Blog Posts By Denise

I first saw it at 9:06PM ET, Wednesday, January 6, 2010, a facebook status posted by a friend that consisted of a color "BLACK" and nothing more. I figured I missed something in her stream and moved on. Then I started to see more colors -- "WHITE", "BLACK" (again)... Humnh, does this have something to do with race?

"HOT PINK", "ECRU", "LEOPARD PRINT"

OK, well, I am guessing this isn't about race. A quick google search and I have my answer -- this (or some derivative) has been spreading virally through the ranks of my facebook friends:

"Write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY women no men. It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men wonder why the women have a color in their status.....LOL!"

So far no known breast cancer related organization or charity has claimed this campaign, so I strongly suspect that this is just another internet chain letter and not an example of viral marketing. But as a person in the industry, I am finding it an interesting phenomena to follow and consider.

What worked about it?

• Well, the thing that makes facebook fun is the interaction -- nothing gains you interaction like enigmatic or provocative status updates. Its fun to put something out there and get a bunch of responses. Its fun to be coy.
• It plays on the "in the know" versus "out of the know". It is fun to feel "in the know" by being one of the first to participate in a trend.
• As we all know -- "sex sells", so anything that borders on the intimate, is immediately interesting. I detect amongst my friends that it is fun to indicate to their networks this sense that "there is more to me than meets the eye". As well as a few honest individuals who reveal a sense of disappointment that there *isn't* more to them than meets the eye. It is reminiscent of the PETA campaigns with models and movie stars who would "rather be naked than wear fur". Its titillating (pun intended).
• I also see a contingent of folks who have been personally affected by this disease who will do just about anything to try to help the cause. [Side note - it is the earnest caring of this group that makes me get truly angry at all of the email, internet and facebook hoax-sters who choose to prey upon them.]
• Lastly, it also plays on the seemingly irresistible cultural draw of anything that sets "girls" against "boys".

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This is a short, interesting post that talks about the power of blogging, even if only in analog. The world's only known analog blog

DiningIn has combined "evite" with their ordering in functionality to solve the problem of organizing group meals. Meal organizers can create an invite, set a per person dollar limit and send the invite allowing people to add their meals to the order themselves. Very interesting solution to a problem that I just now realized I had -- love the ingenuity.
DiningIn

Inspired by the PhizzPop Design Challenge Boston

As some will remember, a little more than a year ago now, Outsight participated in (and won) the PhizzPop Design Challenge - Boston that was sponsored by Microsoft late in 2007. You can check out both our process and the resulting solution. The big take-away for the team (other than the three XBox 360's, that is) was the intense collaborative team experience that came out of working within the constraints of a three-day contest. In fact, Outsight team members who couldn't participate in the contest felt a little left out. The contest rules limited the teams to three people. So, Outsight has decided to reprise the experience to include our entire team.

Design Challenge Reprise

Next week, the Outsight team is going to stage our own Design Challenge. We will take three days to collaborate on a "Research & Development" project of our own choosing. We'll be trying out new techniques and exploring new processes and innovations without the constraints (and potential risks) of experimenting on client work.

Have a challenge for us?

Although we are busy coming up with challenge ideas of our own, it occurred to us to open it up to the larger community to submit potential challenges to our team. Do you have an interactive problem that you wish there were an elegant solution for? Then submit it to us, but please note:

• Do NOT submit ideas that are of a proprietary nature to you (or anyone else) as we plan to keep all rights to anything that we create as a result of this exercise and will likely publish it via our blog, portfolio or other means.
• We do NOT promise to choose from any of the ideas that are submitted to us, but will consider them.
• IF an idea is selected from those that are submitted, we don't guarantee that we will pursue it in the way that you intended. Our plan is to innovate, so we aren't looking to execute on a "solution" so much as we are looking to "solve a problem".
• We make no promises to have a working solution at the end of three days. We'll be aiming for a solid, cohesive concept (or several) or perhaps even a prototype.
• We make no promises that current technology necessarily supports the solution that we come up with. Although we are definitely based in reality, some times you have to dream a little bit to innovate.
• Although it is our intent to share the results, we don't promise that we will do so.

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Kelly and I had the opportunity to attend UI 13, put on by Jared Spool's group User Interface Engineering. It was a great conference, full of interesting ideas to share and try. While it is still in my mind, I thought I would share a few of the lessons I learned this week.

In no particular order...

To have a successful design, you have to connect to a clear strategy. (learned from Peter Merholz)

Strategy is about "fit" (learned from Peter Merholz)

"User-centered design NEVER worked." (Jared Spool) [This one deserves some explanation -- Jared's explanation -- Many great designs weren't user-centered. Many user-centered design processes have created less than successful products. There is no evidence that user-centered design ever improved market acceptance. Jared stated that for each of the success stories they examined there were a myriad of reasons that the projects were successful, so could not be attributed to user-centered design alone. If you think you have an example of user-centered design *alone* improving market acceptance, twitter it to Jared. I can't believe they don't exist, but trust him when he says his group found no examples.]

