Fred opens by saying it’s time to nut up, He also admits that he loves prototyping, and can’t think of a situation where prototyping can’t help your design.

As designers, we’re not making solutions, we’re making hypotheses, and building towards a solution. So the process of design — prototyping is key. You need to be an effective communicator and experimenter.

But it doesn’t matter what tool you use. as long as you go through the prototyping.

Fred uses Axure in this case for Design For Health. He’ll talk about where Axure helped him, and where it bit him in the butt.

At Evantage, they start with the business, and really, in UX design, it’s all about meeting the business goals.

Fred keeps saying that he’s “Not a sexy thinker,” but I think people want to think of him as sexy he says it so much.

He tries to imagine what the users want and sketch for that. He went through 14 sketches with pen and paper to find a flow that he liked. If he did that with Axure, he would have been killed.

He’s doing more modular sketching in components, much like Nathan Curtis does at 8shapes.

He started sketching the interaction flow, again, with pen and paper because he needed to keep revising fast and repeatedly.

Define scenarios and test plan

You don’t have to have real content, but you do have to have realistic content. It helps you test comprehension a little better. But you do need to have a sense of what kind of content is going in.

Structuring a prototype in Axure:
Start with a grid – master so it’s reusable throughout the prototype.
page template custom widget
create pages

Wireframes:
1. Make the wireframe
2. Make it interactive — which is great in axure

Don’t forget, prototyping lets you take bigger risks.

He added a function showing someone very close to being funded, to try and encourage some user to donate and put it over the top. But he has no idea if it’s going to work until he tests the protoype. Now he’s showing some video of him in Axure making the prototype interactive, and allow for real testing in key interactions.

Proof of concept testing

where the benefits of taking the risks are understood and realized.

Prototype only key interactions
Strip test plans to key tasks
run quick tests
Fix what sucks
Retest

Comprehensive testing:

1. Proto. only what’s needed for test and isn’t in your Proof of Concept Prototype
2. Then two rounds of testing to make sure your fixes are actually fixed
3. Make a report. Yes, go through and tell the story to all the different team members can know what is up.

Visual design:
Visual design is an opportunity for your design to evolve. It is not simply refinement.

He makes sure that the designer has all the info, and the context of the decisions that he made going to that point. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about getting to a better place.

You can’t have babies, you can’t get attached to the project or the design.

Collaborate, don’t dictate to visual designers. Let visual designers take risks, too.

Fred now talking through his video, about how the brain takes in stuff, and craps out ideas.

Take the time to properly set up your prototype. It saves much time and hassle all the way through the project.

Now Fred hands over the mic to Will Evans

Will starts with his conceptual model mapping every possible activity and their interrelationships. He doesn’t have a set process at all, he has a whole range of activities that are employed depending on the client and the needs.

Then he gets into sketching and wireframing.

Many people like to sell on a process. But selling repeatable process is a fallacy. Measure twice, cut once, like a circumcision.

He uses design studio to gather requirements. With the stakeholders in the room, they can sketch, iterate and present their ideas to find out what is important to them.

One of the big things is that it allows people across the company to collaborate. By the time to present a wireframe, they can identify themselves inside the design, and keeps any stakeholder from having too much input in a process based on politics.

Personas
Measure 3x and cut once. Users lie. They don’t want to admit certain truths due to embarassment. Use contextual inquiry or ethnographic study where you can observe.

Functional sitemaps, then sketching Wireflows — which are basically storyboards of the Web experience.

Get into the mind of the user and try to build around the story of how the user wants to accomplish a task.

Sketching Wireframes
He’s able to create many different concepts quickly, a transformative act of working through problems.

Don’t go right from requirements analysis right into a tool. Free yourself from the tools and do basic sketches first.

Keep the sketches quick and dirty. Restrict your time doing this. Iterate through the screens many times.

Wireframes are a thinking device for exploration of the problem space. He recommends Omnigraffle.

ugh. Honestly, in making Will’s video, I’ve seen this so much I’m gonna stop blogging it. You can just see the video:

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They’re starting with easy-to-recover from failure.

Maintain scope

Don’t borrow from one budget to pay for another. Just stop, and issue something like change of scope. Communicate early and often so you don’t run out of money.

Did you test?

When you fail, you’ve got to own it. Apologize profusely, take the hit financially and take the abuse.

Scope and Expectations

Greg hoy was bleeding money on redesigns never ending. They had gone through 6 rounds without success, and exhausted all their resources.

He put together a series of 300px attempts, and save money by doing snippets to see what resonated. You have to think of creative ways to keep things moving.

