Eclectic Brain Salad

Hello and welcome to another one of my fabulously long winded conference reports. It feels weird to be attending a conference and not be working for friends of ED any more - no longer will I be stalking the corridors, jumping out on people shouting "Can you spell style sheet? Good? D'ya want to write a book?"

In my new job it'll be more like "Whattya mean you never use Opera to browse the Web? D'you want a knuckle sandwich?" ;-)

I jest of course. My role at Opera is to make *friends* in the community, in the name of furthering the good fight towards future web standards adoption, help educate people to do great things on the Internet, and help Opera to make an even better browsing experience. I'll be publishing many articles on http://dev.opera.com, so check it out periodically - you may well find something helpful on there!

Anyway, I digress. d.Construct was really good last year, and I'm expecting nothing less this year. A good mix of excellent informative presentations and sparkling conversation with luminaries as well as loonimaries (like a luminaries, but drunker. About half the Britpack count in this category.)

Thursday

I'm currently on a train trying to work out how to get my new P1i to Bluetooth a Word doc to my Powerbook. Ok, so you've done it, but where have you saved it to? Damn you. I'm sure this device has a small demon inside it that constantly tries to wind me up. At least it's got Opera Mini 4 beta 2 on it so mobile browsing is painless.

I've also managed to get through about two-thirds of Cameron Moll's new PDF book, Mobile Web Design, which is a jolly good read for anyone who wants to understand how to make their web sites more accessible to mobile phone users, although he does slightly miss the point that Opera Mini both allows you to "Do Nothing" (since it supports most web standards-based content) and it shrinks your content and optimizes it for mobile on the fly, so you don't have to offer different versions of your site. He doesn't seem to mention media queries either, but these things don't stop it from being a good piece of geek literature.

Anyhow, half an hour to go to London, then a bit further to Brighton - nice and easy. I always enjoy UK conferences because it's nice to see our American brothers suffer the jetlag for once ;-)

More later...

Evening

I got to Brighton fairly late, and decided to go straight to the opening party. What I didn't realise was that it was in fact on of those dangerous Media Temple free bar parties...aaargh! I really don't think it was such a good idea to have this party the night before the conference guys (there were certainly a lot of very tired looking faces the next day, myself included.) Oh well - it meant more free beer and more insobriety, but also more fantastic people to talk to.

First of all I bumped into Gareth Rushgrove and Stu Colville, before pushing my way to the bar and getting the onslaught started. The mighty David Storey was also there from Opera, having made it over earlier in the day, and Pete Aylward, my awesome ex-compadre from foED - great to see him! It was also nice to see Niqui Merret again!

At this point it occurred to me that the Britpack folk were notably absent, so I decided to go upstairs and check it out. Sure enough, I found Alun Rowe, Paul Boag, and Pat Griffiths, grooving around. The speaker/organiser group then arrived as well - nice to see Andy, Rich and Jeremy again, and to meet Mike Stenhouse for the first time. He is indeed, a dude! Ah, saw Paul Duncan too, Glenn Jones and his missus, Richard Stephenson, and Drew and Rachel! I ended up having the obligatory conversation about kids with Rachel for a while, which probably bored all the non-parents there to tears...tough!

Scotland's very own Alan White turned up too - good to catch up with him and learn that the first Highland Fling went well. I was really gutted that I couldn't make the first one, and I have pledged to give Opera's support for the next one in any way I can. I also saw Brian Suda for the first time in ages too - great to see ya man.

Aral Balkan was also there, and it was good to have a chat about our Flash band, Phlash5, which is debuting at FiTC Hollywood this year - if it goes well, we'll be playing FOTB too. But we can't tell how it'll go yet - we have some songs, great musicians, and lots of enthusiasm, but it's also hard to rehearse, given that 3 of us are in the UK, 4 of us are in the US, and one of us is in Spain ;-)

The last bit of the night I can really remember vividly was sitting there with David and Norm from Yahoo discussing standards support in browsers. We were there last 3 people left in the bar, and I just hope it isn't the start of Opera getting some kind of reputation ;-)

It all got a bit hazy after that. I have vague recollections of fish and chips on the way to the hotel.

