Good to Great Research: Breaking Away from the Formula

Whether they sponsor research or conduct it themselves, people want simple, repeatable steps that produce consistent, predictable outcomes.  When it comes to the qualitative research that is key to your design and development process, is your approach good or great?  Does it even matter?

Here’s the good news:  research can be done according to a formula and produce pretty good results, maybe even good enough for 60–80 percent of situations.  But formula research will never produce great results.  It won’t break through or innovate.  It will never result in leadership—market, industry, or otherwise.  If you really want to move beyond the pack, you have to depart from the world of formula research.

About Jessica Coffey
Jessica Coffey’s background and education encompasses design, research, and psychology.  As co-founder of Teneo Research, she draws on over a decade of experience leading global research and design programs for innovative companies such as HP, Microsoft, Pepsi, Samsung, and Whirlpool.  Prior to Teneo, Jessica was senior director of research at Fiori Product Development, where she led and grew its renowned research business.  She served as professor and design research manager at the Center for Universal Design at NC State, and has also held design and research positions with esteemed firms including E-Lab and Ziba Design.

See the slides from the March 3 meeting.

Read notes from the March 3 meeting.

Mobile Agency Life: Leadership in a Quickly Shifting Landscape

The release of the iPhone 3G and, with it, Apple’s launch of the App Store marked 2008 as the year that mobile computing changed forever.  We are witnessing the birth of a new class of technology:  pocket-sized devices with always-on broadband that understand who you are and where you are.  With a technological and cultural revolution unfolding before our eyes, how do interaction designers and agencies deal with such a quickly shifting landscape?  What does leadership mean when there is a perceived lack of solid research, UI best practices, and industry mentors at your fingertips?  James will bring some clarity to this area, reflecting on her experiences designing successful interactions for a variety of devices.

About James Keller
James Keller is a digital communications strategist and user experience evangelist at Small Society, a small agency based in Portland with a passion for the iPhone™ platform, dedicated to helping organizations bring great ideas to life.  Before joining the Small Society team, James was at Wieden+Kennedy helping the Portland office align client business goals and brand experiences with emerging technologies.  Leveraging her extensive knowledge of interaction design, business analysis, campaign analytics, and integrated marketing communications, she has led multiple teams in creating efficient and effective online strategies for top brands such as Coca-Cola, NIKE, Procter & Gamble, Levi’s, LAIKA Studio, Zipcar, and the MTV Networks.  She can frequently be seen at conferences speaking on topics such as information architecture, social media, and convergent culture.

It was a great meeting with lots of energy. James described what it was like to be an Apple ap developer on the day the iPad was announced. People were curious to hear James tell us about the new Apple products. Nancy Wirsig McClure confers with John Smith as he prepares to take notes of the program. 

Download John’s notes from the session.

Confessions of a Public Speaker

If you ever wonder why your wonderful ideas rarely get accepted or are compromised beyond recognition in meeting after meeting, it might not be your creative design talents that are the problem.  It could be your ability to frame, shape, and pitch your ideas effectively to others.

This fun, brutally honest talk, loosely based on the O’Reilly book Confessions of a Public Speaker, will give you everything you need to know to present, pitch, and sell your ideas so your world domination plans can begin.

In addition to the CHIFOO event, Scott Berkun will be making the following public appearances: January 6, 9am - The AM Northwest television show on KATU Channel 2 He will also be in the Primetime show, which airs at 7pm on Channel 2.2 (without cable), Channel 302 if you have Comcast cable, or 464 on Verizon FIOS. (First Thursday!) January 7, 7pm. Powell’s Technical Books, 33 NW Park - Book Signing for “Confessions of a Public Speaker.” This is a free event.

About Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is the bestselling author of Making Things Happen and The Myths of Innovation. His work as a writer and public speaker has appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, and other media.  He has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio.  His many popular essays and entertaining lectures can be found for free on his blog at www.scottberkun.com

It was a full house at our first meeting of the year with speaker Scott Berkun. Thanks to the Art Institute for hosting our standing room only crowd this night. And thanks to everyone who showed up. There was plenty of lively discussion before and after this meeting.

(Dis)connecting Cultures: When Collaboration Technologies Are Not Enough

Much work in collaboration has focused on task-specific activities.  The Media Space (a technologically-connected environment of audio and video) was counter to this trend in that it was always on and often peripheral to ongoing activity.  It successfully allowed collaboration in a research laboratory geographically split between Portland, OR, and Palo Alto, CA, spawning a wide range of collaborative technologies in media spaces, shared drawing, and awareness.

It is not always easy to duplicate the success of that first media space.  One such attempt initially appeared to offer the casual interactions and peripheral awareness provided by a media space.  Nevertheless, the deployment was a disappointment.  What lessons were learned and how can failed experiences be useful for future research success?

Download the slides from
(Dis)connecting Cultures:
When Collaboration Technologies Are Not Enough

About the Speaker
Sara Bly provides consulting services for designing and conducting user experience studies.  Her studies encompass a wide range of methodologies to inform the design of technologies from early conceptual states to deployment.  Methodologies include a range of qualitative methods including fieldwork and laboratory designed experiences.  The work is iterative, learning from each phase and using that learning as grounding to inform next steps.  Sara has a Ph.D. in computer science and worked for several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

The Ebb and Flow of Activity Streams

Do you ever feel like you’re being hit with a firehose of information?

In the last several years activity streams have infiltrated the enterprise collaboration space. While they promise to alleviate some of the frustrations of email and other communication software, they can also have some interesting side-effects (such as the “fire-hose effect”). In this talk, Joshua Porter will describe the ebbs and flows of activity streams, how they work and don’t work, and how we might design better ones going forward.

See the slides from the October 7 meeting >>

About the Speaker

Joshua Porter is an interface designer and consultant focusing exclusively on the design of social web applications. Josh wrote the book Designing for the Social Web and speaks regularly at web design conferences and events around the world. Since 2003 he has written the popular design blog bokardo.com. Josh lives in Newburyport, Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Read his latest blog post on Feature Development in Action: Broadcast Stream Messages in Socialcast.

Follow him on twitter: @bokardo

Add this event to your Google calendar.

Making and Sharing Space: Design Success for Interaction and Industrial Designers

When designing products with both form and function aspects to them, a team of people with varied talents is required. Industrial designers and interaction designers must come together to create something that is holistic and cohesive. But our education, focus, and areas of expertise can be very different. This presentation will focus on how the “war room” or actual physical space that the team inhabits can help the success of the design and foster great team relationships. In this shared space is where designers can give their ideas shape, and explore solutions together.

About the Speaker
Gretchen Anderson is the Director of Interaction Design at Lunar Design in San Francisco. Her experience working in firms that do both industrial and interaction design has taught her that getting ideas through the concept phase is a difficult yet crucial stage to successful product design. Gretchen was educated at Harvard and has worked in the design industry for 13 years creating unique products and experiences—from medical products and consumer electronics, to enterprise software applications and consumer websites. Her clients include Starbucks, Virgin Records, HP, Microsoft, Intel, SanDisk, and Johnson & Johnson.

CHIFOO and IxDA Social Bowling

Tired of all this sunshine and fresh air? Perhaps it’s time for some old-fashioned indoor sports. Dig out that bowling shirt and dust off the ball: on Wednesday, August 5th at 6 pm CHIFOO hits the lanes at AMF Bowl, 3031 SE Powell. See a map.

We invite you to join us at our third annual CHI-Bowl event hosted with IxDA Portland to bowl a few games or just drink a beer and socialize. You won’t need to bowl a game to win one of our fabulous prizes, including a copy of Axure ($599 value) and other special goodies. In addition to shoe rental and 3 games of bowling, there will be pizza and soda for all. Beer will be available on a no-host basis.

CHIFOO members will get in free, as usual. Non-members and guests will be asked to pay $10 for this great entertainment package. Please bring your friends on down, form a team and channel your inner Lebowski with a bowling ball in hand. It’s the most interactive meeting of the year. Don’t miss it! Just let us know you’re coming.

Going Bowling with CHIFOO?
Please RSVP on Upcoming so we know how many to expect. Thanks!

