Notes from Donna Mauer’s talk at Oz-IA 2006.

Based on George Lakoff’s book about categorization and cognition. The way that we think about categories in our brains. It offers a challenge and alternatives to the classical theory of categorization. (Most of the good stuff is in the Preface and Chapters 1 and 2.) Understanding categorization is central to information architecture.

The reason it’s important is because the idea of category is central….most of our words and concepts designate categories. How we think is in categories. We don’t think in discreet elements.

This goes against the classical theory of a category, which is an abstract container with things inside or outside clear boundaries. Categories are defined by common properties of the members. No member of a category has a special status–all are equal. All levels of a hierarchy are important.

All of this isn’t true.

There are no clear boundaries. There aren’t common properties.

Basic-level categories.

Generalization occurs at the middle of a hierarchy. Learned earliest. Usually has a short name that is used frequently. A single mental image can reflect the entire category. No definitive basic level in all cultures. Dependent on who is thinking about it.

Prototype Effects.

Categories often have best or prototypical examples. (Robins are more “bird”-y than a pelican, for instance.)

Other challenges to classical categorization theory.

There are degrees of membership in any category and no clear boundaries. Not always clear what is inside or outside a category.

Idealized cognitive models: some of our models are complex structures that need a frame of reference (like what a weekend is or what a bachelor is or what a lie is).

Cluster models.

Mother–birth mother, genetic model, martial model, genealogical model.

Radial categories.

A central concept, with variants (like Mother).

Ideals.

Abstract ideal cases, which may not be typical of stereotypical (“the ideal husband”).

Why is this important to us? Our computer software is built around the classical idea of categorization. Especially in our file systems! We define categories to fit the computer.

How we can use basic-level categories in our work.

Analyze user research data to identify basic-level. Words that are used frequently, that children understand, and come out easily.

Use basic-level categories as trigger words. Easily recognized and have good scent.

Card sort with basic-level content items rather than more granular content elements.

In navigation, get people to basic-level as soon as possible.

Instead of top-down or bottom-up, working at the basic-level up and down.

Knowing all this will make you less stressed about why the categorization is not neat.

“Miscellaneous” categories are cognitively real, just not easy to use as navigations.

Being approximate is ok. We can put some things in two places.

Use prototypical items when communicating because they represent the category well. People connect strongly with them.

Is this why tagging is so popular?

Notes from Mark Pesce’s keynote “You-biquity” at Web Directions South 2006.

The web’s been dull for five years, but right now, anything is possible. The heart of that possibility is that we’re starting to understand what the web can do for us as human beings.

I’m trying to understand how we interact with each other and with technology. To do that, I need to peel back the layers of technology, language until we get back to what we were like millions of years ago–like chimpanzees. We’ve found the gene that gives us bigger brains, but what is it good for? Nature didn’t give us a big brain for nanotechnology. But we need it for socializing. We’re all social animals.

Why are we social? Why is it important to be social? If you are social, you will live longer! When you are social you stand to live long enough to pass on your genes. Chimps grooms, humans gossip. The social is essential to our origins. But being social is one of the most difficult tasks we can perform. Last stage of brain development happens as a teenager: the capabilities of being social. Learning to model all our social interactions. We carry around a model in our brains of all the people we interact with all the time. The better you are at socializing, the more you can manipulate the model.

Social modeling takes place in the neocortex. There’s an average number of relationships humans can hold in the model: The Dunbar Number. About 150. The reason we have a bigger brain is so that we can hold a bigger social network in our head because it confers benefits.

The term social network has become the topic de jour. But is MySpace really like your neocortex? Not really. Why is MySpace big? The network effect. Why is it good? Possibly lots of reasons. Not all that interesting except that I can make a map of my social networks.

Their big secret? These social networks are currently a lot of work. My MySpace page isn’t really me. This is the achilles heel of the social networks today. They are passive. They wait for you to feed them. If you don’t feed them, they die.

