Sessions at IA Summit 2012 on Sunday 25th March

Mobile network providers, device manufacturers and banking corporations are working together to provide the solution you never knew you needed – the mobile wallet. But what is a mobile wallet and how should it work? What are the customer experiences that a good mobile wallet solution should support?

In this session we will talk about a project for a major network provider and what we learned about designing the mobile wallet, including understanding and validating the multi-channel user journeys, designing and developing wireframes and prototypes for multiple mobile devices, conducting usability testing with multiple mobile devices and working with multiple technology platforms and service providers.

We’ll discuss what went well, what went not quite so well and what caused us to throw mobile devices across the office (clue: this happened quite often).

Contains moderate horror, comic action-adventure violence and scenes of mild peril.

It’s part of our job to talk to people to figure out complex situations. To build things people love, we have to understand not only users, but also the wider context we’re working in: people, systems, structures, business models, and more. The need to think the user experience through on several channels challenges us to envision a system that is cohesive and delivers delightful experiences.

Business analysis, computer science and psychology offer different frameworks and tools to help to make sense of a messy situation, to articulate and visualize the problem. In this talk, I will present a selection of techniques that are relevant to UX, such as Soft Systems Methodology or the Business Model Canvas.

Attendees will walk away with:

• Knowledge about systems thinking theory
• An understanding of how systems thinking methods can be used as part of a UX process, incl. tools and techniques

Having low literacy skills makes reading, understanding and using written information more difficult in any medium, but it presents a special set of challenges for finding information on the Web. This exploratory eye tracking study looked at how adults with low literacy skills use search. Watch video clips of participants' information-seeking strategies and learn what we, as web professionals, can do to address their needs.

Picture this scenario: Your flight is delayed. You don't know why, the screens at the gate show no information, and nothing is available on the airline's mobile website/app. The attendants at the gate are flooded with questions, and cranky people.

Most of us have been in this type of situation, where a service provider did not handle a breakdown well. In the world of cross-channel interactions – where people interact with the service provider on multiple channels – the chances of there being a breakdown increase. How a breakdown is handled deeply affects our perception and trust in the service provider. So, handling breakdowns becomes an important design consideration.

In this talk, I want to explore the following: What causes breakdowns in services? What are some good ways to handle a breakdown? How can service providers be more prepared for breakdowns?

By putting the focus on social comfort and its three elements: people, tools, and content you will have greater ease at what the hinderances are for users of social platforms and features. This focus also provides an easier means to see how to resolve the issues through as they map to how people are social. This focus helps not only see the limitations of how people interact socially, but how to bring social comfort into the mix to help resolve the issues and meet your goals.

Comfort made understanding the problems easier and the use of it with social issues around people (a large hurdle in social for mainstream use), tools (few people understand social interaction elements), and content (people may want to share but are far from confident in the subject matter).

Having comfort as a focus for projects helps seeing problems and their solutions in a different light.

As services become more interconnected across channels and devices—and more importantly across time and space—it’s becoming increasingly important to find ways to gain insight about customers’ interactions with your service.

Experience maps offer a framework for mapping human experiences across multiple situations and interactions, helping to ensure that every occasion where your organization touches or connects with a person’s life is appropriate, relevant, meaningful, and endearing.

In this presentation I’ll talk about orchestrating touchpoints and their channels through experience maps. I’ll review an experience mapping framework that includes key dimensions and how they’re used for designing for a multi-touchpoint experience. The presentation will discuss the activities that feed the map so that it tells a tangible story, the key elements make up a useful and actionable map, and how to then define the characteristics of your mapped touchpoints. Experience maps are intended to be catalysts, not conclusions.

Recently, service design strategies have become a popular tool for improving both the client experience and a company’s efficiency in serving clients. Several service models are available to assist designers in achieving their goals, but models are only tools in an overall process. Collaborative cooperation among designers, developers, and stakeholders is necessary to ensure you successfully implement the model’s findings.

In this presentation, we provide a case study describing how a collaborative design team used a client service ecosystem diagram to create consistent and cohesive touchpoints across multiple channels. We hope to provide attendees with an understanding of what they may encounter and how to plan for the challenges of achieving business goals while keeping focused on client touchpoints. As we explore how the design team’s structure can hinder or foster productive relationships, we argue that clearly articulated, collaborative processes allow designers to facilitate a desirable and delightful user experience.

