation and drinking water in East London.

Finding his calling

Thomas gave up his plan to go to China as a missionary, and stayed in London to set up a ragged school in Limehouse, London, where poor children could get a basic education – in what had been an old donkey stable.

One evening, a boy at the mission took Thomas on a tour of the East End, showing him children sleeping on roofs and in gutters. This so affected him, he decided to devote himself to helping destitute children.

Homes for the homeless

In 1868, banker Robert Barclay agreed to support Thomas’s first home for homeless children. That same year – still aged just 23 – Thomas began training at the London Hospital in Whitechapel as a full-time medical student.

Putting students everywhere to shame

During the 8 years it took Thomas to qualify as a doctor, he:

•    Earned a small income from writing and preaching
•    Bought Edinburgh Castle, a large building in Limehouse
•    Turned this into a coffee house and mission church that could house more than 3,000
•    Received important support from rich evangelicals
•    Married Syrie Elmslie - they later had 7 children, 3 of whom died young
•    Opened the first in a network of ‘Ever Open Doors’ - the first all-night homeless refuge
•    Adopted the slogan ‘No destitute child ever refused admission’
•    Started his own magazine, The Children’s Treasury

In those 8 years, Thomas also set up a photographic studio - children were photographed when they first arrived at the homeless refuge, and again months later after they had recovered from their experiences of living on the streets.

These ‘before’ and ‘after’ cards were sold in packs of 20 for 5 shillings or singly for 6d. each – a great way to publicize and raise money for Barnardo’s work.

Thomas finally qualified as a doctor in 1876.

Later, Thomas set up a council of trustees to govern charity policy and look after its money. As the charity grew in fame, it received more and more donations, and by 1878, Thomas had established over 50 orphanages.

Thomas’s legacy

When Thomas Barnardo died in 1905, aged 60, his charity ran 96 homes that looked after more than 7,998 children, with over 4,000 more boarded out, and 18,000 sent to Canada and Australia.

At his death, tributes poured in from across the globe, and the world’s press united in praising a man who had transformed the lives of nearly 60,000 children.

We’d like to thank you for helping to continue his work.

Find out more at Barnardos.ie

We’d like to say a huge thank you to all who attended, and everyone who helped us make this the best Boot Camp it could be.

That includes our Future Now speakers — our open seminar on Wednesday afternoon.

They were:

• Lars Hemming Jorgensen, chief creative officer at Story Worldwide. He talked about the changing relationship between advertising and advertisers, and that it’s time for the former to change with latter. He showed us some advertising campaigns he and his company created, the most exciting one, from Agent Provacateur.
• Damien Mulley of Mulley.net. He gave us some guidelines for business blogging and social networking.  Missed it? Lucky for you, he shares them all on his own site (one of his guidelines is giving away information).
• Mike Brennan, director of RateMyArea.com. He talked about his own site and how he planned his location-based services online and the importance of crowd sourcing and community.
• Our very own John Wood.  He introduced ‘design thinking’ and how it’s a better way of solving problems.  It was a subtle call for designers to rule the world (or just your business).

Charity, Cocktails, and the iQ prize

Later on Wednesday evening, we held our Après Boot charity auction, where we raised more than €1500 for Barnardos.

Wednesday was a pretty big night, actually: it also marked the announcement of the iQ Prize shortlist — (Silicon Republic were there to report on it too).

We’re pretty sure this is our most successful Boot Camp ever — and not just by the numbers (though we’d more courses and more attendees than ever this year!).

We also know it by the great feedback we got from our delegates — not to mention the great feeling we got from giving something back to charity, and giving props to 8 of the most promising entrepreneurial ideas we’ve heard in a long time. (Stay tuned to hear more about the iQ Prize soon).

Step 1: Arrival

Cory and Liz greet you at the door.

You get your badge, coffee, pastries and a chat if you’re so inclined.

Step 2: Classroom

Go to your workshop. The room includes the coolest water bottle I’ve ever seen:

Note: Neither my relatives nor I have any vested interest in Pure.

Step 3: The workshops

Extreme learning. This morning you could choose from Writing for the Web 202 (writing to sell and persuade), from Elizabeth:

Or Information Architecture (what in god’s name to do with all that info), from John:

Or Killer Web Apps (what they are, how they work, how you can build one), from Des (borrowed from Contrast):

Step 4: Future Now

In one hour, Future Now, a series of talks about what’s new in the web world will start (stay tuned for coverage). Our very own Morgan chairs the event, introducing each of our clairvoyant speakers:

• Lars Hemming Jorgensen, from StoryWorldWide.com, talks about the post-advertising age
• Damien Mulley from (amongst other things) mulley.net, talks about social media for business
• Mike Brennan from RateMyArea.com, talks about the future of the web
• and iQ’s John Wood talks about designing for the future

Today there are cookies instead of brownies

So concludes our Boot Camp ‘09 coverage part 2.

Boot Camp | Real Time

After much preparation (both measured and frenzied) and some astonishing sales work by our newest recruit Cory-Ann Joseph, Boot Camp has begun. In fact, it’s happening right now.

Day one, the morning

So what’s happened so far?

• Writing for the Web 101
• Social Networking for Profit
• Kick Start Your Web Strategy

I throw all objectivity into the wind, being that I taught Writing for the Web 101 (the strongest workshop, of course).  The old staples — the aforementioned and Kick Start Your Web Strategy (led by Morgan) — went off without a hitch, and indeed some valuable insight, both from the workshop itself and from some workshop attendees.  For me, some of those great questions will shape next year’s presentation.

Then there was Shane’s brand new and much a-buzzed course, Social Networking for Profit. Since I’m blogging about it, this has suddenly become metaphysical.

The spread

The Radisson Royal Hotel seemed almost truly royal during lunch. There were shrimp served in glasses. You can’t get classier than that.

Day one, the afternoon, i.e. now

• Driving Self Service Online
• Web Analytics 101
• Web Content Strategy

Shane must be tired with two back to back courses, with Web Content Strategy this afternoon. Colin and Brian are rolling out their new course, Driving Self Service online (check out their promo) and Clodagh is laying the ground work for Niamh on Thursday with Web Analtyics 101.

The important stuff: brownies

I hate to be base, but the coffee breaks come with brownies. Perhaps this should have been our slogan.

Check us out tomorrow with some more riveting Boot Camp (semi) live coverage. Or come see us at the Radisson Royal hotel. Maybe I can sneak you a brownie.