The talk was fascinating, interspersed with video clips from his interviews with creative and technology leaders such as Mark Zuckerberg and Chad Hurley, as well as his own wonderful insights on design process and the future of interaction design. Many of the clips came from his most recent book, Designing Media. (BTW, you can download the ENTIRE book for free here. Pdfs and videos. That is pretty amazing! ) Most intriguing for me was his clip of Ira Glass (of This American Life) talking about story and narrative, and how, as designers we can use narrative in all three stages of prototyping ideas: for inspiring, evolving and validating design.

We also heard from Kristian Simsarian, chair of the new Interaction Design program, on how he and the rest of his team are structuring it. There aren’t many programs like this in the country. The challenge of creating a new program like this, an innovation in and of itself, was what drew him to the opportunity. Looking forward to seeing how it evolves and the types of designers who will emerge from it.

Also hope CCA offers more lectures like this for the rest of us! Kevin Kelly is speaking next week. I think they’ll need to get a bigger lecture hall eventually though… last night was packed.

And, a breath of fresh air: the big open spaces of the main CCA campus buildings are wonderful. Large walls with creative work in progress, pieces of new ideas waiting to happen. Reminded me that sometimes I feel like a fish out of water in cubicle land. Would the work we do be different, and produce different results, in an environment like that? I think so.

Adding up the evening: it was valuable as much from the context as the content. Going to the talk together, sharing the experience, discussing insights is so valuable. We need to get out more as a team! Good creative work, engagement with new ideas, solving problems, connecting as a group… all those don’t come from just showing up to the office everyday. It seems obvious, but we (I) forget that so easily. It’s on my list to look for other opportunities to get us out of the cube.

Way back then… (a few months ago … I wrote it up with this lead: Our web services and strategy team rocks!

How do I know we rock?

We just put a presentation together — together —  explain ourselves to our leadership: Who we are, how each of our individual roles relate to process and outcomes, and what we achieved over the last year. It went really well, as result of focused work by everyone: pulling together and analyzing metrics, high level reports on projects and accomplishments, and a simplified view to hit on key points across a large number of initiatives and projects. We included video clips from those we work with cross-functionally as well as stakeholders, on their experience working with us. The videos, as well as personal stories everyone told, helped to keep the session lively — important since it ran a full three hours with Q and A.

The key takeaway, for me, and I think for others on the team, was not how we came across in our presentation to the audience. It was the new perspective and confidence we gained about our functioning as a team. We learned about each person in new ways: both personal and professional.

Day-to-day, we’re all involved in a multitude of projects and initiatives. Taking the time for this joint effort, where everyone’s input was needed, gave us an increased awareness of the scope of our work and how working together could enable us to accomplish even more. In essence, we built our “self-awareness” as a group, critical for enabling high functioning team work.

Two cats, Amsterdam shop window

We were just two cats walking through Amsterdam in March — my 11th floor colleague Paul Rutter and I, in town for a web strategy workshop with our European team.  Paul, ever observant, pointed out a real cat, and a virtually identical paper mache cat, sitting in a shop window together on a Sunday afternoon. Too amazing, it was unposed: the shop was closed. I took a couple of quick snaps and posted to Flickr. Back from the trip, I used the photo in several presentations to explain a concept we were working out. (Interesting images can help keep people engaged, and frame things more intuitively than words alone.)

Yesterday, the artist from Amsterdam who made the cat contacted me on Flickr to ask if she could use the photo for a poster about the shop windows she designs and the art she creates!

Pretty amazing that she would come across the photo: Flickr does geotagging, so that makes it much more possible. But it certainly made me think more about how Flickr connects me to others—even those I don’t know elsewhere in the world—through a shared interest in capturing and sharing the visual richness of the world and our experiences.

I sent the cat’s creator the original image for her poster, and she told me a little bit about her process:

I sat upstairs in a little room above the bakery a whole afternoon with lots of paper bags and tape and, of course, Floortje, the (real) cat.

My use of Flickr has intensified, as it has for many, since I started taking pictures on my  iPhone. I can take shots on impulse, and post quickly, no matter where I am. I had begun using Flickr several years ago, and upgraded to Pro pretty quickly to take advantage of more pictures, sets and collections. But it never quite took me as far as the visionary diagram of Flickr as a social tool that Bryce Glass developed a few years ago. Now that I’m using it more, and connecting with others, I can see the social experience he predicted playing out. It’s fascinating, and fun.

As far as a social tool, I far prefer Flickr to Facebook. The privacy settings seem far more clear, there are fewer hidden loopholes. (Another subject, but does anyone really feel they know what happens to all their information with all the ins and outs of Facebook connections and applications now?) And it’s wonderful to see and share pictures with others, not so dissimilar in some ways from myself, and very different in others, around the world.

A boarding pass that talks like a human

I’d seen the cool exploration of redesigning boarding passes by Tyler Thomson a while back. Graphically really interesting.

One of the highly graphic boarding pass redesign explorations

Today I noticed Khoi Vinh’s post about other ideas inspired by the original explorations. I agree with him that the straightforward human voice in the idea from Graphicology is somehow comforting and more meaningful than all the nice typography and graphics in some of the other explorations. Though the sentences may not scan quite as quickly as the graphic designs, the variety of all the large numbers in combo are actually harder to parse visually than the simple sentence statements, and ultimately require more work. They appear to tell me I’m participating in a complex process when I board a plane. I’m sure that’s true, but I’d rather not have to think about it. Air travel is stressful enough!

Brings home too the importance of voice and how critical the words we use are to the success of communicating in an interface on the web too. We’re not machine readers. We like to be talked to considerately, in sentences that are as simple as possible but no simpler.

We decided to set aside an allocated day each week for the entire design team to review and assess together how it’s all coming together, and provide feedback on development as well as tweek any design work in progress.

War Hall

Looks like some folks might take us up on it and join in! But one question was whether we were doing pigs and chickens.
Now, I’d never heard of pigs and chickens… but apparently, in scrum, there’s the concept of pigs and chickens!

Pigs are the active participants doing the work, and the chickens are the other people who attend. I guess in some models the pigs are the only people who can talk, and the chickens have to shut up.

But I hope we’ll be able to have people attend, and listen during the working standup, but then have time following when we can discuss and listen to others who are interested in the work as well.

More attention on stitching it all together, getting the details right, and making the site as good as we can for launch!

This has been great! The aim of this way of working is not perfection (as in immediate perfection), but visibility into how we’re all designing, writing, developing, managing and working together. It gives us all a visual reference for the large body of work coming together. We have a place for the team (and others) to do quick standups to talk about our work over the course of the day. And it gives us all a real sense of accomplishment and presents the work as what it is…  co-creation by a core team with inputs from lots of others across our business.

Just noticed this tip on the 99percent blog (a favorite) that pretty much validates this approach for a team. Being able to see your progress is just as important to a design team as capturing your ideas and what you hope to accomplish.

Our war hall is also available virtually on foursquare. Visit us and check in!

“Dot com guru” created this Firefox persona, inspired by working on WebEx projects here at Cisco. Get yours too!

User comic drawn on the iPad

In many of the presentations and design projects I’ve worked on recently, I’ve been using comics of various types to keep the focus on the user. Comics are fun, introduce a little more character and put a human context on user experience design deliverables: UI, flows, wireframes. Since I got an iPad, creating simple comics has become much more fun by drawing by hand, or rather, by finger. Here’s a quick review of my favorite iPad drawing apps. Take a peek and let me know what you think. Do you think this is a useful way to communicate stories?