Reading and Collaborating in a Digital Age

Reading is an inherently social experience: what we read and how we read it is shaped by who we know and the broader communities we belong to. With that in mind, Cathy will take a fresh look at the future of eBooks and how we get there from here. In particular, she will share some findings from a body of studies of reading-related activities (such as annotation and clipping) and will draw on her experiences with several generations of eBook products, including Microsoft Reader, ePeriodicals (a reader for magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire), and the Times News Reader (an RSS-based reader for The New York Times).

About the Speaker
Cathy Marshall is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley; she has knocked around in both the product and research divisions at Microsoft. Cathy has long worked in the disciplinary interstices of computer science, information science, and the humanities, with occasional collaborations in the arts and the sciences. She was a long-time member of the research staff at Xerox PARC and is an affiliate of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries at Texas A&M University. Cathy won the ACM Hypertext conference’s best paper award in 1998 and 1999, and the best paper award at the IEEE/ACM Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in 1998 and 2008. She has delivered keynotes at WWW, Hypertext, Usenix FAST, CNI, VALA, ACH-ALLC, and a variety of other CS and LIS venues. Go to Cathy’s Homepage to find her publications, her blog, her contact information, and—most importantly—how she is related to Elvis.

Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation

A culture’s penchant for participation is not dictated by technology; rather, it is the result of changes in human behavior and social organization including innovative design, adoption, appropriation, and adaptation of technologies to their needs. In this talk, Gerhard will share some of his experiences designing and assessing socio-technical environments for cultures of participation. His approach is grounded in the basic assumption that innovative technological developments are necessary for participation cultures, but they are not sufficient. Socio-technical systems are needed because the deep and enduring changes of societies are not just technological, but social and cultural as well.

Throughout the evening, Gerhard will encourage the audience to explore two themes: meta-design (a framework aimed at defining social and technical infrastructures in which new forms of collaborative design can take place) and social creativity (focused on harnessing the complex problem-solving power of our interactions with other people and shared artifacts).

See the slides from Understanding, Fostering, and Supporting Cultures of Participation.

About the Speaker

Gerhard Fischer is a Professor of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a member of the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) Academy. His research interests include learning, working, and collaborating with new media; human-computer interaction; cognitive science; assistive technologies; and cross-disciplinary collaboration and education.

Over the last twenty years, Gerhard has pioneered and developed innovative conceptual frameworks and socio-technical environments for distributed intelligence, social creativity, and meta-design. In these areas he has published extensively, directed research projects, applied the conceptual frameworks to education, founded new research initiatives, and advised organizations in reinventing themselves for the information age.

All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques

Full-Day Workshop -
Come join Lane Halley and Jeff Patton for a fast-paced day of fun and learning. Through a combination of lecture and hands-on exercises, you will increase your understanding of both User-Centered Design (UCD) and Agile methods and gain useful techniques you can use immediately.

Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile

Love it or hate it, everyone seems to be talking about Agile. Agile is used at scrappy startups that are iteratively defining their products and markets and at large companies with complex business problems working with internationally distributed teams. In each of these different settings, some folks are strong advocates of Agile, while some are still skeptics. Some people in the User-Centered Design (UCD) community dismiss Agile as a fad, others have embraced it whole-heartedly. Can these two worlds intersect?

In this talk, Jeff and Lane will draw on their personal experience to share the characteristics of successful (and unsuccessful!) blends of UCD and Agile techniques.

After this talk, you’ll be able to answer these questions:
• What do UCD people need to know about Agile?
• What do Agile people need to know about UCD?
• What are the pain points?
• How can Agile and UCD methods be used together?

About the Speakers
Lane Halley is a Principal Design Consultant with Cooper in San Francisco, CA. Her career spans the formative years of the interaction design profession. Prior to joining Cooper in 1997, Lane worked in marketing, training development, technical account management, and product management roles at SSC, Microsoft, Mindscape, and SenSage. While at Cooper, she has helped companies ranging from start-ups to large corporations create compelling design solutions for enterprise and consumer applications, websites, and devices, and is a popular teacher of CooperU courses. Lane believes that interaction design is a bridge between product management and development, and that user experience design informs and enhances Agile product development.

For the past fifteen years, Jeff Patton has designed and developed software on a wide variety of projects, from online aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. A winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile development, Jeff has focused on Agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. He has specialized in the application of user-centered design techniques to improve requirements, planning, and products for Agile projects. His recent writing on the subject can be found at www.agileproductdesign.com and in Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear. His forthcoming book gives tactical advice to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software.

Design Principles of Wiki

Born in Portland thirteen years ago, Wiki technology and the communities it supports have grown to disruptive proportions in business, education, collaboration, politics, and even intelligence. In this talk, the inventor of this technology relates Wiki’s founding motivation, design principles, and early impact. He turns then to the modern web, the technical and social challenges it presents, and the opportunities identified in his current position at AboutUs.org.

About the Speaker
Ward Cunningham is the Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward co-founded the consultancy Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., and has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns and Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software, and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb. Ward hosts the AgileManifesto.org. He is a founder of the Hillside Group, where he created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences that continue to be held all over the world.

Agile Retrospectives: Collaboration for Continuous Improvement

Software teams experience what goes right and what goes wrong, what works and what doesn’t, during each and every day of each and every project. What happens to that hard-earned experience? In too many organizations, on too many projects, it dissipates as team members shift focus and move on to the next project or chunk of work. Real value lies in capturing, managing, and disseminating technical knowledge and process wisdom to improve current and future projects.

Retrospectives offer the greatest lever for improving any software development project or process—based on the solid data of a team’s immediate past experience of success and failure. Through Retrospectives, teams systematically evaluate their own performance, explore their lessons learned, expand their capacity and capability, and choose how to improve the way they build and deliver products to your customers. For best results, smart teams and organizations convene Retrospectives iteratively throughout the project and again after delivery. Successful teams learn how to encounter problems and implement solutions effectively throughout the project—not just at the end, and identify ways to maintain the relevance of continuous improvement to the work of the team.

About the Speaker
Diana Larsen co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2006). Current chairperson of the Agile Alliance board of directors, Diana consults with leaders and teams to create work processes where innovation, inspiration, and imagination flourish at FutureWorks Consulting. With more than fifteen years of experience working with technical professionals, she brings focus to the human side of software development. Her clients value her collaboration in shaping an environment where productive teams can thrive in times of change. Diana discovers solutions and possibilities where others find only barriers and obstacles.

How Communities Straddle, Leap, and Land on Technology Choices

Can a community design its own digital habitat? Can a professional design a habitat on behalf of a community? Designing for a community is much harder than designing for a solitary individual. A digital habitat includes all the tools and the practices that enable a community to work and reproduce itself. It’s produced collectively, even though it’s experienced individually. This talk will explore how digital habitats vary across different contexts such as a company intranet, a mostly face-to-face community like CHIFOO, and a mostly online community like Planet Ubuntu.  We’ll discuss some case studies of communities and the evolution of their digital habitats, exploring fundamental design tensions, kinds of tool integration, and the nature of technology stewardship. 

Download the meeting notes as a .pdf provided by Ronald Barrett
See the meeting slides on SlideShare

About the Speaker
John D. Smith is a coach, leader, evaluator, and technology steward for communities of practice. He helps communities, their leaders, and their sponsors with the design and production of community events, through community self-assessments and the selection, configuration, and use of technologies. John is the community steward for CPsquare, an international community of practice on communities of practice. His clients include corporations, universities, foundations, and non-profit organizations around the globe. He is the co-author of the forthcoming book, Digital Habitats: Stewarding Technology for Communities, which he has been working on with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White for five years. He has been working full time with communities of practice and teaching online for the past 10 years. 

John is trained in dialog, evaluation, and data analysis.  He worked at the University of Colorado as a planner, institutional researcher, administrator, and technologist for 20 years. He received a Bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College and a Master’s degree in planning and architecture from the University of New Mexico. He was born and raised in Humacao, Puerto Rico.

Designing Successful Collaboration Using Social Network Analysis

Social software holds the promise of improving collaboration between people in organizations, which could significantly improve employee retention, engagement, innovation, learning, and productivity. Designing and implementing these systems, however, can be difficult. People may not work they way they say they do, or may not understand the bigger picture of how a community collaborates, leading to assumptions and requirements that are incorrect. Using a case study, we will look at how Social Network Analysis aided in a successful implementation of social software, as well as how it influenced the design and deployment.