Friday

I can just about remember how good 3 and a half hours sleep feels. Ah, now I remember. I had a rather nice breakfast with David, Drew and Rachel, and then headed off down to the venue.

It was nice to see my old foED compadres Pete and Ben and have a chat, although at least 9 people told me to get away from the foED booth, cos I don’t work there any more ;-) T’was also really nice to say hi to Kenneth Himschoot, Christian Heilmann, Simon Willison and Natalie Downe.

Jared Spool - The dawning of the age of experience

I’d seen Jared give this talk before, at Web Directions North, but it was worth seeing again, as he is so charismatic, and has a great perspective on experience design. He showed the importance of experience by comparing the Sansa MP3 player to the iPod - the iPod is not technologically that great, but it is by far the number 1 MP3 player (Sansa being a distant 2nd) because the user experience is so good - this is largely because of the look of the devices (they are like fashion statements - people have to get the new ones) and the software - iTunes provides all the functionality you need, allowing the iPod itself to be kept gloriously simple, and is installed on more computers than Windows. The apple store is also revolutionary.

Another example Jared gave was Netflix - it’s twice as big as blockbuster. Why? They looked at why people joined, and found that 85% had a friend recommend it to them. They don't advertise; they spend their money on designing the website better instead, allowing the users to do the advertising - what a great model!

He then went through some UE disasters...instances where a company spent millions on their web sites only to see the user figures go down practically overnight. Users seem to care a great deal about maintaining their experience. Consistency is very important.

Successful user experience design integrates the user and the business. But it is something that is hard to learn, or measure analytically. It takes a lot of real experience. He referred to chicken sexers (spotting the sex of newly hatched chicks at a 95% accuracy?) and talked about midwives - the most accurate baby sexing tool we have - way more accurate than any machine. In WWII there were plane spotters – they looked at dots on the horizon and worked out if they are UK or German planes.

Why do users like Netflix? No one ever mentions the IA or the Ajax, because it is invisible to the user, which is how it should be.

Check out www.uie.com for more on Jared’s work, and www.uiconf.com for more on the UE conference they’re running - I’m sure it’ll be great!

The first end of session question made me ponder - why are all questions at conferences in fact presentations in and of themselves? They always last at least 5 minutes! In fact, that one wasn't so bad…

…Another question was about brand engagement - how forgiving are users of bad brand decisions? If you have high brand engagement, you can get away with a lot more. But users will only forgive so much…

Jared also did one of his infamous magic tricks at the end of the presentation, just to round it off!

Interim

In the short intermission, I met Matt Patterson (nice to finally meet him after commissioning him to write something for me 5 years ago!); James Cox, Seb Lee-Delisle, and John Davey (the Flash crowd were out in force!)

Peter Merholz - The experience is the product

Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path is another very good UE speaker. He started off by taking us through a history lesson of camera product development, in 1880s America.

Cameras used to be very complicated - 17 easy steps? Kodak changed all this, with their “3 easy step” camera. Their slogan was "You press the button, we do the rest", meaning that the user just took the picture, leaving all the development to the Kodak people. Kodak ended up being the premier photography brand for over 100 years.

Next, he postulated the question “what's the highest compliment your product can get?” “Highly profitable” is ok. “Never breaks” is good. But what gives you the biggest swell of pride? “It’s cool.” Yup, that's it!

Steve Jobs is very good at this. He is often linked with the following pyramid of product evolution:

• At the bottom of the pyramid you have the technology, which is essential, but just the technology is no good for the product, as ordinary people can’t use it without abstraction.
  
• Features are next up in the pyramid, which can start to make the technology more usable, and seem more attractive. But getting obsessed by features also bad - too much feature cramming sucks. Look at MS Word, and old VCRs!
  
• Experience is at the top of the pyramid - focus on what people actually want to do the most, and hide the rest. This leads to a much better product - Wii and iPod are good examples.
  

