Hello ladies and gentlemen.

Due to being perennially lazy, I like to have a linkset in one place when trying to find out about Indigenous news and events in Australia.  We have quite a rich set of sources available, so we are very lucky.  I would really welcome any readers providing me with further sources of Indigenous news or art.  And here are some that I find particularly inspiring.

Indigneous News and Events links:

National Indigenous Times – http://www.nit.com.au/

As the NIT says ‘Building a bridge between Australia’s Black and White communities’.  The NIT is a prestigious publication with a dead tree version well worth subscribing to.  The National Indigenous Times covers breaking news, has a blog, a message stick for getting in touch with friends and family, and generally has a wide range of information on all topics of current interest in Indigenous Australia. I recommend that all Australians had access to NIT to read each issue as it came out, and achieve a greater awareness.

Indigenous Newslines magazine and Newslines Radio – http://www.fahcsia.gov.au/sa/indigenous/pubs/general/newslines/Pages/default.aspx

A government production, you can listen to Newslines Radio online.  The current issue profiles the Fitzroy Crossing community’s battles against alcohol abuse, takes an in-depth look at the involvement of Indigenous Australians in the national debate on water, and covers the efforts being made to boost Indigenous employment.

Indigenous Australia – http://www.indigenousaustralia.info/

More of a general information site than a news site, and not necessarily the most up to date source of information, it still has data about languages, culture, and the Dreaming, and provides a useful warning that it is worth considering the sources of non-documented Dreaming stories which may have become corrupt through mistranslation by non-aboriginal people.

Aboriginal art and culture center – Alice Springs – http://aboriginalart.com.au/

Has featured artists, information on how to purchase and find out about art from an aboriginal owned and operated organisation, culture, languages, an Arrerente dictionary, and quite a lot more – including some YouTube links.

The Black Book – http://www.blackbook.afc.gov.au/default.asp

The Black Books is a (very large) portal including a directory and a library of artistic works.  The Directory includes more than 2,700 listings of Indigenous organisations and individuals.  The Library is constantly evolving to include new artistic works by Indigenous people. It currently contains 2,000 works from the late 1890s until now.

Does anyone have any more?  Are there any sites you find particularly inspirational or useful?

The Bank Channel – Australia’s UX community comes together, by Rob Findlay.  Exerpt: …On Thursday and Friday last week, I was in sunny Canberra with around 100+ other people at the first UX Australia 2009 conference discussing, sharing and celebrating the UX discipline. A range of quality speakers across two streams discussed, for me, 2 spheres of UX…

Socio-Cybernetic wordle

A socio-cybernetic model for social interaction design.  Oh man, how I love anything that decides to call itself socio-cybernetic.  I myself am totally socio-cybernetic!  At least while watching Bladerunner, I am.

This lecture was, if anything, a bit information rich – I didn’t have time to come to my own conclusions, because I was so busy noting down what @semanticwill was saying about the approach he and his other folks were talking to social networking. In fact, my notes are less about my own interpretation than a frantic attempt to copy down what he was getting at, so here they are:

• SxD – Social Experience Design
• The design of dynamic ecosystems which support discussion.
• The context IS the conversation.

Socio-Cybernetic Experience Design:

Basically a model of how the SxD operates is along these lines:

1. A participant has a goal.
2. They choose a context.
3. They negotiate a language.
4. They begin an exchange of symbols.
5. This causes a reaction.
6. This evokes a response.
7. An agreement may be reached.

Note the deliberate choice of ‘symbols’ rather than words – ever bit someone as a werewolf on Facebook, or voted someone up on an article system?  You are communicating, but not necessarily exchanging meaningful sentences.  In a way, this is almost standing in for body language.

@semanticwill then went on to talk about the failed www.kayak.com and the much more successful www.gather.com, which is a social area that he and his group have set up which is supposed to allow a range of connections that the user has total control over.  You can, for example, set whether someone sees whether you are married or not, your last name, your gender – all of these things compartmentalised from all the rest.  All of these things can be set with varying security levels, thus meaning that you can be yourself with your friends and yourself with your parents – neither group will see what you do not want them to see.

