Berlin

Dec 21, ’10 11:57 PM

I’m really excited about the upcoming Cognitive Cities conference in Berlin. It’s a chance to explore a city I’m longing to visit, and a chance to see some of my favourite thinkers talking about the future of the urban environment.

More than this, Cognitive Cities is doing something interesting and long overdue: taking a conference into the host city. The second day of Cognitive Cities will be spent at exhibitions, workshops and tours around the city – discussing the themes from the conference in the immediate context of Berlin. This seems so much more powerful and alive to me than being sat in a dismal hotel function suite with people who look exactly like you, removed from the rest of the world, drinking greasy coffee under strip lighting and the hum of air conditioning.

Matthew Solle talked about this recently in his call to arms on conferences:

‘My belief is that conferences and events that involve the geographical location as strongly as the conference space are the ones that are most likely to continue to succeed.

‘By exploring the spaces around us as analogies for better learning and understanding we will surely have more fulfilling experiences as organisers, speakers and attendees. Make the city and the experience of it part of the conference, the learning and the experience. Avoid conference experiences being isolated in windowless spaces – fine for shopping (supposedly), rubbish for learning. And learning is supposed to be what we are doing at these things not just parking our fat arses to stare at small screens and to moan about the closest, softest targets.’

Matthew Solle, ‘Better Conferences’.

Cognitive Cities, happily, isn’t alone in trying to re-think the relationship between conference and city, and Daniel Szuc has something very similar in mind for UX Hong Kong, where the city is as much a part of the bill as the speakers.

I’m already looking forward to February in Berlin, spending two days immersed in a subject that, while on the fringes of my work, is a long-standing passion. I’m looking forward to understanding and challenging the ideas of day one in the streets of Berlin in day two, and to learning harder and faster through application and proper thinking, not just scribbled notes destined to fade and be forgotten in a Moleskine.

Can’t wait.

Photography credit: Berlin Building #4 by ‘an untrained eye’

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Help me build a pinboard.in network on the fly

Dec 17, ’10 9:35 AM

Like everyone else it seems, I found myself hastily moving all my Delicious bookmarks to Pinboard.in last night. I’ll leave my rant about Yahoo’s neglect of Delicious until another time, but I have a favour to ask.

Pinboard, rather than Delicious, doesn’t make it particularly easy to find where your friends are – one of the most valuable aspects of sharing bookmarks. So, if you’ve signed up to Pinboard and you’d like to reconnect, post your url in the comments, and lets re-build our network.

You’ll find me at http://pinboard.in/u:byekick

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Ghost riding

Nov 30, ’10 11:57 PM

Cycling in winter is pretty special, I’m belatedly discovering. The initial chill when you set out that turns to a warm virtuous glow; powering through streets on crisp mornings in milky sunlight is a genuinely uplifting experience.

I’ve been reluctant to cycle at this time of year for ages – cycling once the clocks have gone back can feel a far more vulnerable experience. I’ve always been at the hyper-cautious end of the cycling fraternity, but even more so at night.

Every night, before setting off for home, I tuck in a frayed lace that once came perilously close to being caught in my chain, and head out, helmet on, lights blinking, high-vis back pack on.

My route from Shoreditch takes me past the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Goswell Road. There, chained to a traffic barrier near a branch of Costa Coffee is a solitary bike, painted white. It marks the spot where Rebecca Goosen lost her life at just 29 when she was crushed in an horrific incident with a cement mixer in April 2009.

Every time I see that white bike, it catches me and I feel I freeze for a moment – it’s a profoundly affecting, understated tribute.This memorial to Rebecca is a ghost bike, and there are nine other ghosts dotted around London.

‘Ghost Bikes are small and somber memorials for bicyclists who are killed or hit on the street. A bicycle is painted all white and locked to a street sign near the crash site, accompanied by a small plaque. They serve as reminders of the tragedy that took place on an otherwise anonymous street corner, and as quiet statements in support of cyclists’ right to safe travel.’

Later on my route I cross Blackfriars Bridge where Vicki McCreery was hit by a bus and died in 2004, before winding through Oval and Brixton, specifically to avoid Elephant and Castle, where Meryem Ozekman was killed just a day before Rebecca.