As the sun sets on transaction-centric systems and we move into an era of cross-channel engagement and personalization, customer journeys are proving to be a critical tool in the IA/UX arsenal. However, a journey map is only as valuable as the value it provides to a project. A standard structural definition is hard to pin down because the form is highly dependent on the function—what is being conveyed—as well as the context—the role of the deliverable with respect to project stakeholders. Creating a journey map is easy; creating a valuable, believable, useful, elegant journey map is a bit more challenging.

This session will take a practical deep-dive into the process of illustrating customer journeys, from determining whether journeys are right for you, to identifying relevant components, through collaborative authoring techniques, refining visual language, and solidifying strong, value-centric narratives.

The rise of smartphones and tablets is an unprecedented opportunity for all kinds of search to escape traditional limits and become the single best way to access information. In context. Real-time. Come hear practical tips for designing search with tap-ahead, geo-location, still image and video input, voice and unprecedented personalization… While juggling crushing constraints: limited screen real estate, fat fingers, spotty connections, multi-tasking and shortened attention span. From the author of "Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success" (Wiley, 2011).

How can we as UX professionals help lead change within the organizations we are part of? By seeing ourselves as valuable experts in creativity, by finding a common language to communicate, and by including a diverse array of business partners in design practices to solve problems, we have the potential to not only create amazing experiences for our customers, but to also help evolve a changing institutional culture.

I began my career within my organization on the large, waterfall side. The company decided to combine the UX division of Cable with its Internet-based division, but they did not combine the product management teams. This has forced us to become effective communicators and evangelists for collaboration. This session will use my experience as a case study in using creative practice to formulate a common language between design and business.

Everyone experiences information overload. This is the reality of the digital now. How can we transform this reality from a negative to a positive—from information overload to information opportunity? The standard approaches are to use massive computation (think Google) or coordinated group action (think Wikipedia and Facebook). There is another and less-appreciated approach: meaningful interaction.

This talk explores three themes for designing a deeply interactive world in which information is an opportunity, not a burden. The first theme is filtering and how people winnow and sift through information. The second theme is the human body and how people use micro-level interactions to construct meaning from the information they encounter. The third theme is touch and how large multi-touch surfaces can support messy information problems and spaces. By incorporating these themes into current design practice, information can be an eternal opportunity instead of a pervasive threat.

When the volume of design projects steadily grows while your team's capacity remains constant, traditional design processes fall apart. You find yourself agonizing over which projects to favor and which to neglect, which corners to cut, and which precious few fundamentals to defend.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Using stories from real teams, I'll explore how overworked designers have successfully broken free from the daily grind, reinvented themselves as design facilitators and coaches, and taught their companies to practice better design at all levels.

Attendees will leave with a new way of looking at their roles within their companies, a set of collaborative design techniques and methods to explore, and a renewed belief that they can help their companies deliver good design for all projects.

A year after the mergers that created the company, Thomson Reuters realized that they had over 500 different software programs serving their tens of thousands of financial services customers. Few of these programs looked or acted like they had anything to do with each other.

Thomson Reuters approached Cooper to create a platform that would unify the experiences across multiple user groups and channels, including web, smartphone, and iPad applications. User groups included ³C-suite² leaders, investor relations professionals, investment banks, portfolio managers, and treasury professionals.

Come hear war stories about how Cooper, in this multi-year, global project, was able to utilize small, nimble teams to tackle the massive research, interaction, and information architecture challenges; help re-organize the company to be user-centered and design-ready; and give the company a tools to carry the design forward after the consultants left. The team will share personas, scenarios, designs, and demos.

Recent evolutions in mobile technologies are fostering new modes of interactions and allowing the creation of services that work seamlessly across devices. The same is true in Africa, given a penetration of mobile phones well over 50% of the population. The difference? Many: dumbphones instead of smartphones; low literacy level limits the possibility to use text-based services (be it web or SMS); scarcity of PCs; importance of community radios in rural areas.