Download a .pdf of the slides from Kathryn’s talk

About the Speaker
Kathryn Everest is a Social Software Advisor for Jive Software, specializing in the business aspects of implementing social software in corporate environments. Kathryn helps leading organizations achieve business goals, such as improving innovation, knowledge access, and retention and collaboration across complex and geographically dispersed organizations. Kathryn also participates in a number of committees and boards dedicated to knowledge mobilization and collaboration, such as the Monieson Centre at Queens University and the Ontario Neurotrauma Foundation KM Steering Committee. She also speaks at conferences and leading Canadian business schools such as the Queens School of Business and Richard Ivey School of Business.

Creative solutions through Innovation Games®

Innovation Games® is a set of a dozen hands-on activities to develop strategic planning and tactical decision-making skills. Using a variety of expressive techniques, Innovation Games get firsthand reactions from customers and users about an actual or proposed product, a product category, or service offering.

  While similar to focus groups in a few ways, Innovation Games (and other design games) stimulate the customers to tell you things that are important for them that you would have never thought to ask.

Discover more about Innovation Games
See Nancy’s Innovation Games photos
Innovation Games at the Webdesign Festival Limoges

Registration:

$300 general admission; $250 for CHIFOO members

CHIFOO Member 2 for 1 deal

For an extra $50, you can bring a colleague and get 2 tickets for $300. Not a member? No problem, simply join CHIFOO for only $20 and you can bring a colleague too.

REGISTER NOW for this engaging, stimulating workshop.

Fun and Games at Work

Frishberg introduces design games: structured, time-limited and enjoyable activities to involve your customers, your users, and your team.

They focus your audience on specific questions related to products and services such as prioritization of features, what’s not working well, how a product fits into daily life, and what kind of physical-digital environment your customers live in. In the end, your team has data to drive decisions, and even had some fun along the way!

Researching Meaning to Identify More Meaningful Customer Experiences

The business world has begun to talk about the need to address meaning in customers’ lives, but few have bothered to define what this means and none have developed any models or methods for how this intersects with product or service development—until now.

Nathan Shedroff, one of the the authors of Making Meaning, will present a model for meaning and methods for researching customer emotion, values, and meaning, as well as describing how it affects both business strategy and new product design.

Sketching Physical Devices

Matt will introduce participants to Sketch Tools, a robust toolset that allows relative technical novices to experiment, ideate, and prototype with Phidgets RFID, sensors, Flash, networks, and more. Participants will have an opportunity to work together to sketch, design, and build prototypes using a variety of hardware and software kits. In addition, Matt will demo some cutting-edge mobile sketching platforms, as well as some past projects.

Fees and location soon to be determined.

Design Thinking in the Field

Many design methods strive to help designers better understand their users’ needs, such as ethnographic research and participatory design. Matt Cottam has put these approaches to the ultimate test: while working on a project for the healthcare industry, Matt trained to be a certified paramedic, giving him a whole new perspective into the needs of doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals. Matt will share his experiences and how they allowed him to identify truly innovative design opportunities.

About the Speaker
Matt Cottam co-founded Tellart and serves as its Creative Director—he works closely with clients using information architecture and design methods to research challenges, discover opportunities for design, and build strategies and tactics for design interventions. Matt received Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) and Bachelor of Industrial Design degrees (BID) from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). From 1998 to 2003 Matt was a Core Instructor at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics. Since 1999 he has been a member of the Part-Time Faculty at RISD, and is also a member of the Adjunct Faculty at the Design Institute Umeå, Sweden, where he teaches “Experience Prototyping.”  Matt is an Emergency Medical Technician - Cardiac (EMT-C), a National Ski Patroller, and is federally employed as a Medic for the National Disaster Medical System (RI-1 DMAT/HHS.) He has chaired conference sessions, lectured, published, and led workshops internationally on topics including information design, physical computing, collaboration strategies for engineers and designers, design for extreme environments, and design for emergency and disaster medicine.

CHIFOO and IxDA Social Bowling

Come join us for the second annual CHI-Bowl event, held in concert with the IxDA crowd.

Take a whirl at bowling some games, or just come out to socialize with your friends and colleagues. Special prizes will be awarded!

Understanding the Multi-User Experience

Interactive presentations in the museum have the institutional goal of promoting forms of social interaction that enrich the visitor experience. To meet these needs, institutions are turning to multi-user, or group, interactive scenarios. Members of Second Story Interactive Studios will show how understanding people’s needs and tendencies—and the learning curve for people that must be managed in multi-user experiences—can be squared with innovations offered by ever-changing technology and hardware, design obstacles and opportunities, and the desire to wow visitors while offering designs that are appropriate to the content.

About the Speakers
Jennifer Young’s role at Second Story is to lead all aspects of projects and serve as the primary liaison between the client and the in-house teams to orchestrate, coordinate, schedule, and manage projects through every phase of development. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from St. Lawrence University, she worked at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, where she gained experience in collections management, exhibits, education, and research. Jen recently led the award-winning World War I Museum project in Kansas City, Missouri.

Matt Arnold - With a strong engineering, design, and modeling background, Matt’s contributions to projects include Flash programming, animation, and 3D media development. In addition to providing 2D and 3D visualizations, Matt researches and develops innovative technical and engineering solutions for projects such as the Theban Mapping Project, the Lagoda at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, and the World War I Museum. Before coming to Second Story, Matt’s experience has been in the design and research of industrial, mobile, and planetary robotics. Matt has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

Design Thinking: Action and Ecosystem

The number of books, articles, and conferences on innovation, creativity, and design is staggering. Yet, there is still precious little on what designers actually do, how they do it, and how they interact with the other disciplines involved in bringing concepts to fruition.  This talk is based in the premise that design is a distinct discipline with specific skills and practices. Furthermore, the physical and cultural ecosystem in which designers work has a huge impact on their ability to exercise these skills.

This presentation aims to shine some light on design skills and their relationship to various aspects of this ecosystem. The purpose is not to make everyone a designer; rather, it is to help both designers and non-designers better understand how and where they fit into the larger mosaic that makes up the partnership required to go effectively from concept to practice.

About the Speaker
Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology.  His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making, and music.  Bill’s research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers,  technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing. In December 2005, he was appointed Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Prior to that, he was Principal of his own Toronto-based boutique design and consulting firm, Buxton Design, where his time was split between working for clients, lecturing, and trying to finish a long-delayed book on sketching and interaction design.He is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he still works with graduate students.

Using Scenarios to Drive Design: Full-Day Workshop

This full-day tutorial will teach students about the ways in which scenarios are both a crucial conceptual design and vital communication tool for successful ideation in the practice of interaction design. The instructors are versed in the scenario-based approach to interaction design as practiced in the Cooper Goal-Directed Design methodology.

About the Instructors
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise. She received her “post-grad” education in interaction design at Cooper, where she worked for three inspiring years designing interactive systems and helping refine methodology and practice. She then worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, where she was a founding member of the New Product Planning team, designing solutions for implantable medical devices that satisfy and delight customers. She also is a Director of the Interaction Design Association and an active member of CHIFOO. Above all, she is passionate about improving the world through the practice of interaction design and sharing perspectives with fellow practitioners.

Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).

Death to Personas!  Long Live Personas!

Steve and Elizabeth, former colleagues at Cooper, will discuss using personas as a tool to develop product features and behaviors. They will explore pitfalls, misconceptions, and misuse, as well as helpful persona creation and application techniques to inform interaction design solutions.

About the Speakers
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise. She received her “post-grad” education in interaction design at Cooper, where she worked for three inspiring years designing interactive systems and helping refine methodology and practice. She then worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, where she was a founding member of the New Product Planning team, designing solutions for implantable medical devices that satisfy and delight customers. She also is a Director of the Interaction Design Association and an active member of CHIFOO. Above all, she is passionate about improving the world through the practice of interaction design and sharing perspectives with fellow practitioners.

Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).

Someting New Right Away: Ideation from the World of Improvisation

Businesses crave new stuff.  And they want it now.  Product cycles shorten, competitors and information spreads faster and the consumer gets more demanding. Techniques from the world of improvisation can help respond to these forces. Improv actors are real-time, market-driven innovators.

