Web, Technology, Social Innovation and Events
My thoughts and notes on the second and last day of the UX Australia conference. Fantastic presentations by Will Evans, Aynne Valencia and Guillermo Torres, Ash Donaldson and Stephen Cox.
I was up till 1:30am the night before working on reviving this blog, which essentially consisted of archiving everything, reinstalling WordPress and Thesis then migrating just a handful of blog posts across which fell under the new focussed direction of the blog.
So basically I struggled to get out of bed and make it to the venue just in time for one of the first presentations of the day which was about being a experience-led organisation by Steve Baty. He took us through a case study of a project he had worked on with YHA Australia (youth hostels) and all the research and analysis involved in helping the client transition their business to providing a better experience for guests and office staff.
Steve showed us a nice design artefact they had produced for the client which helped illustrate the stages of engagement (including pre and post) between guests and the hostels along with the different activities the guests and the hostels perform at each phase. Nice way of organising user stories.
Aynne Valencia and Guillermo Torres presented on designing for multi-targeted experiences, or rather distributed experiences where users come in contact with a brand through several channels and how to cover multiple channels under a single, unified user experience strategy – using a VISA campaign as a case study – while also ensuring that the strategy is contextualised for each platform, form factor and relevant personas for each channel and touchpoint to adapt to that platform and the user behaviours of that platform.
Guido gave us a demo of itsme, an innovative alternative desktop model, and took us through the design process and thinking behind it – particularly the introduction of the metaphors of “venue” and “story” which seemed unusual and possibly confusing to some however Guido assured us that they had hit no snags in user testing thus far.
Jürgen Spangl’s presentation on his experience with a project to modernise and improve double-decker cargo train eletromechanical systems was very interesting and made us all jealous for those few lucky enough to be involved in awesome products actually building real, physical things … however I took no notes of his session and took nothing away.
Stephen Cox’s 10-minute talk after lunch on semiotics was … interesting. I think. I have never heard of semiotics, structuralism, syntagnetics and paradigmatics but loved his analogy of words as signifiers and how words on their own don’t mean much but together say for example as a book they provide each other with the context that makes it something of meaning. He lost me a bit on the metaphor thing but if he was explaining what I think he was then it was interesting … not just using metaphors in an end product but as a communication tool and a new way of approaching analysis of problems that align with that metaphor.
Anyway, go read Semiotics for Beginners by Daniel Chandler. I haven’t yet but will once I’ve cleared the backlog of five blog posts in my head.
Ash Donaldson presented on trust and what makes people trust an information source and the role of social networking and social media in trust-building. He looked at Familiarity, Similarity and Authority with examples of where people will trust product reviews on websites or advice given in forums and blog posts. Interesting – I’ll be referring to those three trust avenues in future when preparing social experience strategies as I think it’s a nice way of approaching the topic.
Will Evans. A lot of interesting content in this presentation and what has provoked at least two of the blog posts I have swirling around in my brain right now. A good look at social experience design, the elements thereof: Identity, Presence, Relationships, Reputation, Groups, Conversations and Sharing (presenting in a 7-hectagon diagram like Peter Morville’s Facets of the User Experience).
Will spoke about providing an articulated context, groups, security, labellling, surface and deep-linked conversations, designing for presence, symbolic exchanges and community monitoring.
Great content, picked up a few new ways of considering social experience design and developing more in-depth, targeted strategies that cover off the planning, design and deployment of social networking and social media community platforms.
Few other presentations – all interesting, but didn’t take away any ideas or tips.
Overall, fantastic conference – big thanks to Donna and Steve, the other organisers and assistants, speakers and attendees. The pace of the conference felt just right, the content was absolutely and completely relevant to my role and interests. I’ll be going along next year to UX Australia 2010 in Melbourne for sure.
// purecaffeine.com is a user interaction and UX design, social media and Government 2.0 blog run by professional Canberra, Australia web user interaction designer Nathanael Boehm, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Nathanael,
Thanks for the mention in your blogpost.
In response to:
“He lost me a bit on the metaphor thing but if he was explaining what I think he was then it was interesting … not just using metaphors in an end product but as a communication tool and a new way of approaching analysis of problems that align with that metaphor.”
Semiotics is a pretty old school way of looking at the world (people have moved onto post structuralist thinking at unis), but I think it still holds a lot of value, if not for its validity but for the way it makes you think and consider context and connections.
Metaphor, is another way of “signifying” things as well, but as usual I digress…
The example I was showing during the presentation was to illustrate how reading “signs” and “sign systems” can help when you are doing research. The example basically boiled down to trying to understand why in a lot of “empty nesters” households (in particular those who want to move to a gated community) there is a cabinet full of objects from overseas. My analysis suggested that the cabinet was an unconscious “metaphor” for how the owners wanted to see the world outside their homes. That is the international objects were locked safely behind the glass to be admired from afar and not interacted with. This contrasted with what was actually happening in their suburbs, where there was extensive immigration and a change in the culture. I.e. the “international” was out of the box and they were being forced to interact with it, this suggested some reasons as to why they were looking to move to gated community, which they assumed would be more like the suburbs they remembered growing up.
Basically, by doing the analysis on an object found in the context of the interview (the cabinet) I was able to think of more appropriate questions to ask the people involved in the study.
It’s sort of fun to try semiotic analysis on all sorts of stuff, try your desk at work. See what signs you are portraying to the world through the use of signs… I’m looking at my desk thinking, the mess probably represents me be appearing to be busy… while the random packets of herbal tea and nuts is something to do with me pretending to be healthy.
Anyway, always happy to try and clarify further if I have missed the point of your question.
Cheers,
Stephen Cox
@s_cox
Thanks Stephen, that’s what I was looking for – although I think I’d get value out of observing someone else going through a semiotic analysis more relevant to the work I do.