Starting from projects on voice-based services for farmers in West Africa, the talk presents some of the most interesting cases of multi-channel approaches – that combine different eras of technology in one service. It details the possibilities that voice-based interactions can give to illiterate people to access information available on the web, as well as create a community-based repository of information. In conclusion, it reflects on the learnings and how these can be applied to Europe and North America.

Every design project faces some tough situations. Design teams may not agree on a direction, making it difficult to execute on an aggressive plan. Clients may provide conflicting feedback, forcing designers spend as much time managing politics as doing design. Design decisions made in one meeting may be reversed in the next, delaying progress and depressing morale. These are but a few of the challenges that arise.

Designers are sometime ill-equipped to deal with complex situations. We focus on quality of craftsmanship and attention to detail. Our accomplishments are measured by the content of our portfolio, not the stories it took to get there.

Even the best planned projects hit a bump in the road, and designers on the path to leadership need to build a repertoire for anticipating, managing, and recovering from them. In this session, Dan Brown will offer a glimpse into the techniques he uses to deal with difficult situations.

Values have increasingly come to the forefront in discussions around information architecture. Our solutions must address ethical and cultural values such as privacy, trust, security, and sustainability. Value-sensitive design principles can assist us in identifying the context, systems, and values necessary to solve complex problems in a meaningful way, while ensuring our designs retain integrity for ourselves, our clients, and all impacted users.

We can help guide this conversation as part of design strategy, using practical methods to assist in framing product purpose and user engagement. Understanding the implications of our design decisions greatly increases our chances of finding the best solutions across channels and stakeholders.

This presentation will explain the tenets of value-sensitive design, and show examples of these principles being used in the design process. These techniques can be used to solve problems around complex interactions with a multitude of touch-points that can effect a variety of users.

Simplicity is a frequent mantra for designers and a worthy goal. But life, well, life is infinitely complicated, and sometimes software become quite complex as well. So what does a well-intentioned designer do when faced with the challenges of designing for a complex system?

This session will first explore some common examples in well-known applications that involve intricate workflows, massive amounts of data, and generic rocket science type complexity. Next, six general heuristics for handling complexity will be discussed with in-depth examples and case studies:

1. Prioritize Tasks
2. Be Consistent and Use Patterns
3. Use Data Visualizations (wisely)
4. Adapt UI to Roles
5. Learn and Habituate Based on Behavior
6. And Remember, the Simplest UI is no UI

At the end of this presentation, you will no longer fear the complex. Instead, this session aims to inspire attendees to embrace, solve for and even celebrate complexity.

Young children use tablets in ways they do not use mobile phones and computers. We find evidence in developmental theories that touch interfaces and larger screens afford better usability, while tablets' social nature keeps them accessible to children. Because of that, they have become powerful consumers of digital content.

An increasing number of apps is made for them, but the digital world has far to go in its child-centric offering. App stores have yet to explicitly support searching for children's apps, and some apps are well-intentioned but misguided in their experience designs.

How to proceed? Apps like PizzaBot, a game designed by 12-year-old Harry Moran that briefly ousted Angry Birds from the bestseller spot in the Mac App Store, show that we underestimate kids to our peril. This talk discusses different ways to involve children in the design process, not only as informative users, but also as designers and decision-makers.

Participate in a rapid prototyping/sketching/brainstorming exercise to participate in planning the next IA Summit. We'll take as many as we can fit. Join us!

Congratulations! Over the past decade UX has shifted from the fringes to everyday business everywhere from the Fortune 500 to Silicon Valley startups. IAs and UX designers are hot commodities. And yet, in that success lies the seeds of failure. That same decade has seen UX focus on pixels instead of experience across channels, on wireframes instead of vision and value. Other disciplines are taking on the leadership roles that companies need to be successful in a cross-channel world. Those companies and their customers are missing out on the strategic value that UX can provide if only we would take the next steps.

With his trademark wisdom and insight, Harry Max will challenge the complacency of success. The UX community should be more than a commodity. Based on decades of experience with the world's leading companies, Harry will point out the opportunities for each of us and the steps we should take to prepare for a greater leadership role in our community and in our own careers.