Manage the unknown

Will Reynolds has a unique part of their client agreements is getting ahead of them. If you see things aren’t going well, call them and tell them to stop paying before they call you. It engenders trust.

When they told a client that the results weren’t good enough and to stop paying them for two months, they got three referrals in that time.

The ménage a trois
Adding third parties to your project

Greg story was working with a guy who literally left the client. The new guy had a completely different platform and approach, which they went with, but it didn’t deliver the results they needed. The site didn’t work right.

They went back to the client, and partnered with three different vendors, adding a month of project purgatory time, and lopped off a bunch of great features they just couldn’t do at that point.

Great panel I’ve got to leave early for to check Russ and Todd at Right Way To Wireframe

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Guys in suits on bikes. What brand is investing in this?

As noticed by Amy Cueva as we walked around Austin, looking at this bunch of oddly adorned bicyclists, there seems to be a trend this year by brands to be as silly as possible, ultimately humiliating themselves before this audience in the hopes that (I guess) people take some pity on them and buy something?

This is ultimately my problem with the presence of many of the companies spending a lot to make a quality impression with the many people here at SXSW. What’s the point? It can’t be just about getting your attention, but quickly moving you to the next step. But too often there is no next step, making it seem like they don’t want the business? I don’t get it. And whenever I finally get to go through this year’s triple play of big crud bags, I’m sure more questions will pop-up.

Best panel discussion of the day happened around crepes

Other than that, this year’s SXSW has so far been great for hanging with excellent, smart folks, and terrible for actually attending any of the presentations/panels. They completely oversold the conference and I haven’t been able to squeeze my way into anything. Let’s hope tomorrow is different.

Look! I caught three gigantic bags of promotional crap!

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Margot is the tiny dot hundreds of ballroom miles away, laying down some serious content strategy

Psyched since yesterday to watch Margot Bloomstein open SXSWi with her presentation on content strategy, how to include it in a workflow, and budget appropriately for it. She is absolutely brilliant and a great choice to open the conference with. She’s also a JUXer, which means she’s been training a lifetime in how to structure arguments.

For all these reasons, I’m standing here furious outside the ballroom because I got to this 2pm five minutes late! Still, hard to stay mad when a truly talented person has an overflowing ballroom to talk content strategy.

Oh no. Now they closed the doors. Nuts. Now I got no presentation at all….

...and now I'm pushed out by the crowd.

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And hello to badge pickup and our warm up for many, many, many long lines. Looking forward to Margot bloomenstein at 2pm, and maybe some BBQ lunch. Here we go!

Update: by 2pm, the lines stretched across the entire building. Woo hoo! Now I’m glad I was in the short line.

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But… Accompanied by a plane full of Philly sxsw’ers, and welcomed by this incredible sunset. Time to set up the local nerve center and find food. Interactively, of course.

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Mostly I do this for all the people who can’t make it. There’s too much good stuff going on to not try and share it.

So here’s what you can expect over the next two weeks:

• More, varying posts that range from literally transcribing certain presentations, to pictures, commentary, poems, and combinations thereof. I’m just trying to send as much back to the homebase as I can, so I’m going a bit more “Editorial Parkour” than the typical outline format I follow here.
• There will be typos. The only time SXSW stops is when you’re sleeping. So don’t expect much in the editing category. Of course, if you are the other reader of this blog, you already knew that.

Should be fun!

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Join the IDEArmy at SXSW!

If you know me, you know that I volunteer my time to lead sponsorship and marketing for the IDEA conference because I believe it’s an incredibly valuable learning experience for the UX community.

Designing for complex information spaces melding the physical and virtual is critical knowledge for anyone with a stake in designing digital today, and most everything else tomorrow.

To that end, IDEA2010 (this upcoming fall in Philadelphia) is about to engage in asymmetric promotional activities to spread the good word.

On Saturday, March 13th, we’ll be bringing the beautifully designed IDEA2009 T-shirts to SXSW and handing them out for free. Kinda like the revolutionary Minutemen. But with T-shirts. And not at all in a war. But other than that exactly the same.

All you need to do is find one of us (@mleis, @semanticwill, @russu, @simplybrad) and have your picture taken with your shirt on (please) as the newest #IDEArmy recruit.

Do you already have a T-shirt because you were one of the lucky folks at IDEA2009? Great! Please wear it on saturday, and upload your pic with the #IDEArmy #SXSW tags: make your voice heard and your presence known.

