"The world is abuzz with social computing: Facebook, My Space, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis and other spaces powered by Web 2.0 technology. It’s a social revolution, empowering individuals to communicate, share what they know online, and help others locate information that is important to them in both their private and working lives.

Some see all this as a big waste of corporate time, but is it? Is there value in handing over control of collaboration and sharing knowledge to individuals, rather than hoarding it in records systems, knowledge systems, and thousands of network dive folders? Is there a way you can harness this social revolution to help improve our organisation’s knowledge management practices? Is there actually a solid business value proposition for social computing?"

A presentation given at Web Directions User Experience, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

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Matthew Hodgson is regional lead for Web and Information Management at SMS Management & Technology in Canberra. He has over 10 years experience in e-business strategy, information architecture, information management and knowledge management, working with the government and commercial sector to deliver innovative solutions to difficult web problems. Matthew has published papers in the areas of social psychology, has lectured at the University of Canberra on social computing, and is passionate about the way in which technology can positively impact on social change through facilitating interpersonal communication and knowledge sharing.

Here is a presentation given at at Web Directions User Experience, Melbourne Town Hall, May 16 2008, and Web Direction Government, Old Parliament House, Canberra, May 19 2008.

Most great web applications have a few key things in common. But can you name them? Better yet — can you achieve them consistently in your own projects?

In this closing keynote, Robert Hoekman, Jr., author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious (New Riders) describes the seven qualities of great web-based software and how to achieve each and every one of them by learning to communicate through design.

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 Robert Hoekman, Jr., is the founder of Miskeeto, a product development and web design consultancy focused on socially-conscious projects that improve the world.

He’s a passionate and outspoken interaction designer, writer, and user-experience evangelist who has written dozens of articles and has worked with Adobe, Automattic, United Airlines, DoTheRightThing.com, Go Daddy Software, and countless others to create superior user experiences for a wide range of audiences. He also gives in-house training sessions and speaks regularly at industry events like Adobe MAX, Flashforward, SxSW, Future of Web Design, and others.

Robert is the author of the Amazon bestseller Designing the Obvious, which focuses on seven guiding principles of great web-based software and how to leverage them in any real-world project. Learn more about Robert through his blog at rhjr.net.

A presentation on "Enhancing User Experience By Employing Collective Intelligence"

From the HFI April 2008 Newsletter:

"There is a lot of chatter going on about designing the customer experience.

Usable designs – interfaces where the user can do the task – are no longer enough. Today's focus is broader. An individual interface is less important than understanding how the interface fits in the larger system of interactions. We don't create customers, we create relationships with customers.

Establishing a relationship via technology-2-human "conversation" is tricky. Without actually being there, you need to hold up your end of the conversation. This means predicting both where the conversation could go, and knowing how to repair it when it doesn't.

It's well known that humor is an important part of human-2-human interaction. Appropriately invoked, humor can help to establish and deepen relationships. Can humor also help to establish and deepen relationships in a technology-2-human interaction?"

From Boxes and Arrows, March 2008

"In Part I of We Tried to Warn You, three themes were developed:

1. Organizations as wicked problems
2. The differences of failure leverage in small versus large organizations, and
3. The description of failure points

These should be considered exploratory elements of organizational architecture, from a communications information architecture perspective. While the organizational studies literature has much to offer about organizational learning mechanisms, we find very little about failure from the perspective of product management, management processes, or organizational communications."

 From  Ferry den Dopper in Slideshare.net - "My notes from a workshop on Interaction Design & Psychology I attended in 2002"

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In this session from the IA Summit 2008, Jess McMullin discusses how to work within an organization to get the best results, using his experience impact framework. We have tools to understand our users, but there's need to understand the business to have a successful project.

There is also a good summary of the presentation from Roger Zender's blog.

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Jess has been working in design and user experience since 1997. He specializes in helping clients work with multiple stakeholders to bridge competing viewpoints, align project vision, and create a clear understanding of the problems at hand. His value-centered approach grounds strategy at the intersection of business goals and customer needs – the sweet spot that produces sustainable value and real innovation.

Jess regularly writes and speaks at conferences about user experience, design thinking, and innovation. His work with the design and user experience community is focused on helping practitioners increase their influence in the organizations they work with.

"Personas work because they tell stories. Stories are part of every community. They communicate culture, organize and transmit information. Most importantly, they spark the imagination as you explore new ideas. They can ignite action."

This is a copy of a presentation that Marilyn Tremaine gave to the New Jersey UPA chapter in February 2008.  A 4-part MP3 recording of the presentation is also available from the UsabilityNJ website.

"This talk addresses an issue that has been skirted both by the Usability Community and the Corporate Community, that is, what value do efforts in usability and user experience design provide to the overall corporation, and what coMPetitive advantage might the skills and activities performed by usability personnel give to business operations? The talk is therefore not just concerned with the return on investment that might be achieved in various focused areas of usability, but also in areas such as:

• the redefinition of business processes
• the development of new markets
• the creation of new products and services
• the capture of unique information, the building of brand loyalty
• the use of service engineering that ties a product with its service infrastructure
• the better management of knowledge throughout the corporation
• the use of HCI in developing successful corporate strategies

The talk will cover what types of Competitive advantages have been identified for corporations and then give specific exaMPles where HCI has been or can be used to gain a company one of the competitive advantages identified."