One of the ways of mandating good behaviour suggested was ‘reputation systems’, at which point I drew my geek girl wondering why she gets treated like a unicorn (And you can check out geekfeminism.org if you’re wondering what that means).

I am a big fan of systems that can control or at least permit a defense against bullying and abuse online as I’ve seen and experienced quite a bit of it, and Gather purported to have one.  ‘Grow a thick skin’ isn’t really a useful comment when the violence gets as bad as that shown in the Kathy Sierra incident.  In this case, the way the reputation system works is that folks have a form of good karma and a form of bad karma.  Votes against you for publishing bad things gradually downgrade your karma, and recovery is only possible by doing ‘good’ things.  I never did get a chance to ask about what happens in the case of dogpiling – when a large number of people organised by one jerk all vote someone down, or all email them something nasty.

Here was a cute summary that I liked:

• Non-social software fulfills user needs.
• Social software fulfills user passions.

After this, @semanticwill then went on to lessons learned from gather.com (or, possibly, inspirations for!  What can I say, I had no coffee at the time!)

12 Design Considerations.

1. Provide an articulated context: Allow differentiated contexts and personas as people operate differently in different spheres.
2. Rich profile: The profile can act as the conversation.
3. Design of Groups: Allow grouping by shared interest.
4. Security: Allow user created varying levels of security based on group membership.
5. Labels Matter: Consider what users will think ‘friending people’ means.  Is there a better, more accurate term?
6. Surface Conversations: Allow different conversations to be visible to those interested in them.
7. Nail Deeplinking: Similar sort of thing to above – allow ways for contextual information to be surfaced.
8. Presence: Tempo, velocity, flow, where are you?  What’s the hap and how’s it going?
9. Number Nine: Was missing!
10. Allow symbolic exchanges: And by this we mean things like throwing sheep or having people get bit by werewolves on facebook – often someone can be too distracted to have a meaningful conversation online but doesn’t have the visible body language to show this – a short sharp interaction via symbols can be used to alleviate this.
11. Community Monitoring: You gotta be able to deal with the trolls or we’re going to have more incidents that can really wreck someone’s life.
12. Reputation and Face Saving: Merits and demerits, you have to be able to recover from making a big mistake and learn from your problems.

Wondering where number nine was? So were we! Like I said, this was an intensive lecture.  Now to go and check out gather.com!

Interesting Links:

• http://blog.semanticfoundry.com/
• http://www.gather.com/
• http://www.kayak.com/

Moleskine Artefacts:

10 Minute Talk 3 and Designing Sociality

Designing Sociality 2

Designing Sociality 3

]]> http://rookinthegarret.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/ux-australia-designing-sociality-in-networked-publics/feed/ 2 rookinthegarret Socio-Cybernetic wordle 10 Minute Talk 3 and Designing Sociality Designing Sociality 2 Designing Sociality 3 http://rookinthegarret.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/ux-australia-more-10-minute-talks/ http://rookinthegarret.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/ux-australia-more-10-minute-talks/#comments Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:40:12 +0000 rookinthegarret http://rookinthegarret.wordpress.com/?p=86 ]]> I really enjoyed the ten minute talks series due to their short and sweet nature – everyone could get something out of them, audience reaction was generally positive, and they were sometimes remarkably hard hitting and at other times highly entertaining.

10 Minute Chat Wordl

As a pretty brief summary for Friday, we had Sam Ng doing ‘three truths and a lie’, essentially proving that his small UX company was breaking a lot of the very standard UX design rules (such as, for example, testing!) for the right reasons.

There were some words of wisdom from Mr Ng regarding realisations in his own company:

• Advising is easy compared to doing
• Personas are not for us, because we ARE the customer and we don’t need to communicate who we are for ourselves.
• We test to learn about the unknown, not the known, and only when we can act!