You too, speakers: we know you were at IDEA2009, and a part of the Murderer’s Row of Keynotes. Present with your IDEA T-shirts on, please!

Of course, feel free to take the above graphic and pass it along to everyone and anyone who joins us in tackling these experience design challenges.

You should follow all the fun via Twitter on your favorite device @IDEAinfo.

Thanks!

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Regardless of the background of the agency, leadership understands that clients want one company to serve their integrated communications needs. They want a company that can do all of it: get press, transform them into a publisher, or programmer, and make all the channels that they’re engaged in have a responsive flow across all channels.

Then you meet with the practice leads, which is akin to visiting the information work equivalent of a field hospital. No matter how many people are currently employed in that tent, they’ve got more clients waiting for immediate critical care than they can handle. And they’re burning out. I hear a lot of, “I love all of these clients and their work is great and challenging, but I haven’t slept in weeks and I can’t possibly get to them all.”

So, like any good (or in my case hack) writer would do, I want to solve this problem by first envisioning the ending: when the agency is throwing the big dance party scene at the end of the movie and the credits begin to roll, what does that look like?

Hello, Ma Bell

It looks like a nightmare to anyone with a solid senior corporate track record at anytime over the last 30 years. It’s hideously bloated, inefficient, and a large majority of the workforce is only 70% billable. But it’s necessary, and it will drive far more total revenue than any other approach. It will win the race for the middle. This is what it takes to weave so many nodes of the vast data network into a valuable resource. I know this because we’ve done it before as a country when we integrated the phone.

Sure, no one gives the phone a second thought now. But it is our nation’s most solid and complete communications infrastructure. When I was a kid, you still needed certain skills just to operate one. If I wanted to call someone in another state, you might have to talk to two or three telephone operators: at least one regional operator and one state operator. It wasn’t cheap, and it was kinda special. You also needed to know your name exchange. Ours was MOhawk and I thought that was really tough and cool.

Anyway, people needed a single network to make this experience of switching between exchanges seamless, and they have done it. As a phone user now, you have only the smallest of chances to have to deal with a real live person in connecting a call across the country or the world. But do you remember how truly large Bell Telephone was? How specialized the positions were? Those people were part of the workforce transitioning the country from phone 1.0 to phone 2.0.

Of course this didn’t last. As integration and innovation evolved, so did the industry. Ma bell was broken back down into many regional corporate business units, which of course reformed into an oligopoly, just because the work is just that big. It’s a huge job and it takes an incredibly large structure to operate this much integrated communication. And many of the jobs shifted. The telephone operators became customer service agents, as the new frontier became integrating communications between the companies and the public instead of the operations itself.

Shifting from efficiency to capability

This is the hardest to swallow: letting go of efficiency and billables as measures as important as building capability. Especially with stockholders demanding instant accountability, it’s incredibly hard to say that you absolutely plan on being inefficient so that you can grow big enough to take the largest business, where no one else is competing: to be the first monopoly for truly integrated brand communication. But it does happen. The iPod wasn’t born with 80% market share, it took 4 redesigns to get there.

Does it ultimately look like a bond purchase?

Agencies who are truly committed to winning this race towards the middle need to pick up specialists at an incredible rate. Probably beyond what any internal HR staff can realistically handle: in sheer logistics, but also in having a depth of knowledge in one of these specializations.

The only way to do this effectively may be to absorb smaller shops, whether they be in UX, or visual thinking, or mobile metrics, integrate them physically (as much as possible), and get them to spend time, real time (like 30%), sharing knowledge with other departments, especially account service. And look at this transaction not as a pure revenue generator, but a capability investment almost like a muni bond, giving the company a smaller, consistent dividend over a longer period of time after an initial large investment.

What do you think? Please leave your take on who will win the race to the middle, and how, in the comments section below or on Twitter @mleis.

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What Value Do You Attribute To Your Personality?

My comment:

All excellent points worth calling out. There is a significantly broken premise going on in social right now because people don’t know what to do when faced with so many choices, and so many of which are either corporate and overpackaged or consumer-driven and hardly accountable.

To me, it’s about the fact that we’re headed right into ubiquitous computing and everyone above college age is losing their minds. They throw out words like honesty and authenticity and transparency and social because they’re not sure what the right word is, or how to wrap their minds around what it means to be investing in contexts instead of messaging, outlines instead of scripts.

But the more real brand people I hear from (this post as one), and along with advances in User-centered design practices, the more I start to see the forest for the trees. Be proud of what the brand is and does, allow people to be advocates, give them a platform to do so.

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