Here is an article from agile expert Scott Ambler:

"This article presents a coherent strategy for bringing usability practices into agile project, summarizing Chapter 4 of Maturing Usability: Quality in Software, Interaction, and Value.  User experience (UEX) and agile practitioners need to learn about and respect each other?s philosophies and techniques, and then actively find ways to work together.  This requires both communities to make minor changes to the way that they work, but if they choose to make these changes I suspect that their work products will be much better for it."

And here's a glimpse at the conclusion:

"If the agile and UEX communities are going to work together effectively, they need to find a middle ground.  I believe that middle ground exists, but that both communities need to adopt several changes in order to succeed.  First, agile professionals must:

• Learn UEX skills.  Developers should be trained in, and adopt into their practices, UEX techniques.  This will enable developers to work more collaboratively and effectively with UEX practitioners.
• Accept that usability is a critical quality factor.  Luckily, agile practitioners are ?quality infected? ? they understand the importance of doing high-quality work and have a proven track record of adopting techniques such as test-first programming, code refactoring, and database refactoring.  Good usability of an end product can be ensured only by systematic usability engineering activities during the development iterations. 
• Adopt UI and usage style guidelines.  Developers must understand that not only should their code follow common guidelines, so should their UIs." 

This is an article by Catalyze blogger Laurie Gray.  Laurie works for OneSpring and has lived in the world of user experience since 1995.

"Interactive, dynamic web experiences are becoming more popular, but it's possible to build them in a way that prevents users from being successful. This article discusses best practices in designing for and building the dynamic web, and gives the reader suggestions and tips for building a successful dynamic web experience."

This whitepaper outlines HFI's top five trends for user experience design in 2008.  They predict these trends will have a significant impact on business, technology, and the usability profession:

• Emotional design and persuasive architecture
• Designing for different generations
• User experience and human factors in healthcare
• Trends in e-commerce user experience
• Trends in e-government

This is a presentation made by User Experience Evangelist, Chris Bernard, on 1/24/08 in Houston.

"My presentation from 'Got Social Media' that I gave in Houston on January 24th. This presentation is a deeper dive into some ideas I presented in Marketing's Perfect Storm with a much bigger focus on social media and how (even in the past few months) it has impacted traditional marketing."

Chris blogs at www.designthinkingdigest.com and works for Microsoft.  His blog is included in the Catalyze Feed Room RSS feed.

Jesse James Garrett put together this Elements of User Experience in 2000 - and it is still applicable today.

"A basic duality: The Web was originally conceived as a hypertextual information space;
but the development of increasingly sophisticated front- and back-end technologies has
fostered its use as a remote software interface. This dual nature has led to much confusion,
as user experience practitioners have attempted to adapt their terminology to cases beyond
the scope of its original application. The goal of this document is to define some of these
terms within their appropriate contexts, and to clarify the underlying relationships among
these various elements."

It's also available from JJG's website at this link.

dConstruct 2007 Podcasts

dConstruct is an affordable, one-day conference aimed at those building the latest generation of web-based applications. The theme for this year's conference is Designing the User Experience.

The 2007 conference was held in September.  This page aggregates recordings of all of the speakers or you can visit the link to download the podcasts.
     
Tom Coates
In this session, Tom will talk about new literacies that designers need to build things that are native to a web of data, the blurring and interplay between designers and developers and what it means to rapidly iterate in small multi-disciplinary teams to find the heart and soul of a new concept.

Matt Webb
Products aren't only their aesthetic form and feature lists in catalogues. We live alongside them, and they open us to experiences. We first spy them across a crowded shop floor (then take them home and unwrap them); we get to know them, are frustrated by them, are pleased by them; we socialise with them and our other friends.

George Oates & Denise Wilton
Denise and George want to talk to you about a few community-based projects they’ve worked on. They’ll delve into strategies and ideas around building a sense of place, and discuss the dynamics they have observed by watching people get comfortable… so comfortable there’s a sense of ownership and possession.

Cameron Moll
It’s easy to poke fun at bad design, but it’s far more challenging and rewarding to discern differences between good design and great design. This session will teach you practical design techniques for tipping the scales of greatness in your favor, using a blend of graphic design theory, human computing principles, and a communication-centric approach. Learn the difference between concepts such as influence vs. inspiration or machine efficiency vs. user efficiency.

Leisa Reichelt
Including an introduction to the principles and practices of Agile Methodologies, this presentation explores the opportunities for UCD in an Agile environment, how designers can shape Agile to better support their work, and what designers can learn from Agile methods.

Peter Merholz
Engage in a deep dive into the importance of experience. In this session Peter will cover the historical perspective; lay out the evolution of product categories; demonstrate the competitive advantage that experience provides; explain the importance of thinking about your products in a systems fashion; and cap it off with a discussion of experience strategies and how they can provide stars to sail your ship by.

Jared Spool
In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs. See how successful experience design integrates the needs of the users with the requirements of the business. See how it is learned, but not available through introspection. Learn how experience design must be invisible to succeed and why it is cultural, multi-disciplinary, and thrives best in an 'educate and administrate' environment.

The Return
After an unintended hiatus, the podcast returns with a look at all the stuff going on around dConstruct 2007.

Last.fm
A late-night chat with Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan from Last.fm

Retrospective
dConstruct is back. Before taking a look ahead to this year's event, let's have a listen back to last year's conference and hear how it sets the stage for dConstruct 2007.