The next section was about anthropomorphising products - making them seem more human, so that people get more emotionally attached to the product and the brand. For example, Tivo has its little TV character, and the Wii has its ii’s as little human-like characters in the adverts.

Next up was designing from the outside in - think about what you want to do, and get it to look right/experience etc, then work out how to actually do it. Tim O'Reilly posted about this. Google calendar has gained massive market share against Yahoo and MS because Google really considered the experience and did customer research. They then got the look and the experience right before then working out how to implement the experience.

It is a great idea to write out lists of goals. The guy who invented the palm pilot did this, and one of his top goals was “must fit in shirt pocket.” He then created a block of wood that fitted in his shirt pocket and carried it around with him to get and idea of how the user experience should feel (it’s mentioned here.)

The iPod works well because it hardly does anything - all of the complicated functionality is ported over to iTunes, which does it much better (this was also mentioned in Jared’s talk) – hand held devices are not good for entering data, so it is much better to put this on the desktop if you can.

He also talked about the American woman who redesigned American pill bottles - colour coded, clear instructions for family member, drug name, intake instructions etc.

Finally, he showed an Adaptive Path video about a product they’d like to create ASAP, but which is only theoretical at the moment - see http://www.adaptivepath.com/charmr. This felt very much like showing off how clever they were, but hey, it was still fun, and insightful.

Leisa Reichelt - Waterfall bad, washing machine good

Next up we had Leisa Reichelt. She talked about the next part of the process – when you’ve designed your user experience, how do you start to plan your product, and implement it?

Creating a team to develop software is all about managing risk and expectations. Some people create a big fat spec document before they start, and some people don’t.

Waterfall refers to a strictly linear process where there's no going back through each iteration until you’ve finished. This is all well and good, but it has many problems. It is bad for the designers and developers because it assumes that you know exactly what you're doing at the start (not necessarily the case – you might have to start again half way through because of something you didn’t consider.) It also assumes that design stops at the end of the design phase, and then throws the design documents over the wall to the rest of the team to implement – encouraging the team members to work in isolation like this is obviously bad bad bad.

It is just not the way humans are programmed to work. MCC did research on how people solve problems by looking how designers approached a task they knew little about. Results showed that people like to work simultaneously on the problem and the solution, flipping back and forth again, rather than thinking of a solution and following it all the way to the end, then seeing if it worked or not.

Washing machine refers to a spiral process where you can go back round the corner again to fix parts of the planning that aren't working, before you reach the end. It solves a lot of the problems listed above, and makes projects much less likely to run over budget. The washing machine model is iterative, allows for an early and rapid release cycle, is multi-disciplinary, collaborative, and involves real end users. Agile development is a fairly good fit for a washing machine process, although it doesn't really contain enough user insight/testing generally. You can always create a hybrid to make it better?

Leisa seemed to know what she was talking about, and her slides were great - a bunch of photographs of sticky notes stuck to a table. I liked the low-fi approach!

Lunch

David and I found an amazing sushi and noodle bar called E-Kagen for lunch (highly recommended by Jeremy.) We had dinner with Natalie Downes, Simon Willison, James Aylett, Steve Marshall and a few other folks - very tasty! The only slight complaint was that the service was quite slow, so we missed about half of the next talk ;-(

Cameron Moll - Good design vs great design

I arrived late for this, but I’ve seen it before, and it is a great talk. Cameron is a good presenter, and his knowledge of design is top notch. Topics included typography, interface bloat, good advertising, bullet-proofing, accessibility, and thoughtful testing, for example considering individual use cases beyond your own. A good way to test the effectiveness of an interface is to grey scale and blur it, and then look to see if the page hierarchy still "works."

Cameron is speaking at the UIConf in November - use moll as the code when booking your ticket to get a discount!