This was followed by Stephen Collins, who I had dinner with the night before (we had some violent agreement happening regarding the requirement for fully accessible websites for the disabled and the kind of guff you have to deal with when you have folks that get all obsessed about the bottom line instead of service). Stephen works for a group called Acid Labs. And this talk was titled ‘Who are the people in your neighbourhood’.

Stephen is a creative writer, amongst other things, and apparently used to get stuck in the whole ‘persona perfection’ sort of area – he wanted to write good personas, but got bogged down in the detail.

Stephen Collins: “I used to hate personas until I realised they were just stories.”

As he proved, you can get inspiration from everywhere, including Sesame Street. Why not find a fun source rather than yet one more mind bendingly boring grind through potential customer concepts?

After all, you have folks like Big Bird, who is the Nice one, The Count (the obsessed guy who won’t shut up about his cat), Bert and Ernie (the two guys that fight but always back each other up), and Oscar the Grouch (the troll).  The classification of Elmo as the newbie was particularly enjoyable, and not just because we had @stefwill from the BoM able to sound like the red floppy one himself.

All round awesome.

Gary Barber finally gave a talk on the Redux of the Equaliser, though after chatting with my homies here, we felt that he could have explained what the Equaliser was in the first place as none of us knew what it was. We didn’t really understand it, so the revisiting and the turning of it into a radar map didn’t make that much sense to us. Perhaps I blinked and missed it! I did, however, learn to blame Donna Spenser for designing a useful tool!

One of the things I did glean, however, was the reinforcement that ‘Clients don’t speak the same language that we do’ – they want comparison to some form of norm, even when there is no norm.

After this came Keith Lang with the Science of Aesthetics, which was a really awesome ten minute talk for the designer geeks out in the audience (well, that is, me). You can get ahold of Keith at @songcarver on twitter, but if you want the general gist of it, he was drawing us through things like the development of the rounded rectangle that appears so often in the Apple product – users just seem to find that style of pictogram more comfortable to look at. This clues in rather neatly with synesthesia and the Bouba/Kiki effect (go check it out, synesthesia for all, across cultural and age backgrounds).   He also went into the science behind animation, where exaggerated characteristics and styles are naturally more pleasing to the eye – such as the stretch and squash animation for a bouncing ball.

Stuff to Check Out:

• Visual Perception by Jörg Nänni.
• The idea of chromatic aberration.
• The concept of stretch and squash in animation.

Linkies!

• http://www.acidlabs.org
• http://www.radharc.com.au
• http://www.UIandUS.com

Moleskine Artefacts:

ITSME and 10 minute talk

10 minute talk 2

10 Minute Talk 3

ITSME – Beyond the Desktop Metaphor with Claudio Moderini

ITSME Wordl

This was a fascinating talk where I was initially very skeptical. The concept was based around designing a new operating system based on a different metaphor. Initially from the presentation, there was a distinct impression that the whole thing was very folder based, perhaps with a rather high powered search engine or a more efficient underlying taxonomy. This opposed to anything to do strictly with what one might call an entirely new vision.

ITSME is an attempt by an Italian IT company to produce a revolutionary new approach to the desktop, one that has moved away from the traditional folders and paper filing metaphor. The reason for this appeared to be that few people really worked in that style of office environment any more – instead collaboration and connection was more important.

ITSME is a system based on stories and venues. We no longer need the old style of physical world analogy, because people have ceased to operate in that way. Now we think in terms of stories and systems with a distinct start and end point, where the journey is somewhat more temporal.

At this point in the lecture, I was watching Claudio and wrote down: “Am I missing this? (Is this just) Like a good filter system?”

Claudio then took us through several different user stories. I gradually began to gather something more of the system in context. Items seemed to be moved around in the system primarily in a contextual way where linkages were preserved between any particular item (a contact, a document, a video, a piece of metadata) in a way that was fully explorable and contextualised. In addition, items were organised into venues and a venue could be viewed at any point in its history, allowing a sort of time travel effect.

The whole interaction design model was based on a three tiered approach:  For the elements of ‘Access’, ‘Management’ and Communications’ there were interaction, visualisation, and structure.