What really could be going on could be so much more profound. We’re being asked to fill the social networks with time. But time is a scarce commodity.

No one is thinking about tying together things like email to social networks. Finding, Filtering, Forwarding. Each of us are finding things then forwarding that on to people we know. We’re sharing media in ad-hoc social networks. We find things, we filter them, and we forward them. There’s a lot of potential here for social networks to help us communicate more effectively than ever before.

When you are a human being living in the Western World right now, you have a data shadow that follows you around. All electronic communication can be used to model your social networks. But all that data is being poured on the floor. We don’t use it, we get rid of it.

The mobile phone is an even bigger offender of getting rid of useful data than the computer.

Even anonymous social networks (like Amazon) are useful.

Mash-ups are just the beginning of the job. We need to comprehensively and obsessively mash up our data. The web is the universal glue between our devices. How do we reinvent our social networks using the data we already have.

We’ve forgotten the real world. It’s easy to forget about this these days. But our neocortex is wired for the real world. We need something to tie them together: the mobile phone. It’s a nexus for social communication. For human communication. It’s the place where the real and virtual world touch. But most of the time, it is doing nothing at all. This is an enormous waste.

We need to start thinking about that device as the center of the social world, the way into the data shadow. We need it to start active listening. Email, IM, Skype, World of Warcraft…all need to actively listen.

Relationspace.org

Just by letting devices listen, we can produce a model of our social networks. The ubiquity and utility of mobile phones lets them do this. The value of this information will increase once it’s shared. And it all has to happen invisibly. It doesn’t have an interface, it just sets the stage for everything else.

Lots of people are nibbling at this problem, but no one is tackling it head on. If we don’t get in front of this, we will be run down by it. Users will do it themselves.

Notes from Andy Clarke’s talk at Web Directions South 2006.

Inspirational session to get us all to think a bit differently about what we do for a living. We’re all involved in a creative medium no matter what we do: coding, visuals, whathaveyou.

“Art is design without compromise.” -Jeff Veen

Limitations and restrictions for us: environment; the inflexibility of the 2D screen; materials, the limitations of markup and CSS; medium; poorer CSS support. But the biggest limitations are those we impose on ourselves. We need to unlearn what we have learned from past experience. The web’s only 10 years old! We need to think more about letting go of what we’ve done in the past.

Without knowledge sharing, we wouldn’t be doing what we do now.

“Absolute positioning is the new Ajax.”

There’s an enormous selection of great stuff going on. There’s a huge amount of talent on the web doing vastly different things all with the same technology. It’s no longer about the technology or the markup or the CSS. It’s about meaning. We should never forget that it’s the visual design evoke emotions have help our audiences understand what we mean. How do we use design to convey the deeper message? Through the use of imagery, typography, layout. We need to be refocusing back on design, not being obsessed with technologies.

We’ve reached a level of maturity with web standards and CSS. Now, we’re just starting to know what to do with it. We shouldn’t stop designing because we’d had some successes. The job is far from done.

No matter what the challenges are we face (technological or psychological), technology isn’t an end to itself. We need to make things that people love to use, to bring into their lifestyle. It’s about the love and about getting people to feel passionate about something. When we buy an iPod, we’re buying the dream.

The web is not a power drill. Not much I can do with my power drill except drill holes. It’s a creative, artistic medium. People come on the web to find out about things.

Don’t forget the stuff that regular people go to. It’s not just about our own small community. People going to sites for a movie isn’t like going to a site to buy the DVD. Usability and efficiency isn’t always the point. There are other things going on outside of what we consider our core community.

How can we bring this stuff from outside into what we do?

At the end of the day, the whole development process should be a fluid one. Understand what your teammates are thinking and doing. Break down the barriers between design and programming.

