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Our observations of the world around us

• Design Thinking by Dan Rockwell on January 15, 2010

  Last year Chris Rockwell, CEO of Lextant, wrote a tasty article for DMI’s Design Management Review magazine entitled The Mathematics of Brand Satisfaction.  It’s a very good read.  Readers can see application of multi-sensory participatory research and translation in the article.  The article was so good that its been added as a chapter in Thomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking book that’s just been published.

  

  The book is organized into three sections that focus on using design for innovation and brand building; the emerging role of service design; and designing meaningful customer experiences.

  You can find the book on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere.  Chris has no shortage of observations when comes to design and experience- if you’re looking for more goodness- check out his new personal blog, The Experience Shack.

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• Information Architecture is Here to Stay by Jess Bailey on January 08, 2010

  Over the holidays, the UXD team came across a blog post from Thomas Memmel’s blog on usability and user experience. While he touches on the industry’s “war of terms,” we were most interested in his statement that Information Architecture is going to begin disappearing from the scene in 2010:

  “I believe that information architecture (IA) will disappear from the scene, because the web becomes increasingly interactive. IA was especially associated with an expertise in building content and navigation structures that rather had a static form. Today, technologies like Silverlight, AJAX and Flash turn the web into a highly interactive media. Because the design of interactive systems is headlined with the term interaction design (IxD), it will absporb IA as a discipline. Naturally, this comes with an increasing need for IAs to enhance their knowledge and design capabilities beyond static forms of content representation.”

  We can agree that IA is changing, but we don’t think it is going away any time soon. IA’s rarely deal with static content and structure. There will always be information that needs to be organized – whether the technology delivers it in a static form or not.

  Engaging with the interactive web isn’t like floating in a sea of nothingness. There is still information there, and that information may just be dynamic or interactive. Just because it is dynamic doesn’t mean it is structure-less. We will sometimes explain IA to others with an analogy of a skeleton in the human body. Without it, the other components cannot form a meaningful structure.

  For us, IA is the middle layer. The technology layer (system architecture) is below and the visualization layer (user interface) is above. The IA is the immutable, abstract understanding of the information at hand. It defines the scope and relationships of this information and it is enduring over time. The underlying technology may change or the physical manifestation may change, but the IA remains constant. This constancy and relationship to the user’s wants and needs is what creates a more ideal user experience with a product.

  So, what are our predictions for IA in 2010? We have to look beyond the technology. IA isn’t going anywhere so long as there is information to be had. Information is constantly growing, and technology is constantly evolving. Someday they will run in parallel, and the experiences will be out of this world!
  

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• Casual Data by Lauren Serota on January 04, 2010

  About a month ago, Dan Rockwell and I finished writing an article for interactions magazine about Casual Data, the term we’ve used to describe rich data propagated or mined via some form of social media. The piece defines Casual Data, talks briefly about why it’s becoming so prevalent, and then proceeds to identify current ways it’s being used and what that means to the fields of design and research. It will be out in a spring 2010 issue of interactions, however, here’s a sneak peek at some of the data nugget goodness:

  The problem with too much data
  While there are a number of firms analyzing the surface value of casual data, there is a need dig deeper to understand context and higher-level implications. The more connected we become, the more connected our data becomes, and the more we need a structured approach for making sense of it.

  Companies having loads of customer data available is not news, however this casual data is not quantitative in nature (demographics, pattern-focused). The emotional meaning behind casual data should not be analyzed statistically, and the methods used to gain this data are as important to understand as the data itself. If customer voice is only harvested through an existing medium (e.g. submitting a query for iPhone-related tweets) the results you get will be brief and will tend to either be of intense glee: “new iPhone copy/paste function, thank GOD” or intense distaste: “Apple sucks!” – leaving little room for understanding context of use, while still providing good touch-points for product improvement. There is the potential of casual data being more dangerous than helpful if not properly understood.

  
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  Ok, so what’s our role?
  The need to find long-term meaning via any quick casual data-farming medium creates a niche opportunity for research firms to use their proven techniques to analyze and understand this abundance of user input. Professional researchers will be able to understand how casual data is useful, where it is applicable and where there are still unanswered (and often unasked) questions. This will allow research companies to reinforce doing more in-depth research as a result of learnings from this data, rather than allowing clients to use this data (which is often incomplete) as conclusive.Even tools that have built-in analysis capabilities cannot play down the importance of involving a comprehensive research process. Design researchers look at data to understand not only design opportunities but also to come up with high-level emotional themes. If 10 people say that they want a certain feature from pampers.com, what does that mean in terms of their needs, and how will they benefit from that feature? Extrapolating concepts, ideas and feedback into themes can help the design team understand trends and potential meta-themes, and consequently how to design new products and services that weren’t necessarily articulated by their customers. Researchers also have the opportunity to help companies understand how to manage all of this data – does it need to lend itself to searching by future company stakeholders, or will it be regenerated? Having a plan for where the data goes can increase the value attained from it, and help to track trends over time.
  

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