A team of people works together to create something (a story) to satisfy a customer (the audience) under extreme time pressure (instantly, on the spot). They use a set of tools that absolutely anyone can learn and practice.  The methods improvisers use on stage help create the conditions for new ideas to emerge.

A Framework for Innovation

Originally designed to organize the fuzzy front end of new projects, the DC Cycle™ (an intuitive framework for moving toward well-researched designs and plans) has been elaborated over the past five years to greatly facilitate the innovation process, merging ideas and inspiration with context, opportunity, and customer needs.

Jon will describe the basics of the DC Cycle with its component parts and some of the philosophy behind its use. The cycle incorporates many ideas from different disciplines–from the creative process to the Toyota Development System–and can be applied to a wide variety of innovation aspects.

Half-Day Design Research Workshop with Brenda Laurel

Participants will be asked to bring design briefs or general areas of interest. Together, we will look at several qualitative and representative methods and appropriate processes for each, discussing the value of selecting and deploying a variety of methods. We’ll also be using some improvisational techniques to explore various methods. At the end of the four-hour workshop, each participant or project group should be able to leave with a well-articulated research plan.

About the Instructor
Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher and writer. Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction, and cultural aspects of technology. She currently serves as chair of the new Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Her career in human-computer interaction spans over twenty-five years. She holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in theatre from the Ohio State University. Brenda was one of the founding members of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California, where she coordinated research activities exploring gender and technology. She was also one of the founders and VP of Design of a spinoff company from Interval–Purple Moon–formed to market products based on this research. She served as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and also worked as a Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs in Menlo Park, California.

Design Research: Process and Provocations

Those of us who use ethnographic research as part of our design practice are often plagued by criticism from our colleagues in the social sciences as well as those in the design field itself. Anthropologists lift an eyebrow at our seemingly cavalier use of their qualitative methods. Hard-boiled business types snort at our lack of quantitative data. Design students ask, “if we do research with people, does that mean they get to tell us what to do?” And the Great Designers of our time claim that the whole notion of human-centered research is utterly beside the point. This talk looks at a design process that utilizes ethnographic methods as tools for informing and inspiring innovation, and answers all those mean people besides.

About the Speaker
Brenda Laurel is a designer, researcher and writer. Her work focuses on interactive narrative, human-computer interaction, and cultural aspects of technology. She currently serves as chair of the new Graduate Program in Design at California College of the Arts. Her career in human-computer interaction spans over twenty-five years. She holds an M.F.A. and Ph.D. in theatre from the Ohio State University. Brenda was one of the founding members of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation in Palo Alto, California, where she coordinated research activities exploring gender and technology. She was also one of the founders and VP of Design of a spinoff company from Interval–Purple Moon–formed to market products based on this research. She served as Chair and graduate faculty member of the graduate Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and also worked as a Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Labs in Menlo Park, California.

Sketching Smart Things: User Experience Design of Ubiquitous Computing Devices

The user experience design of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) products is a new branch of design. Like Web design was different from traditional graphic design, ubicomp user experience design is different from traditional industrial design. Mike will discuss how he has tackled (and occasionally has gotten tackled by) the unique challenges of ubicomp UX. He will reposition the notion of information as a design material, and propose merging interaction design with the principles of agile software development to create new tools for prototyping new interactions.

About the Speaker
At ThingM, Mike Kuniavsky researches, designs, and writes about people’s experiences at the intersection of technology and everyday life. Companies and universities around the world use his 2003 book Observing the User Experience to understand and teach techniques that bring the design of products closer to the people who use them. His next book, Smart Things, expected in 2007 from Elsevier, will discuss user experience design for mobile devices and ubiquitous computing. He has also contributed to a number of other books, including the encyclopedic HCI Handbook (also to appear in 2007) and his articles regularly appear in MAKE magazine. He is a regular presenter at academic conferences focusing on user experience design and ubiquitous computing. In 2001 Mike cofounded Adaptive Path, a leading San Francisco internet consultancy. Previously, he founded the Wired Digital User Experience Lab for Wired Magazine’s online division, where he served as the interaction designer of the award-winning search engine, HotBot.

Download the presentation notes

Show the Whole Story, Show how you Think

We create portfolios to build trust. Prospective clients and potential employers need to feel confident that we can meet their needs. So we create portfolios to show what we have already done in order to communicate what we can do. The problem is we’re only showing the end of the story.  Clients and employers need to know how we think and work. The end products we show are great, but how were they made? What activities did we do? What decisions did we make and how did we make them? Our portfolios need to show the entire creative process, from the brilliant napkin sketches to the design variations to the final result.

Bill and Tom will show some examples of how the interaction design group at Ziba shows its process as part of its portfolio. Come learn strategies for how you can document your process as you work to eventually show prospective clients and employers how you work and think.

About the Speakers
Bill DeRouchey is a Senior Interaction Designer at Ziba Design, shaping how people interact with devices, websites, and spaces. His goal is to create natural interactions between people and technology. He also blogs about the history of technology in our culture at historyofthebutton.com.

Tom Lakovic is Ziba’s Director of Interaction Design. He has a background in Cognitive Science, Computer Science, and Graphic Design, and he brings a multidisciplinary approach to leading the Interaction Design team at Ziba to create innovative and emotionally compelling interactions between people and their products, software, and environments.

Repositioning User Experience as a Strategic Process

It is ironic that the UX profession often fails miserably when it comes to describing the value of our deliverables to business leaders. Are we not supposed to be experts in thinking about the end user? This talk will explore a three-level framework for thinking about UX, with the goal of helping practitioners define a strategy appropriate for their business context so they can achieve greater impact. This framework is based on the presenters’ combined 30 years’ of experience working with a diverse set of businesses leaders as both in-house practitioners and consultants for leading high-technology companies and startups.

About the Speakers
Jon Innes is Director of User Experience at Augmentum, a software development consultancy. Jon has over a decade of experience, including leadership positions where he has defined and improved user experience processes at some of the world’s largest technology companies. He has designed and evaluated user interfaces for Intuit, SAP, Siebel, Cisco, Oracle, Symantec, and IBM. Jon holds a Master’s degree in Engineering Psychology and is a member of UPA, HFES, and ACM CHI/BayCHI.

Liam Friedland is the Director of User Experience at Informatica, a leading provider of data integration software and services. Prior to Informatica, he founded and ran UXstudio, a User Experience Design consultancy. Liam has been designing software products for over 16 years, and has led a wide range of first-generation design programs at some of the world’s top software companies including Microsoft, Oracle, Borland, SAP, and Siebel Systems. He has degrees in Industrial Design.

Liam will unfortunately not be able to participate in this evening’s program, but has worked closely with Jon over the past five years to develop the content that will be presented.

Selling Creative Solutions to Clients

How do you convince a client that a comprehensive usability study is the best approach to diagnosing their product’s problems? How can you approach your customer about optimizing processes in the face of long-standing political opposition? Whether you define your client as someone within or outside your organization, you likely run into challenges such as these in your day-to-day work. Panel members working in agencies and internal organizations will discuss best practices for selling ideas, solutions, and services to clients in various settings.

Our panelists are three industry veterans with long track records of successfully selling ideas and managing the impacts of the changes these ideas bring about.

Justin Garrity is the creative director at Portland interactive agency Pop Art.
Nicholas Rexing is involved in overseeing widespread change management initiatives at Tektronix.

John Sherry conducts ethnographic research for Intel and serves as an advocate for user-centered design methodologies throughout the organization.

CHI-BOWL Social

Come join in this special, once-a-year CHIFOO program event held in concert with the IxDA crowd.

Take a whirl at bowling some games, or just come out to socialize with your friends and colleagues. Special prizes will be awarded!

The Shifting Role of Design

In an increasing number of companies the role of design is changing dramatically from mere styling to a core ingredient of product strategy and innovation. But what’s behind this shift? Why are designers previously tasked only with “making things pretty” being invited to the corporate strategy table?

This talk will examine the impact that recent technology and market changes have had on the role of design within modern companies. In particular: the decreasing distance between equations and solutions made possible by technologies like 3D modeling and rapid prototyping; the increasing rate of commoditization driven by shorter product lifecycles and cheaper manufacturing; the always-on availability of massive data sources; and the growing ability of consumers to absorb and enjoy increasingly complex media and interfaces.