When you are not experimenting for clients, you can do it for yourself. I keep a scrapbook for inspiration. Finding stuff is great–you’ll never know when you are going to use it. We can get ideas from around and bring them into our work. Yes, the web isn’t print, but there’s a ton of stuff we can find just from opening up magazines and ripping stuff out. Look for the semantic meanings behind the things we see.

We should bring the users’ conventions into the web, not our conventions onto them. Look at things in a different way. Does every ecommerce site have to look like Amazon?

We can’t constantly look inwards or the on the web for inspiration. We need to look to the world. If you look up in the city, you get all this hidden detail.

We need to have an appreciation of what the guy across the room is doing. In design, there’s hundreds of years of experience and inheritance that we’ve nearly thrown out on the web. Our terminology is different. We’re concerned with boxes on the web. And yet there’s this similarity: the grid. We need to know what’s gone on before for inspiration and to know the rules–perhaps so we can break them. We have have some exciting visuals all based on the same structure.

It’s not the technology that’s limiting us anymore, it’s our imagination. We need to not only look at what we normally see, but things that are outside of our experience. From different parts of the world and different areas.

The next time you are out walking, just find something that inspires you and try to bring that back in to the work you are doing that day. Out there is this massive amount of opportunity–the world is a collage and so is the web. It’s knowing how to bring all these things together that makes web design a fine art.

People have asked me, in light of John Maeda’s new book and blog, I suppose, why simplicity isn’t one of the characteristics of good interaction design I list in my book. (The characteristics are trustworthy, smart, clever, appropriate, responsive, ludic, and pleasurable.)

The reason is pretty, well, simple really: I don’t think every good interaction design needs to be simple. Certainly, many good designs are. But many aren’t, and I don’t think you’d necessarily want them to be. I don’t want my games to be too simple, for instance. Nor would I want it to be too simple to, say, launch a nuclear strike from a control center. I tried to chose characteristics that held true in most circumstances.

Users don’t always want the advanced features stripped away from them, and sometimes prefer having more complexity because more complexity can sometimes provide users with more control. Simplicity puts a lot of control in the hands of the designer. We say, you only get these features and users have to deal with that. Sometimes, this is great: we’ve hidden a lot of complexity. But sometimes, we de-skill users by only giving them the lowest common denominator. No advanced features for you! It has to be simple! It’s a fine line to walk.

My take on it is roughly Einstein’s: “As simple as possible, but no simpler.”

Mostly, I’ve been busy writing essays and preparing my presentation material for the Designing for Interaction workshops this month. The first essay was my updated take on Robert Reimann’s classic essay: So You Want to Be an Interaction Designer 2006. The second essay–which has generated more discussion than just about anything I’ve ever written–was the light-hearted Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Designers (But Were Afraid to Ask) for Vitamin Magazine. It was really the only thing I could think of that might appeal to their audience, and boy did it, apparently! 40 comments as of this writing!

But the bulk of my energy has been spent designing and rehearsing my two upcoming workshops: one in San Francisco next week and in Sydney the following week, at Web Directions. A few seats are still available for each workshop! Over the last few weeks, I’ve put together what I hope is an interesting, challenging, and useful day of material, using the book as a starting point for explanation and discussion. Don’t forget to use my code–FODS–for the SF (and New York!) workshops and get 15% off.

While in Sydney, I’m also speaking at OZ-IA, the Australian Information Architects’ Retreat/Summit/Conference. I’m talking about Documenting Ajax and RIAs there, and, even better, doing a workshop about a new project called Models of Invention. It’s about ways of thinking about (and doing) brainstorming sessions and designing new products. Should be a blast! I hope to meet and talk to some of you at one of these.

Anita Wilhem, Caterpillar Mobile

When we normally think of mobile design, we typically think of phones. And the market is huge! But there are other devices. Most of those devices do single things: tell time, listen to music, etc. Mobile phones, however, are now doing many things.

We have these devices everywhere this us. They are very personal. We don’t typically share phones. They are intimate.