The Ghost Bikes Documentary Film Project is seeking to chart the rise of ghost bikes and the stories behind them, and has won funding through Kickstarter. I’m looking forward to seeing it brought to screen:

Every day, in cities all over the globe, cyclists must contend with bad roads, poor traffic conditions, and dangerous intersections. Ghost bikes are ways for cyclists to come together as a community and grieve a loss, while making a quiet statement about their struggle for safe passage.
We are tracing the roots of the ghost bike movement from San Francisco to St Louis to Pittsburgh to New York, and examining how it is manifesting in New York, Chicago, London, and Brazil. The end result will be a feature length documentary film, independently produced and privately funded by the filmmakers and people like you. City by city, the film will reveal the stories behind ghost bikes and the people who make them.

Roads are dangerous places whether you’re a pedestrian, cyclist or driver (and most of us are any and all of those) and London is a great city to cycle in. I’d rather cycle here than any other city in the UK (ok then, I’ll give you Bristol) and it’s growing cycling culture as found in the coffee bars of Look Mum No Hands or Rapha’s pop-up Cycle Club, or the besuited London bike hire cyclists, is a joy to be just a little part of. London’s traffic infrastructure is slowly beginning to catch up – but cycling in imperfect, dark and occasionally dangerous London is still a good place to be, and getting better.

Ghost bikes are an every day reminder to me of my own luck, my part of London’s cycling community, our responsibility to each other, and most of all, the memory of the individuals who lost their lives.

Photography credit: LV11 by Länsiväylä: Pyöräilykaista2010

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Good, fast, cheap. Pick three.

Nov 17, ’10 11:46 PM

I gave a short talk at the Agile UX Meetup tonight on startups, alongside Basheera Khan and Sjors Timmer, and expertly organised by Johanna Kollmann. It was good fun, there was some interesting conversations after the presentations, and it was nice to have so many people there – and a few familiar faces too.

Here’s the slide deck from my talk and my speaking notes too.

Good, fast cheap. pick three.

I’m going to talk tonight about a project I collaborated on recently with Leisa Reichelt, Lisa Drake and Mark Boulton. That project was StartHere, and what I’m going to focus on for the next 15 minutes is 3 themes.

The nature of teams

Some thoughts on working together both within a UX team, but collectively with the start up too – and their dynamics.

The importance of proximity

What we can gain from designing as close as we can to our research work, and our clients.

The value of intensity

And lastly, a word or two on why intense is good, and something you should actively seek out, not shy away from.

Why I’m talking about this

I’m no expert in Agile – this is one of only a handful of projects I’ve worked on that, could be described in any way as Agile, so, I stand before you as a relative Agile newbie. I hope that helps those of you who are like me newish to this – because I’d like to share a little of my experience of why this particular project has profoundly changed the way I think about the way we work and some conventional wisdoms.

A small disclaimer then.

When I say ‘Agile’, I mean aligned with the principles of the Agile manifesto rather than a specific method:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

When I say ‘startup’, I’m defining that for these purposes as being a small organisation, dependent on raising funding to support its product or service, and where – in effect – the product is the organisation.

StartHere

StartHere exists to help the most digitally marginalised in our society to get vital information – the sort of information that is, ironically, often hardest to get, when its needed most, on impenetrable council or NHS websites.

That’s frustrating when privileged people like us are trying to get our bins collected, but when it’s affecting profound life decisions, then it’s another matter.

Good, fast, cheap

We had one week to go from nothing to a completed design concept, ready to be built and implemented. By the end of this single week, we’d:

  • produced a UX strategy
  • undertaken mood boarding for the visual design
  • conducted 3 days of user research and design iteration
  • redefined their content strategy, and turned an information architecture on its head
  • delivered a final presentation to the client

One of the biggest challenges we had, time frame excluded, was defining how we’d work together. Leisa and Mark had worked together before of course on Drupal, but some of us hadn’t even met by that first Monday morning.

And this brought to my mind a presentation given by Hannah Donovan at this year’s dConstruct. Hannah had talked eloquently about the improvisation in music and what it can teach us about improvisation in design and how we work together.

‘It pays to be picky about the people we work with, establish clear roles for each other – a structure that encourages cooperation and respect for improvisation to flourish.’ Hannah Donovan

We were helped firstly by Leisa’s care in picking who she worked with on this, pulling together people she felt could work collaboratively and who were really engaged by what StartHere was trying to do.

