Marketing, beauty, the senses, and Agile at Big Apple Redux 2011

In May, I had the pleasure of attending the IXDA NYC's "redUX", showcasing some of the talks from Interaction 11 conference earlier this year (where possible, I've linked to the video from the Interaction 11 session).

Ray DeLaPena (@rayraydel) did an excellent writeup of the talks in Big Apple Redux Recap, so I'm going to focus on the talks that I could relate to the most (and they were the ones where I captured the most notes).

Marketing is not a 4 Letter Word by Megan Grocki

[video]

Many folks, particularly designers and developers, have a negative reaction to the word "marketing".

Megan says, "Marketing is like matchmaking". You want people to know about your work, your portfolio, your company or your product. It's a nice little ecosystem where something that is well designed gets promoted, and then you're more likely to get more work like it.

Who is doing marketing right? The Disney experience is immersive and enchanting and when you get home, they remind you to book your next trip! Netflix has great branding and also immersive. It's pretty easy to spend ages in their site rating, reviewing and being shown suggestions for things you might like. I agree with both those examples. Megan also cited Zipcar as a product with excellent user experience.

During Megan's talks, it really dawned on me that at GVS, we don't spend much time marketing ourselves, particularly our work on event and conference sites, yet we should. Given the choice, we've always done client work and improvements to the Conference Organizing Distribution (COD) itself, rather than putting portfolios and case studies together. But we are focusing on conference and event websites, and we need to raise the awareness our focus and abilities to potential clients. And those clients always help fund direct improvements to COD.

Therefore, I'm glad to say we've got several new conference project listings in our portfolio.

Beautiful Interactions: Codifying Aesthetics in Interaction Design

by Callie Neylan [video]

Callie told us that beauty is visceral, behavioral and reflective. Beauty is symmetry and patterns and mathematics. It's the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio. Humans have evolved to find these patterns beautiful. The new Twitter site layout was based on the Golden Ratio.

Vision is the dominant sense, but interactions and experience design aren't just limited to visuals either. Touch is the other primary interaction that we design for. Buy there's audio: pink noise is filtration of white noise. It helps humans get into a flow. And smell. Did you know, the Katy Perry's CD Teenage Dream was scented with cotton candy, as will her upcoming concert tour (if anyone goes, please let me know if it enhanced the experience!).

Humans have a preference for patterns. Beautiful relationships are honesty, trust, support, communication and humor. These are all working within a healthy relationship. Callie then went on to rank the beauty of Seattle and Baltimore based on all of these criteria.

I love her quote “Interaction designers are mixtures of aesthetic equalizer".

An image that embodies marketing, Drupal and the senses touch, sight and smell! Photo by @rupl

Agile’s Secret Step: Discovery (and Planning!)

by Lis Hubert [slides]

In Agile, or any other project management system, the first step is the discovery and planning phase.
But in Agile, teams don't always know where UX fits in. In waterfall, UX had it's own "design" phase.

Lis pointed out the hard truth: UX slows down Agile, but without it, we don't know who users are, how they need to use it, etc. She says, the problem is we're not using Agile correctly, and used the assembly-line analogy: there is a backlog and there is a priority.

During discovery, you discover the what. You conduct user research, business research. You put the product roadmap in priority order, you plan, analyze and prioritize continuously. Discovery is figuring out what to build in what order. Discovery and planning often happens outside of Agile.

Usability testing decreases risk.

Agile, yay!

This talk resonated with me because we (GVS) are Agile as much as possible. Even when clients think it's totally weird, and make us do tons of documentation upfront, we always end up adopting some Agile techniques. Early feedback is a critical one. During the requirements phase, it's nearly impossible for clients and development team to think of every single scenario, and we'd rather not. We'd rather start building, getting feedback, tweaking, building, feedback, etc.

We're building UX into projects. I recently had pleasure of interviewing 14 readers of the product we were converting to Drupal. It was invaluable in understanding their unique needs and desires. Many of the readers are 40+ years old, and less confident about interacting with the social web (specifically, they were nervous about posting comments!) The product is now 90% built, and I'm ready to start usability testing. I hope that we have designed a reassuring interface.

Conclusion

For a one day mini conference, this was $30 very well spent. I met loads of people in the NYC interaction design community, and several of them were familiar with Drupal. I really value and appreciate time spent with smart folks!

Additionally, local Drupal groups should consider hosting their own DrupalCon Redux. Invite a few speakers from a recent DrupalCon, and let your local community hear some of the great sessions live. And hey, you can use COD to put together your Redux site!