Designers of all types can use this knowledge to communicate the value of design skills, methodologies, and deliverables to both clients and stakeholders. In other words, this presentation provides a way to explain “why design matters more now.”

About the Speaker
Luke Wroblewski is a product designer, strategist, and author. He is currently the Principal Designer of Yahoo! Inc.‘s Social Media group and and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996.

Luke has authored a book on Web interface design principles titled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and numerous articles on design methodologies, strategies and applications including those featured in his own online publication, Functioning Form. Luke is a member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association and a frequent presenter on topics related to the Web and design.

Previously, Luke was the Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.‘s platform team. At eBay, he led the interaction strategy for new consumer products (including Kijiji and eBay Express) and internal tools and processes including design pattern and creative asset management systems. Luke also taught interface design courses in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked as a Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.

Making the Invisible Visible: The Problem with doing Good Work

There frequently is a frustrating phenomenon of one particular aspect of the kind of work user researchers do: When you do your job well, what you have illuminated about a user experience becomes so instantly accepted by either the client or design team (or both), that all the rigor and effort that went into getting there becomes invisible.

Additionally, user experience professionals are frequently called to measure their value via traditional business metrics, and while this can be done on occasion, frequently the best ways to describe our impact is through compelling stories, that in some business situations can be seen to matter less than what a spreadsheet says.

This talk will examine these phenomena and offer ways to reclaim some visibility, and give voice to our value, especially in ways that promote the value of our work in business contexts.

About the Speaker
Martha Cotton is the Vice President of Research for HLB, where she provides leadership in planning and implementing all aspects of the company’s various research programs. This includes ethnographic and observational research, focus groups, user interface development, and data collection and analysis. Martha is also one of three members of the Seed Group, HLB?s design strategy and innovation team.

Prior to HLB, Martha most previously worked for Hall & Partners as Research Director and lead of their ethnography practice. While there, she worked with her clients developing brand, channel, and positioning strategies, as well as understanding consumer experience as it informs brand and communications. Before that, Martha worked for Sapient Corporation as Director of User Research, serving as principal for all user research programs and providing leadership, vision, and delivery oversight for clients such as Nokia and Marriott.

In addition to her research work, Martha wrote and published a cookbook entitled, “Dinner Dates: A Cookbook for Couples Cooking Together.” She promoted the book in selected U.S. cities via television, radio, and print media as well as personal appearances. She is also a classically trained singer, and spent ten years working as a professional singer and actress in New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

Cascade ACM SIGGRAPH and CHIFOO present: Visual Communication

In this co-sponsored event, local experts will discuss the role of visual communication when it comes to effectively selling our services. Panelists representing various disciplines (including graphic design, interaction design, multimedia design, and industrial design) will compare visual communication approaches as they apply in agency settings, corporations, and academia. Topics will include: How we as designers communicate visually with clients, coworkers, potential employers, and other stakeholders; various aspects that define visual communication; strategies for visually communicating more effectively

About the Speakers
Liz Bacon, Chief Design Officer, Devise
Liz discovered her calling as an interaction designer in 1999 while obtaining her Master’s degree. That year, she joined Cooper, where she consulted on interaction design projects for complex software systems, consumer websites, and office telephones, and also helped advance Cooper’s methodology and practice. In 2002, Liz helped establish the Human Factors group at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 100 company that develops implantable medical devices. At St. Jude, she led all facets of user experience design work throughout the product development process. Today, Liz is Chief Design Officer of Devise, an interaction design and development consultancy based in Portland, Oregon. In Portland, Liz also organizes the IxDA Local Group and is an active participant in CHIFOO (an ACM chapter). Most of the rest of Liz’s time is spent with her daughter Evelyn, born in October 2006, or dreaming of her next autocross race.

Sabrina Jetton, Design Instructor, Portland Community College
Sabrina teaches Multimedia Design at Portland Community College. She has been a part of the PCC staff for the past 11 year years and has developed an evolving curriculum that maintains an edge on the industry standards in the area of Multimedia Design. Sabrina is also an Associate Creative Director for Ziba Design. Ziba, headquartered in Portland, Oregon, is an internationally recognized design consultancy that helps companies create ideas, designs, and experiences that connect in meaningful ways with their customers. Sabrina has a background in rich-media communication and specializes in information architecture and multimedia interface design—from cell phones to websites. Past clients include Hasbro, Microsoft, Sirius Satellite Radio, and Procter & Gamble. She received her Bachelor’s degree in graphic communication and teaches principles of usability, information architecture, and multimedia design. Sabrina also heads up Ziba’s Education discipline, providing clients with new perspectives on meaningful design and innovation as well as new methods for cultivating innovation-rich culture within their companies.

Wendie Siverts, President, FlatHED, Inc.
Wendie Siverts is president and founder of FlatHED, Inc., an industrial design office. Working with firms ranging from Fortune 500 companies to garage shop entrepreneurs, FlatHED’s portfolio includes products ranging from motorcycle goggles to rugged vehicle mount computers to wireless headsets. Focused on delivering clients fully detailed designs, FlatHED has ushered over 30 products to market in its 10-year history, as well as provided design and engineering support to many others. An active member of the Industrial Designers Society of America, Wendie served as the 2002 IDSA Western District Conference co-chair, IDSA Oregon Chapter Chair, and Ink editor.

Catherine Veraghen, Creative Director, White Horse
As Creative Director at White Horse, Catherine is instrumental in leading the development of the creative strategies, concepts, and messaging on for a variety of websites, rich media pieces, and online advertising campaigns for clients such as Columbia Sportswear, Celestial Seasonings, Nautilus, and Providence Health Care Systems. Catherine is a firm believer that the user experience is the brand in the interactive environment. She is dedicated to pursuing a holistic approach combining flawless visual design, thoughtful rich media content, engaging navigation interactions, and compelling user task flows, to create memorable branded experiences. Before joining White Horse, Catherine spent two years as Interactive Group Creative Director for CMDagency, and more than six years as Creative Director for ImageBuilder Software, one of the Pacific Northwest’s largest independent game developers.

Ethnography-based Work for Business in Emerging Markets

Businesses are increasingly relying on ethnographic-based work to catalyze new technology markets within “emerging market” countries. This talk will draw on examples from Tony’s experience in regions such as the Middle East, India, China, and South America to highlight how this research impacts the bottom line.

About the Speaker
Dr. Tony Salvador is the Director of Research for the Emerging Markets Platforms Group (EMPG) at Intel Corporation. His team of research ethnographers, along with the rest of the business unit, is based in five different global cities. Tony will discuss some of the distinguishing features of this work—from research to residence—with an emphasis on how ethnographic and related research is integrated into the business and product outcome. Prior to his current role, Tony was a research scientist and co-founder of Intel’s People & Practices Group.

Designing Persuasive Documents

As HCI practitioners, we may not always align ourselves with the role of Salesperson. But many of us are increasingly being asked to do just that. We are in the business of selling ideas, whether we are encouraging senior management to sponsor a new initiative, or convincing clients of the merits of a design solution. And knowingly or otherwise, the documents we produce every day—from product specifications to wireframes to routine e-mails—serve as our sales pitch. How can we make sure that these documents are communicating effectively, prompting the desired response from their audience, and, ultimately, successfully selling our ideas?

Designers have long been aware of the fact that polished, near-final designs evoke very different responses than quickly-rendered, rough sketches. Anyone who has ever used a “too-finished” picture to illustrate an idea still in its infancy, only to receive feedback about color and font choices, knows how frustrating it can be when people are unable to move past specific details to comment on the overall concept. In the world of HCI, this phenomenon is often referred to in terms of fidelity: lower-fidelity prototypes are used early in the design process to validate general ideas and approaches; higher-fidelity prototypes are introduced later on to better represent the final product’s form and functionality.

Carrie will discuss document design within this model of high- and low-fidelity prototyping, using what our field already knows about product design to explore how the fidelity of every-day documents may affect how effectively they promote acceptance and buy-in from their audience.