The most successful teams generally do not have a formal methodology. Instead, they tended to have a toolbox of "techniques" and "tricks" that can be applied as appropriate to the situation at hand. (learned from Jared Spool)

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"Lowering the barrier of entry" should not be equated with "one form or many"

When considering registration/sign-up with clients, there is a spectre floating about the room, the "Lower the barrier of entry in order to prevent drop-offs" spectre. This is a very good thing. Just ten years ago, I remember being told in no uncertain terms that we had to "force" users to give us as much information as possible. What is interesting to me now though, is that this "how to lower the barrier of entry" question has started to become synonymous with "should we do one long form or multiple short forms".

Don't Lose Sight of the Single Most Important Principle

Before I give my answer to that question, I would like to take a moment to remind folks that the single best way to lower the barrier of entry is to -- ask only for the absolute minimum amount of information you need. Honestly, every other form consideration is secondary to that single guiding principle.

Think you already are? Try looking again. Or have a relative or neighbor look with you. None of my relatives create websites. They are very helpful for seeing sites with fresh eyes..

Common Reasons Folks Use Form Processes

Now, back to one form versus multiple.... Let's start by looking at the thinking behind using multiple short forms rather than one longer form.

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I have often been asked by clients about the better order for the OK and Cancel buttons. Finally, Jakob Nielsen has published an 'official' answer To sum up:

• Either is perfectly fine.
• The question is not of great concern as neither poses a big threat to usability.
• If you need a tie-breaker, go with the platform convention that most of your users are known to use.
• Generally on the web, most users are on Windows, so "OK" then "Cancel" is the platform convention to follow.

Lastly, and perhaps, most importantly, he points out:

• There are questions in usability that are, perhaps, not worth the time spent debating them

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Have you ever read something that resonates so loud to your experience that you want to run around and share it with everyone you know? I found such a passage today in Jared M. Spools "UIEtips: 4 Design Lessons from the Flip".

"We want to make designs simple, but we don’t want to make them dumb. There’s a difference. The goal is to simplify the design by keeping only the most valuable bits, eliminating everything else.

This is not easy to do. You really have to know something about the users, what they are trying to do, and how they go about doing it. Just having that information will likely push the team to add more features, not less, so you then need a solid vision of how simplicity will make it better. Finally, you have to be ruthless and stubborn, cutting all the unnecessary bits out and sticking to your guns about keeping to the essentials." -- Jared M. Spool

Honestly, I have nothing really to add... Amen...read more...

PhizzPop Design Challenge - Creating a winning application in 3 days

Turning out an application using new software with only three days to do it is quite a challenge, to say the least. But that is precisely what we were challenged to do in the Microsoft sponsored, PhizzPop Design Challenge, Boston.

PhizzPop posed a particularly interesting challenge regarding process. No one builds applications in three days. So the challenge isn't really how do you produce a quality application, but more how do you squeeze weeks/months worth of work into three days to produce a quality application?

To answer this question, I thought it might be interesting to bring folks into our PhizzPop War Room and explain how we did it.

PhizzPop Design Challenge War Room

Brainstorming:

Moments after the challenge was presented, we opted not to go out for Microsoft-sponsored drinks and chose instead to take over a quiet room in the Microsoft offices to brainstorm. We immediately began to review the personas for user tasks and discuss what we believed would be possible with current technologies. Then, prompted by Jon, Outsight's Creative Director, we talked about "If the application was magic... what would we want it to do?"

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Outsight recently participated in a unique interactive design and development challenge - The PhizzPop Design Challenge. Microsoft, looking to stir up interest Silverlight and Expression Blend, approached 6 firms in each of 6 metropolitan areas in the US - New York, Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston. Each firm could send a 2-3 person team for two days of training, a challenge would be issued, and each team would have the remainder of the week to create a solution using Expression Blend.

Outsight was invited, so we went.

Our team was comprised of Jon Reil, Brandon Goldsworthy and me, Denise Preston -- a designer, a developer and an information architect/project manager. We were up against some great folks from Digitas, Molecular, Cramer, RDVO, and PixelMedia.

The challenge? Create the interface for a home automation system. Details can be found here (DOCX).

Outsight architected, branded, designed and developed a system called Varlet (a knight's page, archaic form of Valet) that could be accessed via touch screens mounted within the home, via television screen and via a smart phone interface.

The competition culminated in an event held at the Saint Lounge where each group had to present their solutions to an independent panel of judges. The Boston panel of judges included representatives from Monster.com, Burnt Sand and 3 Comm.

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