And we were helped hugely by an open-minded team at StartHere who were prepared to commit a full week of their time exclusively to us, open to being challenged, prepared to dig in and get involved.

‘No matter how organic an approach you have to building things, there need to be some rules decided on that everyone is respectful of, and it needs to be within a larger holistic vision of how those pieces are going to function – otherwise it will just be a cacophony of sounds’. Hannah Donovan

You have to quickly understand the dynamics of not only the teams you are working for, but with, and find your space within it.

That’s something that becomes second nature to freelancers as we move between agencies and organisation – and it feels to me like it’s critical to Agile too.

‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’ as the manifesto would have it. Agile feels to me like something that is very much about relationships between people and between teams.

‘Music is the space between the notes. It’s not the notes you play; it’s the notes you don’t’. Miles Davis

When and what we ‘play’ – to extend the musical metaphor – is dependent on having both range and flexibility – the ability to listen, to create space for the client, to know when to back off, and when to go for it.

The pace we worked at on this project, meant ‘responding to change’ not ‘following a plan’ in the manifesto’s terms, became crucial.

The importance of proximity

The project necessarily involved difficult subject matter – we were dealing with powerful human stories.

It was a humbling experience of seeing not just the people we were trying to help, but their engagement with what we were trying to do.

As Leisa said during the project, it’s really precious when you get moments of genuine delight, and we had them here. In one small but significant example, watching a participant clicking through from the home page expecting to see paragraph after paragraphs of content, only to be confronted with the bare minimum of content, and a phone number. In other words, what they hadn’t dared hope for.

For the startup, it was this proximity that made the product feel real and brought them face to face with the people they exist to help. That was really energising for them, but convinced them too that we were on the right track.

We couldn’t have had anything like this emotional resonance in a more drawn out, traditional waterfall process.

The value of intensity

When we started this project, the word ‘intensity’ kept coming up. And yet. Having a team – UX and client, and the critical involvement of our participants – in a room together for a single week was really all we needed to produce a result we knew worked, that met the information needs of our target audience and did so in a highly accessible way, without demanding knowledge and experience of the internet.

Intensity – I’d argue – is a desirable quality.

We don’t often hear about our fellow designers saying ‘This could have been a great piece of work, if only we’d had less time’, but I’m wondering if maybe we should.

This intensity applied to the start up too – their own intensity came from the very fact of the service being their reason for existing. This wasn’t just another project, it was the only one that mattered, and its success critical to securing the funding they’ll need to extend it as far as they plan to.

When you’re working with a startup, the product or service is the very manifestation of the organisation. You’re inescapably defining the very nature of their business.

When you’re working with a startup, all UX is strategic.

Final thoughts

It’s self-evident that not all projects are like this of course: an exceptionally pressured time frame; a very special client; and a team that it was a privilege to be a part of.

The agility of our process got a testable proposition in front of real people within a few hours at most. I don’t think we ever tested the same set of concepts twice – we weren’t afraid to drop that we knew to be testing badly, and to introduce variations on concepts immediately. We had to be prepared to ‘show our working’, to expose our process, every step of the way.

And, lastly, we had to recognise the deal when you’re working with a startup – because what you are designing is, I think, the manifestation of that organisation.

The UX decisions you make are inescapably strategic and profound.

You’re doing more than making that organisation a little more efficient, or effective in a particular channel – you’re defining the very expression of that organisation.

Further reading

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Puzzling

Nov 11, ’10 8:00 AM

It’s not often that we’re able to talk publicly about what we’re working on, when we’re working on it. But here’s a quote that pretty neatly sums up what’s swimming around my head at the moment:

‘So on the Web, we make things as simple as possible and we try to remove as much friction as possible. But in a game, you often try to do exactly the opposite of that. Much of the fun in a game involves solving puzzles and learning how to achieve objectives more efficiently. So you actually want to learn how to do things more efficiently.’ Daniel Burka

Gamification, or game dynamics, is everywhere at the moment, but it’s specifically the place where games meet web that I’m thinking a lot about at present, and the way in which they interact and play off each other (or even if they should).

Daniel’s interview on UX Magazine on Friction Can Be a Good Thing: The role of gaming dynamics in user experience is well worth reading – lots of insight into games design in his current work on Glitch, but also his time with Digg and Pownce.

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