About the Speaker
Carrie Gilbert has devoted her 10-year career to making online tools and information easier to use and understand. She currently works at Portland-based agency White Horse, where she heads up the User Experience team and works with clients such as Columbia Sportswear, Knowledge Learning Corporation, and Nautilus.

Prior to joining White Horse, Carrie had the opportunity to work at Fortune 500 companies such as Silicon Graphics, Cisco Systems, and Gemstar. She holds an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a B.A. in Digital Art from San Jose State University. She has published two peer-reviewed journal articles on technical communication and is an active member of the CHIFOO (Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon) Executive Council.

Presentation Files
Download program slides and notes (392 KB .zip)

Making the Business Case for User-centered Design Strategically

Our field has been overly preoccupied with return on investment (ROI) as the basis for making the business case for user centered design (UCD). However, experience has shown that the most brilliant ROI analysis may often not win the day in the real world of business. Cost justification and (ROI) is often not persuasive, especially when we are talking to strategic level decision makers. At a certain point in the evolution of UCD, ROI arguments may have helped us gain credibility and get “a foot in the door.”

However, excessive dependence on ROI arguments can have some destructive effects. To be convincing, ROI analysis has to focus on easily measured variables that impact near-term outcomes. This can distort the way the value of our contribution is conceptualized and recognized, and artificially isolates UCD from other factors that affect the product’s ultimate success. Even more important, it can lock us into a peripheral tactical role where we address only modest incremental improvements. It can work against our field’s efforts to get involved earlier in the product planning process where we can have a more decisive impact and potentially contribute to strategic risk reduction.

David will discuss the dynamics of persuasion and harder-to-quantify factors that can make the business case for UCD more compelling to strategic decision makers. He will talk about how to position UCD with strategic decision makers who are pursuing fundamentally new initiatives, entering new markets, looking for order-of-magnitude benefits, or facing major risks. He will provide examples of specific cases where ROI arguments may be weak, but other kinds of persuasion may be very compelling.

About the Speaker
David A. Siegel, Ph.D. has worked with Dray & Associates, Inc. since 1993. He carries out field user studies and contextual research, usability evaluation, design consultation, and expert evaluation of interface designs. His practice has increasingly emphasized higher-level user experience issues, and he is involved in work to assess and improve the fit of new product concepts in developing markets. He has consulted on many software applications, Web designs, and designs for new technologies. He played a leading role in the pre-release field trials of Microsoft’s Tablet PC, which led to significant changes in functionality and design.

David has published numerous articles and book chapters on a variety of user-centered design topics, and has taught many workshops and tutorials around the globe. Together with Dr. Susan Dray, he edited the Business Column in ACM’s magazine, interactions. He is currently on the editorial board of User Experience, the magazine of the Usability Professionals Association. David received his B.A. in psychology from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA.

Presentation Files
Download the slides (225 KB .zip)

Understanding the Business Leaders’ Perspective

Over the past decade, business leaders have been bombarded with a myriad of business magazine articles on design, design awards, and consulting firms pitching their approach to design. Likewise, designers and design managers have taken to talking about their work in terms of “B” school concepts—quantifying the value of design, ROI of design, using usability data to position design—instead of “D” school concepts to get business leaders to better appreciate, value and invest in design in their companies.

Why then, despite all the focus over the last decade, are most designers and design managers failing to get business leaders to realize the value of and invest in design? Why do only a small number succeed? If business leaders want innovative design so badly, why aren’t they listening and behaving like they want it?

From this presentation, you will gain insight into the business leaders’ perspective, their challenges, and the potential roadblocks to embracing design. You’ll also learn how, from a designer’s perspective, to recognize these conditions and how to work around them.

About the Speaker
Tom Herceg is currently the Principle User Experience Design Architect for the Tektronix Video Product Line. Tom has had significant experience in incorporating user-centered design principles into product development processes. Starting way back at PARC where he worked on some of the original GUI interface idioms, through his managerial experiences at Xerox, Tom has focused on design as a means of expressing the voice of the user to build both product and brand equity.

Using scenarios to drive design

Learn techniques for creating meaningful and effective persona-based scenarios and how to prevent scenarios from becoming a tool of evil in your organization.

Former Cooper design teammates Elizabeth Bacon and Steve Calde reveal the power of scenarios as a requirements definition tool, a conceptual and detailed design tool, and a communication tool.

About the speakers
Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).

Elizabeth Bacon, M.A., is a senior interaction designer at St. Jude Medical. She received her “post-grad” education in interaction design at Cooper, where she worked for three inspiring years designing interactive systems and helping refine methodology and practice. She has worked for the past four years at St. Jude Medical, where she is a founding member of the New Product Planning team, designing solutions for implantable medical devices that satisfy and delight customers. She also is an active member of the Interaction Design Association, and is the IxDA Liaison/Member-at-Large of CHIFOO. Above all, she is passionate about improving the world through the practice of interaction design and sharing perspectives with fellow practitioners.

Work practice modeling: A UXD technique for gathering customer data

Work practice models are effective and engaging tools for gathering product-independent information from users about their day-to-day challenges and the types of tools and resources they need to do their jobs. This program will combine presentation, case study examples, and hands-on exercises to explain how to: 1) identify and model your users’ routine work practices, 2) understand and document users’ conceptual models, and 3) use these tools to gather customer information to drive product design.

About the speakers
Thomas Herceg is currently the Principle User Experience Design Architect for the Tektronix Video Product Line. Tom has had significant experience in incorporating user-centered design principles into product development processes. Starting way back at PARC where he worked on some of the original GUI interface idioms, through his managerial experiences at Xerox, Tom has focused on design as a means of expressing the voice of the user to build both product and brand equity.

Anne de Ridder is a user experience designer who has applied her technical background and visual design skills to the fields of UXD, information design, and marketing communications. Anne is currently a contractor at Tektronix, where she is helping to develop user-centered, clean-sheet designs for the Video Product Line. Anne has served on the CHIFOO Board as Vice-Chair for the last two years and is helping to define the 2007 program around the business of design, one of her current professional interests.

Presentation Files
Download the slides (383 KB .zip)

Designing with the mind in mind

The normal workings of the human mind should have some influence on our designs. Increase your store of information to make educated design choices and avoid some common errors. For interface designers, technical writers, and anyone who wants insight into mental processes and design, this course requires no psychology background.

About the speaker
Tom Hewett is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on Cognitive Psychology, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction Design, and Problem Solving and Creativity. He has been a visiting fellow, visiting professor or visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, Twente University, Hengelo, The Netherlands, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, and the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Most recently, during academic year 2003-2004, Tom spent a month as Visting Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Reinforce your foundation: There’s more to it than you may think

Education and training should provide the foundation for our HCI-related practices. Tom Hewitt unpacks the HCI Curriculum to show us the breadth and practical relevance of our field’s building blocks and provides guidance for our development through self-study and collaborative efforts.

About the speaker
Tom Hewett is Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Drexel University, where he teaches courses on Cognitive Psychology, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction, The Psychology of Human Computer Interaction Design, and Problem Solving and Creativity. He has been a visiting fellow, visiting professor or visiting researcher at the University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland, Twente University, Hengelo, The Netherlands, Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK, the Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, and the University of the Aegean, Syros, Greece. Most recently, during academic year 2003-2004, Tom spent a month as Visting Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology Sydney, Australia.

Currently Tom is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI), the Society for Applied Research in Cognition (SARMAC), the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) and the IEEE Computer Society. Tom regularly offers a professional development tutorial on cognitive aspects of interactive computing system design to interface designers at both conferences and in-house training sessions. He regularly teaches a week-long course module on Human Problem Solving for the User System Interaction program at the Technical University of Eindhoven, The Netherlands. In addition, Tom has made a variety of invited and refereed conference presentations.

Presentation Files
Download Dr. Hewett’s slides (531 KB .zip)

Networking made easy

Ann M. Marcus, Communication Strategist

About the speaker
Ann M. Marcus brings two decades of experience in communications and technology to the topic of networking. For the past several years, Ann has divided her time professionally between Collaborative Strategies in San Francisco, where she is an analyst and consultant, and with her own business communications consulting practice. Ann’s studies in sociology (ethnomethodology), linguistics, and business systems analysis form the underpinnings of her life-long interest in the ways people work together, communicate about their work, and establish processes and tools to streamline their efforts.