Hardware interaction modalities: phone, keyboard, stereo, tv, camera…why do we still think of this as a phone?? Manufacturers think of these different modalities very differently.

Single-task objects will never go away, but we’re also bringing with us the multi-task phones with us all the time.

mFoundry example
Making a richer presentation of data on the phone
A very iPod kind of experience

Changing metaphors: buttons used to be physical, then it became a soft button on a web interface. But what’s the button on an iPod? Arrows become the button.

Designing for mobile devices is not just designing for a smaller screen! We can’t just design things smaller. Mobile devices are smaller and change context and stay with people. People have limited attention, constant interruptions, physical and social obstacles. We have to deliver relevant bits of content.

4info example
Changing search for mobile. Don’t get all results, just a select amount.

Monetizing: traditional advertising (even ad words) on phone is intrusive. It needs to be extremely relevant for it not to be annoying. Less about accessibility, more about relevance.

Sociality: Intimacy and Co-Presence
Not about a device–it’s an extension of our personal and private being. We take keys, wallet, and phone. It’s part of our identity. Extension of my connectedness.

As I change context, might encounter other technology and engage with other phones, devices, fixtures, but it is still my private device. No one else really looks at my screen.

Highlight common, essential elements that make interaction possible from many platforms.

Steve Portigal

Don’t get bogged down in jargon-laden discussions about names for user research!

What Steve means:
Examining user in their own context. What are they doing and what does it mean?
Infer something. Go from data to insights. Inferential, interpretive, and synthesize. Finding connections and the researcher is the “apparatus” for creating inference. It’s a subjective methodology, but that’s its power.
Apply to business and design problems.

Observation
How people are doing [something]? Look for and documenting processes. What the the sequence of events and duration? Who does what and in what order? Identify what you want to want to know more about it. Why are you doing this? (Can ask in interviewing)

Interviewing
Who to interview? People that are involved in your activity, no longer involved in the activity, people that refuse to be involved, and people that are over-the-top involved.

Judgement: You go into environments that aren’t your own and its very easy to have a judging reaction. Allow yourself to have a judgmental reaction, but don’t act on it. Note it as data.

Cultural Context
What is “normal”? Look at artifacts in the culture: media, products, advertisements, street culture, trends and fads. Advertising tells our stories back to us and can show cultural norms. Normal isn’t right or wrong, it’s the set of background rules.

What happens when we leave our culture? Tips and Tricks.
When we’re really out of our comfort zone. The backdrop (the stuff we usually ignore) is unfamiliar. We’re getting a huge amount of data. We’re trying to create a cultural model. The artifacts are different. It’s a visceral different, we’re in constant synthesis. This will be more impactful than outsourcing the research to a local firm.

http://www.cultureventure.net

Finding participants
Partner with a firm in the destination country. Partner with a local firm with connections or offices in the destination country. Use social networks. Make sure you localize your screening criteria! Are the things we’re thinking about to find these people appropriate?

Logistics and Location
Allow a day in your schedule to get acclimated and a day for “culture loading.” Stay a day later and do the processing there in the place. More great stuff happens. Take advantage of the location. Take pictures, collect crap on the street, local newspaper. Figure out what you’ll use it for later. Be aware of themes that arise.

Interviewing in Another Culture
Be the humble outsider and that will provide you with dialog. People will meet you halfway. You are naive, so dumb questions are expected.

Interpretation
Don’t call it translation! get referrals and hang onto folks you like. Have them be a partner, get them involved in the project. Use them to help avoid breaking cultural rules. Interpretation creates this entertaining “language soup” between interviewer, respondent, and interpreter. Where do you make eye contact? Don’t ask the interpreter the follow-up question!

Cultural Context
When we leave our culture, we also lose some of our ability to describe things like tastes. “Mundane” observations can reveal crucial cultural needs.

There is an interesting tension between that fact that people are the same where ever you go, but also completely different. Looking outside ourselves is a provocative way to learn about ourselves.