Interaction 09 redux – IxDA SF
March 17th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
The SF chapter of the Interaction Design Association held a redux of Interaction 09 this weekend at Adaptive Path. I volunteered to help with A/V stuff and whatever else needed doing. Many speakers from the February event were from the Bay Area, and a healthy number of local practitioners couldn’t make it to Vancouver for the real thing, so we asked 5 speakers to give abbreviated versions of their talks. At $20 a head, this was an excellent deal for such a cool, collaborative and intimate event.
Up first was Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting, who led the group of 100 or so through some simple user observation exercises for use in the field with the intention of transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.
Next was Adaptive Path’s creative lead Kumi Akiyoshi, with a talk centered around sensory design experiences, listing her insights for designing brand leadership strategies. She gave a great case study of the recent refresh of MSN.com: getting rid of the clutter and uniting brand messaging by trimming back the amount of colors, icons and disparate images on the landing page.
Ian Swinson gave us a look at Agile UI pattern creation process that he & his team went through at Salesforce. When charged with the task of design pattern creation, his team set out individually to work on their own designs. 6 months later, they only had 2 designs to show for it. After regrouping and working together in collaborative brainstorming sessions, his team was able to piece together library of 43 design patterns in 3 months. Impressive to say the least. You can view his deck here.
Given that so many web users are also gamers, it stands to reason that we should take some experience design advice from the game design community. Razorfish IA Nadya Direkova outlined four best practices in bringing game-like user experiences to interactive marketing:
- Understand that our ultimate goal as designers is to make the user happy. Games accept this by default.
- Understand a product or message better by imagining it as a game. If you have a message you want people to find and interact with, invite them to play with it!
- Convey a message by building it into an advergame.
- Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.
You can see Nadya’s entire deck from Interaction 09 here.
Finally, Cooper’s Kim Goodwin delivered her keynote on the state of the experience design discipline. She acknowledged that though interaction designers are in demand, even within the current economic climate, we are still a very young discipline that is trying to define best practices, educational standards, or even what we want on our business cards. One troubling point she made referenced the US News & World Report article heralding the User Experience Specialist as one of the best careers of 2009. The first sentence of the article is telling:
“This profession has a hard time agreeing on a name for itself. It’s called, for example, user experience specialist, interface designer, information architect, usability practitioner, user-centered design specialist, and usability manager.”
Goodwin stressed that we need answers to these questions if we are to evolve as practitioners.
My photos from the event are here, and the “official” IxDA SF photos can be found here.