Ann holds a B.A. in Sociology from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)/San Diego (UCSD) and an M.B.A. in Decision Sciences from San Francisco State University. She is currently doing coursework toward a PMI (Project Management Institute) certification.

Ann has served on the program committees for Women In Technology International (WITI), Computer Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO), and Fast Company Magazine’s Company of Friends. She also participates in communities of practice in knowledge management, organizational storytelling, and video ethnography.

Tools of the trade

In July, CHIFOO will host a show-and-tell evening program focused on the tools and techniques HCI practitioners use to collect and analyze customer data. Learn about new or alternative techniques and technologies through a series of 15-minute presentations by regional practitioners showcasing real-world examples of these “tools of the trade” in action. Presentations will include an introduction to the problem, challenge, or situation under investigation; methods/tools considered and applied; and findings or status of the project.

For this event, the definition of “tools” is wide-reaching, including the physical hardware and software tools as well as the process techniques used to capture, catalogue, distill, and present the voice and needs of the user.

Program Schedule

7:00-7:15pm Quantifying Usability

Barbara Karyukin, Sr. Human Factors Engineer
XEROX Office Group, Wilsonville, OR

Ms. Karyukin will discuss the tools and methodologies she and a colleague developed to quantify and qualify the amount and value of their work at Xerox. Learn how her team measures usability, a discipline that has more attributes of a creative art than of a quantifiable methodology.

7:15pm – 7:30pm Turning Customer Needs into Product Designs

Tom Herceg, Principal User Experience Designer
Video Product Line
Tektronix, Inc.

Mr. Herceg will present a comprehensive and proven user interface design process, focusing on the tools used throughout the process and the types of user data collected at each step. He will also show how this information translates directly into the design of an intuitive user experience. During the Q/A section on the evening, attendees will be able to view and discuss particular tools in detail.

7:30pm – 7:45pm Audio and Video Recording: Capturing the voice of the customer

Anne de Ridder, User Experience Designer

Ms. de Ridder will discuss her experiences with selecting audio and video equipment for capturing input from customers and working with collected media footage. The presentation will cover available equipment and its benefits and tradeoffs.

7:45pm – 8:00pm Smart Pix Manager: Organizing Video Snippets

Hari Vepadharmalingam, Interaction Designer
Leo Frishberg, Principal User Experience Designer
Logic Analyzer Product Line
Tektronix, Inc.

Mr. Frishberg and Mr. Vepadharmalingam will present Smart Pix Manager, an inexpensive image and video archiving application they used to catalog over 700 video snippets and still images. The presentation will include a brief overview of their cataloging process, which will introduce the details of the product’s user interface and features, as well as a discussion of how they made use of the selected images in various contexts as part of their design/development process.

8:00pm – 9:00pm Individual Question and Answer Session with Presenters

Professional participation: When you reach beyond your job

Professional societies, industry consortia, and trade associations provide us with education, networking, standards, public policy, and professional development.

Panelists provide a glimpse into what they did, when they did it, how they got involved, why they signed up, and their own view of the benefits and costs.

The Interaction Design Association (IxDA): Growing an international community

Elizabeth Bacon introduces the new Interaction Design Association, a non-profit, member-supported international organization dedicated to advancing the profession of interaction design. She explains its early history as a mailing list, growth as a group, and its recent formal incorporation. As a volunteer organizer of IxDA Face-to-Face gatherings on the west coast and a member-at-large of CHIFOO, Liz will also encourage discussion about how this new organization can successfully build interaction design communities around the world, and especially offer value to practitioners here in the Northwest.

About the speaker
Elizabeth Bacon, M.A., received a “post-grad” education in Interaction Design at Cooper, where she spent three years designing interactive systems and helping refine methodology and practice. Today, she works at St. Jude Medical, designing solutions for implantable medical devices. Involved in the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) since its inception, she is passionate about obtaining professional recognition for the field and helping build its community of practice.

Time is money ... Can you $pare a minute?

One of the most difficult challenges in the usability field is getting clients to realize just how much of a difference usability can make. But every so often, a project comes along that provides the opportunity to demonstrate immediate, tangible savings. Improvements to a Customer Information System (CIS) at an electric utility resulted in decreasing call processing times by approximately 1 minute, resulting in a net savings of 10 FTEs (reduced the need for new hires and related training).

About the speaker
Chris Bond is responsible for leading usability efforts across the corporation for CIS improvements, web development and IVR design. As an active member of the Human Factors Society and the Usability Professionals’ Association he promotes usability in systems design as a guest speaker in various forums. He has written a number of articles on usability and developed several user interface guidelines for web page design and automated telephone systems. PGE currently serves over 770,000 customers in northwest Oregon.

Expression into facts: Practical statistics in design research

When to research and when not; how to ask questions; the scientific method; validity and reliability; experimental design; applying basic methods to usability work.

Fundamentals are tied to practical, real-world examples to illustrate the power and pitfalls of statistics in design research.

About the speaker
Tom Cocklin is a hardware human factors engineer with over 20 years of experience in product design and usability testing. Products he has collaborated on include UNIX workstations, networking systems, scanners, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and printers. During product development he has created novel methods for turning expression into fact through his research in acoustic quality, control quality and image texture assessments. He holds a B.A in Psychology from the University of Colorado and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Kansas and is a Certified Human Factors Professional.

Tales from the field: Practice issues in home and workplace ethnography

In recent years, studies of human computer interaction have expanded from usability labs to homes and offices. Often called “ethnographic research”, these studies look at the everyday, in situ activities and behaviors of people in order to provide insights for the design and evaluation of technologies.

This talk will focus on issues involved in going into people’s homes and offices (i.e. the “field”) with examples from studies conducted in the past few years. E.g., How could we study reading in bed? Will digital pictures be around forever? Does anyone other than your grandmother “clip” from newspapers and magazines? The presentation will encourage interaction and discussion.

About the speaker
Dr. Sara Bly has been an active researcher and practitioner in qualitative user studies for more than 20 years. She was involved in Media Space research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center before becoming an independent consultant. Sara has worked closely with designers, social scientists and engineers to develop methods for using ethnographic methods for informing the design of technology. She has been active in ACM SIGCHI since its inception, recently receiving the Lifetime Service Award.

Data: Finding What You Need; Documenting What You Did With It; Publishing What You Produce

There is a common philosophy that says if you collect more data, you can distill it into more information, and that will result in greater knowledge, culminating in greater wisdom.

In modeling complex systems and evaluating policy decisions, we develop models that require data sets that establish initial conditions as well as continued data for model validation and correction. This data is largely non-textual. The quantity of high quality data required is daunting, but more daunting are the candidate data sources—both in the number of possible sources and the quantity of data.

As an example, the GOES R satellite system scheduled for deployment in 2012 will produce roughly 500,000 data products per day per satellite, and it is but one in a myriad of data sensing devices. Data collectors report that as much as 98% of the data they collect is never looked at. Clearly, having more does not translate into greater wisdom unless we can effectively use what we have. Addressing this is as much a social as a technical problem.

Understanding Fun and Games: User Research at Microsoft Game Studios

Imagine hearing an MS Word user say “Creating a form letter was easy, but it wasn’t very fun,” or an Excel user say “I completed the pivot tables, but it just wasn’t challenging enough!” Maximizing the fun and making a software product appropriately challenging are not issues most user researchers have to worry about, but they are the core concerns in the development of good games. In the Games User Research group at Microsoft Game Studios (MGS), the goal is to gather information from consumers to identify and fix issues in games that prevent consumers from experiencing the fun. If this mission sounds straightforward, consider that games pride themselves on—and distinguish themselves from the competition by—being cutting edge and unique.

These are qualities that tend to strike fear into the hearts of many user researchers because they defy the use of consistent, generalizable principles for making products more accommodating to consumers’ needs and desires. The group has had to adapt accordingly, developing cutting edge (or at least abrading edge) methods to gather useful information from consumers to help make games more fun and playable.

About the speaker
John Davis is a member of the Games User Research Group at Microsoft Game Studios. John has worked in the user research field for about eight years and has conducted user research with thousands of gamers, and summarized thousands of hours of gameplay. Before coming to the games user testing group, John was a Usability Engineer in the Social Computing Group (SCG) at Microsoft Research, where he conducted research to explore various social dimensions of computer-mediated communication and decision making. Before joining Microsoft, he was an assistant professor of Psychology at Seattle University. John earned his B.S. in Psychology from Texas A & M University (yes, he is an Aggie) and his Ph.D. in Experimental Social and Personality Psychology from the University of Washington.