George Oates and Denise Wilton – Human traffic

I’d seen both Denise and George speak before, so I knew to expect a good talk. Although I didn’t know previous to this talk that Denise co launched B3TA! That makes her my heroine by default ;-)

George is the lead developer for Flickr. She started by talking about the original version of Flickr, which actually started as a Flash-based community game application with various photo features, and developed into a pure photo community over several iterations.

So how do you build a community? Create things people can do together, eg play games, and content to create, eg photos. Keep it changing/evolving, so they will have reasons to come back. It's also about connecting with people with similar interests, and having users act as hosts, rather than just the site creators. Dealing with passionate feedback is an interesting one. You must be careful with controversial features, as a feature that users hate can cause a lot of backlash. It's the users' site, and they hate you changing it in a way they don't like! Think carefully about what people actually want...

Denise gave a very interesting example of this – when people first started to swear on the B3TA forums, they added filters so that swear words were replaced by names of fruit, eg c**t became cranberry. It was fun for a while, but eventually people complained that they wanted their swearing back, so they turned the filters off.

After the talk I bumped into Jon Hicks, which rocked, because he's cool!

On to the next talk!

Matt Webb - The experience stack

Matt Webb seemed like a very animated character, and good speaker, but I think this was the only talk that I feel slightly let the day down - and only slightly. He basically presented an A-Z of words, names and phrases to do with experience design. Maybe I just "didn't get it," but I felt that while it was entertaining, and provided a few interesting insights, I felt that the balance was tipped too much towards thoughts, anecdotes and humour, and not quite enough towards actual useful stuff.

His insights about the way the brain is wired to see 3D was interesting (eg the sun comes from the sky above, so buttons consisting of gradients that start off light at the top will always appear convex.) His comments about how computer games start (eg do they start with a story, or a grave danger, and do they just throw you into the thick of the action?) Web sites often just seem to throw you into the thick of the action, assuming you know what you are doing, with no effort to help you or set context.

I also enjoyed some of the stuff about the Mac Disco CD burning app, in which the Window actually catches fire when it’s burning a CD, and the Olinda (a digital radio with physical interfaces to allow you to "bolt on" extra pieces of hardware with different functionality. Users love this kind of customization in software, so why not provide it in hardware too?

Tom Coates - Designing for a web of data

I'd never seen Tom Coates speak before, but I am glad I did - it was a perfect talk to round the day off, with a mix of brilliant insights about application design, biting humour, and good general commentary about where the world of web application development is going. How can you not love a man who starts a talk with "Hello Brighton! I'd like to start by congratulating you on the quality of your gay people."? He also gave us a warning that last time he gave a similar talk, the building got stuck by lightning.

He started by talking about Yahoo's Brickhouse project - kind of like a think tank that looks at new/future concepts for web applications and user experience design, and new product development, that kind of stuff.

He mentioned quite rightly that we are changing the web from a web of pages to a web of data, and that users and the data on the sites are getting closer together. You only have to look at a site like Flickr to understand what this means.

His key concepts were as follows:

1. Your site is not your product

This basically means that your product does not stop with your web site - it extends to your entire user experience, derivative sites, data from your site used in Mashups, and even physical objects, such as sensors, or even merchandise like t-shirts. Again, look at Flickr, with its site, API leading to loads of Mashups, and even physical stuff like Moo cards, and Wifi picture frames that display your photographs. In THE WORLD OF TOMORROW, we will see a lot more of the web of data bleeding into the real world. Check out Nabaztag , Ambient Orb, Wattson and the weather underground, a service whereby you collect weather data using a digital barometer, and then upload it to a web site where you can display the results in lots of different ways. Look at Apple TV.

Another great quote came when he was trying to access Twitter to show an example, and it came up with an error - "Twitter is a way of accessing error messages on the web". He said that something like 90% of twitter data is not entered or viewed using the actual Twitter web site - it's dealt with using addons/other means. So the central Twitter site is not really acting as an interface - it's just acting like a store of data to be manipulated by other apps.