There were three interface layers: Venue, home, and frame. Venues were discussed in particular, they being tools that permit the user to enter and interact with a particular story. The highlight feature made context explicit rather than implicit. There was the concept of channels within a venue which allowed a certain breakdown of information and did not appear visually to really be the analogue of a folder at all. Each channel within a venue could move independently, and the whole system seemed to be heavily based on a well implemented drag and drop functionality.

Lastly, the Frames had a Limbo section where lost or orphaned documents could be stored though the Limbo itself was kept purposefully limited so that the user would be gradually forced to link the items into some form of Venue.

Apparently they are now redeveloping it, as they, too, follow the ‘Never fall in love with your first design’ theory.

Places to Check Out:

• http://www.itsme.it
• http://itsme.it/news/category/blog/

Moleskine Notes used to produce this:

ITSME Moleskine Notes 1

ITSME Moleskine Notes 2

By Stephen Hall

Making Light Work wordl

As Stephen discussed data rich interfaces are not always heavy. Data is a series of discrete pieces of information, it does not imply form in general. He led on into a discussion of knowledge management at this point, and essentially creating data rich interfaces is a form of knowledge management.

The hierarchy of knowledge goes something like this:

Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom

Stuff → Useful → Actionable → Insight

In order to break data into usable segments, one can approach it in a sequence which moves from understanding towards action:

Comprehensible Data:

• Condensation
• Contextualisation
• Calculation
• Correction
• Categorisation

Actionable Data:

• Conversation (user reviews)
• Connection (relationships)
• Consequences (calls to action, buy stuff)
• Comparison

All of these things reveal or enable meaning. You can enhance meaning by making the structure of the data evident. Meaning and structure emerges over time, it takes a while to come out after examining the data. It is also worth while remembering that we do not change the data, we contextualise it. You must understand the data sufficiently to expose themes and patterns.

Ways of breaking up data include:

• Creating your own structure
• Exposing the structure
• Discover unsought information
• Find a subset quickly
• Get a useful taxonomy going and understand it

Ways to improve content access:

• Self elimination
• Clarity of purpose – upfront!
• Anticipated needs
• Self streaming
• Non-preferred terms (such as alternative words)
• Contextual support
• Forgiveness (Don’t punish the user for not behaving the way you expect them to)

Cool things to Check Out!

• Autonomy IDOL – Reveals structure in unstructured data and allows you to see heat in data clusters. Pretty funky concept, and something I would love to see applied to the whole water data problem.
• Something called Palantir which does something similar. This is a bit disturbing – does it mean that Sauron can see everything your company is doing?
• Balsamiq – Another structure revealing product.
• Napkee – A system that concerts Balsamiq’s output into HTML.

Weird little Moleskine Notes:

Making Light Work of Data 1

Making Light Work of Data 2

Making Light Work of Data 3 and ITSME 1

By: Jessica Enders

Easing the Pain wordl

This was, I suspect, a slightly challenging lecture for Jessica to give given that despite the fact that the entire audience is usability experts, the general attitude to government forms in general is that they are some of the most somnolent documents in existence.

We started out with the five lessons to begin with:

1. Questions beget Questions
2. Real Simplification is Hard
3. Times the time by two
4. The form is just the beginning
5. Forms redesign is good for everyone

Jessica was involved in working for group called APRA – The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. Through ARPA, individuals in severe financial straits can sometimes get access to their superannuation. Examples of circumstances under which this might occur include such things as loss of somewhere to live, severe medical bills not able to be covered, or individuals who are suffering a terminal illness and wish to access their superannuation to improve their quality of life now.

Folk applying to ARPA under these circumstances are seldom in any mood to deal with forms and are often emotionally overwrought. Complex legislation surrounds access to this money, and various proofs need to be made.

Questions Beget Questions: Vague wording on forms is extremely bad. If a user who is under a financial or legal obligation cannot understand exactly what is required, they can be badly penalised or not gain access to a service that they need.