Microsoft Media Center Extender Technologies: Usability Testing Adaptations

Consumers don’t want to be tied to the room where their PC lives. Windows Media Center Extender technologies provide access to video, photos and music on from any room in the home. Human Factors manager Lisa Mason describes the special challenges and usability testing adaptations needed to create a smooth and easy consumer experience.

About the speaker
Lisa D. Mason is the User Research Manager for the Windows eHome PC Experience Group at Microsoft Corporation. Her work focuses on creating best-of-breed user experiences for remote controls, keyboards, PC form factors, wireless networks, home media ecosystems, and Media Center Extender Technologies. An employee of Microsoft for nine years, Mason’s work has covered webbased application design, as well as the small business, enterprise, and international arenas. Mason is also active in industry-wide initiatives such as the Ease of Use Round Table and Digital Living Network Alliance. Mason has a M.S. in Physics from the University of Minnesota.

Presentation Files
Download program slides (1.5 MB .zip)

No-Strings Internet

The basic utilities of water, electricity, gas and telephone are about to welcome a new sibling: Wireless broadband Internet. And many technosavvy road warriors already depend on such access. We welcome experts Scott Shamp of Athens, Georgia, and Nigel Ballard of Portland, who are making wireless access available to citizens in their cities.

WAGz: The Wireless Athens Georgia Zone
In 2002, the New Media Institute created the Wireless Athens Georgia Zone (the WAGz)—a cloud of WiFi connectivity over downtown Athens, GA. Although it was one of the first municipal wireless implementations in the country, the technology wasn’t really the point. Instead, the WAGz was created to explore how powerful new mobile media technologies can enhance the experience of being in Athens. Scott Shamp will describe how the WAGz provides an interface to important information about Athens for businesses, residents, government, and visitors. This presentation will detail the lessons learned from this initiative.

About the speaker
Dr.Shamp is the Director of the New Media Institute at the University of Georgia. The New Media Institute is an interdisciplinary unit created to explore the creative, critical, and commercial implications of new digital communication technology. As the Director of the New Media Institute, Scott is helping students carve out careers in the rapidly evolving field of new media and helping companies map out strategies for success using new communication technologies. Currently Scott heads the Mobile Media Consortium (http://www.nmi.uga.edu/mmc) at the University of Georgia. This industry/academic partnership is dedicated to promoting mobile media and wireless development.

PTP: Portland’s Personal Telco Project
Portland’s Personal Telco Project (PTP) has the momentum and the initiative to continue to grow as a volunteer organization that makes a difference in Portland. Aaron Baer will describe how, over the next two years, it can grow beyond being an organization of geeks building networks to become an organization with volunteers and participants from every part of the Portland community and to help everyone take part in building public wireless networks.

About the speaker
Aaron Baer graduated from PSU with a degree in Computer Science and works as a Business Systems Analyst out at Mentor Graphics. Aaron’s involvement with the Personal Telco Project, a volunteer-run organization, dates back to early 2001 and he has been the project’s Treasurer since late 2001. In addition to a wide array of job responsibilities, Baer spends time working with Linux and other Open Source software and enjoys mountain biking.

Presentation Files
Download program slides (3.8 MB .zip)

Experiences Implementing and Using Wearable Computer Displays in an Automotive Repair Environment

The Microvision Nomad projects a transparent monochrome computer display into the wearer’s eye by means of a lightweight headset and is controlled by a belt-clip unit at the wearer’s side. Nik Anderson will share his experience deploying the Nomad wearable display at Jim Fisher Volvo and discuss the issues and obstacles encountered, both technical and human. Topics include a basic introduction and demonstration of the technology, technical details of implementation, factors regarding resistance to and acceptance of the tool by the users, what went right and what went wrong, and future possibilities for the technology in the automotive workplace.

About the speaker
Nicholas Anderson was born in Portland, Oregon, and he returned to Portland upon attending Reed College where he studied English Literature. A lifelong technology enthusiast, he now works at Jim Fisher Volvo, where he is responsible for the company’s IT infrastructure. He is in his fourth year with Jim Fisher Volvo.

Wireless at the Bedside: Social Impacts of Technology Introduction in Health Care

Good patient care depends on good information at the right moment. Ivy Holt describes how Providence Hospitals moved from paper to wireless bedside patient records and uses knowledge management systems for advice. Ann Demaree recounts the recent introduction of Lifecom’s Shock/Trauma Management System into the chaos and hierarchy of emergency medicine.

#1) WIRELESS TO THE BEDSIDE: The Providence Health System Experience

Ivy Holt, Providence Health Systems
Since the early 1990s, Providence Health Systems has worked to move patient charting on-line and make patient information immediately available. Patient safety is central to this effort as managing paitent information electronically allows for real time communication of patient information. Holt, an RN and director for the project, describes the move from hand-written paper toward wireless bedside entry assisted by knowledge management systems and the many challenges to find the most appropriate form factor to meet the needs of the bedside nurse.

#2) LIFECOM’S SHOCK/TRAUMA MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: Decision-making ‘reminders’ in acute critical patient care

Ann Demareem, Lifecom
Solutions designed to enhance medical decision-making must do far more than store medical records. A solution must identify and present relevant patterns combined with all of the appropriate knowledge needed by a physician in order to make a rapid and accurate decision. Medical decision-making is about recognizing patterns: There are patterns of illness, patterns of behavior, patterns of lifestyle, patterns of therapy, patterns of response, and many others. Medical decision-making requires understanding. It takes more than just seeing a pattern - the meaning and relevance of the pattern must be recognized. Medical decision-making results in action. Physicians must make critical decisions before intervening on behalf of their patients.

Lifecom’s Demerey describes how the Shock/Trauma Managment System was designed to fit smoothly into Emergency Department workflows without adding overhead and how its form, function, and ‘place’ in the medical/social hierarchy was conceived, delivered, and received in practice.

Designing for Glance-able Experiences: Awareness & Context

How do you make everyday objects and interactions smarter? How do you design for awareness? Glanceability is a new word in the mobile vocabulary. It affects cognitive awareness and relates to the environment and situation (context) of everyday situations. The personal space is sacred, and so are the interactions and experiences that reside in this very important space. This presentation discusses some of the opportunities and challenges to design for increased awareness.

About the speaker
Dane Howard has been telling stories for 13 years. As a Senior Creative and strategist specializing in the practice of prototyping and product development, Dane has been creating strong strategic design directions that shape businesses, products and the teams that foster and build them. With a background in sequential media, he has focused much of his work on the creative process. Experience-based prototypes and serial thinking are the emphasis of his work.

Dane has worked with Directors of Design, Marketing teams and R&D labs, Senior Executives of Technology and CEOs. He has played a principal design and management role in developing key strategies and products for Microsoft, BMW, Major League Baseball, Avaya Communications, Quokka Sports, NBCOlympics, Alias/Wavefront and Disney. Dane recently authored Sharing Digital Photos: The Future of Memories—a book about sharing stories in a digital and connected world. He is currently a manager of design at Microsoft.

CHI 2005: Technology, Safety, Community

CHI 2005 is the premier international conference for human-computer interaction.

This year Portland, Oregon is the location for the CHI conference.

Human Factors Research and Development for In-Vehicle Systems

Human Factors engineer Chris Kirn presents computer and communications applications for passenger cars and heavy duty trucks, including the Freightliner Driver Message Center.

He will describe the objectives, methods, and project/product overviews of the Human-Machine Interface (HMI) research and development team of DaimlerChrysler Research and Technology North America (DCRTNA). A main focus of this talk will be the iterative process of testing with a target population and developing the proper research design, methods, and materials in order to efficiently generate meaningful results.

Josef Loczi provides the big picture of Ergonomics and Human-Machine Interaction activities at Freightliner. He’ll also discuss his work on truck occupant packaging and 3-D modeling tools for product design, and share insights he presented as a keynote speaker at the SAE Digital Human Modeling Conference.

About the speakers