2. Playing well with others

This point is all about designing for recombination - making sure your site has enough hooks so that your data can be taken and utilized by others in different ways. Opening up data and services is great, as it drives people to your site, gives them content that they will pay for, allows advertising and putting yourself into the ecosystem, and makes your services more attractive due to less central development. It makes the web a proper platform.

He showed oakland.crimespotting.org/, a site obviously inspired by chicagocrime.org, but which is Flash-based, using MS's mapping system.

He also introduced a new Yahoo product called FireEagle, which basically allows you to recombine data sources and enhance sites in very interesting ways, kind of like a key to data that can enhance sites that know about it, leading to some very cool Mashups and localized data services on phone or PC. He showed a few cool examples on mobiles, and then even a service that pushes data to Mac dashboard widgets to show you where your friends are in the world. Cool!!

3. Paths through a web of data
4. Turning paths into navigation

I was so blown away by FireEagle that I didn't get too many more notes, but I still got some more good points! Tom started talking about how Datasets are getting bigger and bigger - larger datasets are more useful, but they do present a scalability problem. Example - there are 1.35 billion photos on Flickr. The way to deal with this sounds rather illogical at first - you need MORE DATA. Metadata, to be precise. Metadata that groups the other data, explains how different pieces relate, give the data more context, allowing more efficient and more powerful data manipulation. Metadata makes the dataset better for everyone.

To demonstrate, he showed Flickr again, and looked at exactly how much data is stored about each photo - even down to stuff like camera details, eg Lens aperture. You can do a lot of really interesting searches with this stuff.

This was also the point where he ranted rather amusingly about Bill Clinton's book "Giving", while showing the kind of data available on Amazon, and the different paths available to navigate through it. "Giving"? Yukk.

5. Collaborative design practice

As Tom mentioned at the start of the talk, this was his hippy bit - he made a statement about different technical companies, and the fact that every company seems to have a dominant job role that has the most weight in the company, and seems to call all the shots, eg the developers, or the editors. He basically put a call out for everyone to work more harmoniously together, and not let this happen. I think it's a good sentiment.

Evening

So, after a great day of talks, we now had a great evening event to contend with, co-sponsored by Yahoo and the BBC. After dropping my bag off at the hotel, I got to the party pretty much on time (after a brief but good conversation with Ryan Carson and Paul Boag about the Future of the web™ and how to save the world,) and proceeded to work on the most important goals:

1. Not be stuck in the huge queue for the food when it got served
   
2. Beer. Free beer.
   

Stu Colville and I managed to achieve both goals pretty damn well. Were were out and finished by the time David (Storey) had managed to just about get in to the queue.

Next up several good conversations followed concerning Opera 4 Mini and the future of Opera and browsers in general, with Chris Heilmann, and later on Paul Lloyd and Trevor Morris.

I was feeling pretty tired at this point, after the day's awesome but lengthy proceedings, but I was saved, and shown my second wind by the might Scottish contingent, consisting of Alan White and Roan Lavery. We talked about all manner of insane stuff for ages, from Alan's vision for world domination, to Peep show, to music, to computer games (Eve online - no!) to Alan's amazing magic tricks (you do realise amazing is just a synonym for appalling in this context.)

At this point, I was definitely in party mode, and ended up going on to the "special secret" party along with Mike Stenhouse, Richard Stephenson and some others. Richard will probably never talk to me again, as I not only blagged him to come to a party he didn't altogether want to come to, but I blagged him to come to a party he didn't altogether want to come to that he then bought expensive champagne at! We enjoyed it. Thank you Richard, for being drunk and accommodating!

The Party, like the closing party for the last d.Construct, was in a smallish guesthouse – way too small for the whole conference to come back to! I spent the last few hours chatting to likes of Andy Budd, Jeremy, Brian Suda, Christian Heilmann, Ioanna, Thomas Van Der Wal and Norm. After leaving, the last task was to find another fish and chip shop to satisfy David’s fish and chip obsession, and then I was able to go to bed.

Great conference, all who were involved! And apologies to anyone who I missed off this report – I have a few name recollection problems…!

FIN!