Real Simplification is Hard: The original form submitted to the users was a 6 page long form. The one that was eventually produced turned out to be 23 pages long. This was a result of removing ambiguity in the wording, and it created an entirely new problem as a result. So how do you break an obscure form into simple, short groupings? The answer is to seek a single goal for each form. The form was divided up into several other forms.

Times the time by Two: Things take longer for lots of reasons, but no matter what you do, they almost always do end up taking longer. You can realise that the client brief is incorrect or not what the client actually requires. After all, small changes often only yield small benefits, and there are external factors such as the Global Financial Crisis which can cause delays.

The Form is Just the Beginning: Other business processes always wrap around the form – letters, responses, that sort of thing. Sometimes the choke point in an organisation is not actually the form, but what happens around it.

Forms Redesign is Good for Everyone: There can be widespread benefits. Staff can end up with a sense of ownership, of membership and feel motivated through being involved.

URLs Mentioned:

http://www.arpa.gov.au

Some funky little sketches aww yeah:

Easing the Pain 1

Easing the Pain 2, Making Light Work of Data 1

10 things Wordle

The idea was that items would randomly be selected, and Shane and Matt would show how they translated into interaction design. If one was chosen that they could not work with, instead they would get a member of the audience to do it – and if you could get a decent answer happening, you won a free book.

Okay, maybe I liked this because I won a free book – a copy of ’101 things I learned in Architecture School’ in fact, which is bloody brilliant because I have been very sadly jealous of #willdonovan’s one for a while now.

I could go into detail, but essentially it was a fresh look at design from an entirely different angle, and I really enjoyed it. I suppose my ‘gotcha’ moment with this came across as something like:

Me: Cross-discipline lessons can be learned through the study of other change based fields and looking at how they overcome challenges. Some examples of good fields that I want to look at in this respect are Architecture, Industrial Design, Molecular Gastronomy, Charities and Funds, and Unions.

Some ideas that came out of the event were the following:

• A bad design can still get users on board if there is sufficient cohesive supported vision (for example the iPhone).

• A website should grow organically out of the needs of users and the requirements of business.

• Seek clarity and purpose – don’t just put something in because ‘you know’ it belongs (an example here could be something like a Contacts Page – justify that sucker and know you need it).

• Designing for different types of behaviour is important because the user journey can be very different.

• Seek balance through contrast.

• Get the rubbish out of the way first – push past the first five designs and see if you can get to something a bit petter.

• Move from the impossible to the probable.

Check it all out at:

http://IxD101.com and go contribute!

And see the wee notes here:

101 Things 1

101 Things 2, Easing the Pain 1

By Joel Flom

When customer experience design fails and how to avoid it.

Ka-chunk

Joel: “Customer Experience refers to the totality of experience of a customer’s relationship to the product’s touchpoints.”

Experience is internally processed, it’s the impression a customer has of all the interactions in the series. It certainly isn’t something that sits out there by itself, alone, lost, tired…no, wait, that’s me still typing at this hour. In any case, twitter itself is part of the experience these days, no matter how much we don’t want it to be. But it still isn’t as important as the 1800 number.

So when bad design happens, who is the culprit? Probably us, really. What do we need to do?

• Revisit our own perspective
• Empathise with the businesses
• Stop idolising the ideal customer

One of the problems with usability folks is that we love shiny things – core services for the business often get overlooked as a result. We simply don’t see the person on the packing floor, the delivery driver, or anyone else like that. We may not even really have a good idea of what a place does – in the example of a shoe seller, we might be ignoring the whole manufacturing process behind it.

Words of wisdom: When it’s online, the content is the experience.

Customers interact with the content, not the business. As a result, in order to make the content really reflect what the business both wants and needs, we need to be a student of the business and give the real customer what they need, not our idealised customer who understands usability and wants our lovely, shiny toys. We need to not make it about us.

OMG Links!

• http://www.dustincurtis.com
• http://www.gerrymcgovern.com
• http://www.elavision.com

Notes in their original scary form:

Ka-chunk 1

Ka-chunk 2, 101 Things 1