Author: Luis Menchu

Another chance to see Luke Wroblewski talk in Portland on the heels of his earlier session at WebVisions. His focus tonight was “The Shifting Role of Design” which dealt with the role of design in the strategic definition of products. Design is maturing beyond simply “icing the cake” to being a leader in innovation.

Luke spoke of design thinking as the ability to tell a story that grows from empathy and vision in an iterative manner. Empathy to design with an eye and ear for the user — the ability to internalize real world situations. Vision through abductive thinking to keep an open mind for what could be and building a framework for growth and possibilities. Iteration to grow the story from possibility to reality via an evolution of trial and error and prototyping.

In my world I see creatives hampered with an overload of work and with direction that often does not include their imaginative powers to define a story. They need to be at the table when the concepts are first taking shape to best leverage their expertise. Often a concept is defined too well by the time the creatives see it and, by then, the ability to influence the path is curtailed by deadlines, lack of conceptual awareness and the reluctance to modify what many already have a vested interest in.

Luke speaks well of the increasing overlap between the business, people and technology components of developing a product. For success their needs to be deep integration between the components. I believe that around us we see many success stories in businesses where their is leadership made up of people that can talk and walk across these functional areas and they understand how each impacts the other. Within these relationships Luke discusses “crowdsourcing” as an impact on business and people where the public becomes a source for marketable content either freely or in a low-cost environment. “Fab labs” are impacting business and technology with much reduced costs for prototype development. Associated here we also see low entry costs for technology infrastructure.

Overall, another enjoyable and rewarding session. You too can enjoy the session by visiting Luke’s site. Luke won out over the Harry Potter opening night for this group of Portlanders enjoying this CHIFOO session but, alas, I did not take the opportunity to introduce myself to Luke personally — perhaps the social equivalent of purposely choosing to eat an ear wax flavored Bertie Botts Every Flavor Bean since he linked to my previous entry on his WebVisions talk.

Suggested resources:

• Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling
• Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink
• Everything bad is good for you, Steven Johnson

Luke also reference the Apple Knowledge Navigator, the 1987 Apple concept product, featured in a five-minute video sporting many features we now take for granted. If you have time you can also take a corny “look into the future” with Sun from 1992.

Closing keynote at WebVisions featured Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of askaninja.com fame. Their discussion covered the business aspects of developing a creative media business success. Running through their inspiration (e.g., redvsblue.com, tikibartv.com…) they shared the good of each inspiration and where each — and therefore us — could improve upon their business model.

Just as you’d expect from a ninja, the talk was filled with humor as we learned from their success and struggles.

I won’t pretend I knew much about the ninjas before reading about their presentation in the Web Visions materials. I did get to enjoy a few minutes with them at a table outside the meeting rooms before their talk as they prepared and I fixed something at work. Both are obviously fun and lively men that are passionate about their business — feel strange using “business” but in the context of their presentation today it seems to fit. Hopefully they enjoyed their visit to Portland and will be back again soon.

Luke Wrobleweski from Yahoo! presented on Web Application Page Hierarchy. He focused on the use of design elements to provide visual hierarchy in a web page. Making use of the usual graphic tools of size, color, contrast and placement, he showed numerous examples of simple page tweaks to visually prioritize important content.

Luke discussed emergent networks of loosely coupled content replacing strongly hierarchical web page structures. Closely mimicking content relationships to the relationships found in crowds and friendships. Content as incidental networks, or a more organic structure. This leaves content to reign over the hierarchical demands (e.g., site structure navigation…) a site’s structure often imposes. How often on a site have you found the content hard to find amongst the mass of navigational tools?

Luke used measuremap as a sample of decent attention and contrast in the content items. Another good sample is the evolving patientslikeme site. Aerobahn traffic display is also a good information sharing tool. It was very nice to see the evolution in each sample that he shared and how truly identifying the focus and then actually using this to drive the design created a much more effective tool.

I see his talk as kind of reminding you to stick to what’s important and keep it simple. Remember that the page is there for a reason, don’t lose the focus during the journey. He also talked about the little things like the rampant “sign-up” buttons. Luke dislikes the primary action option being to “sign-up” as this isn’t what you really want to do. In the physical world the registration forms get recycled. Let me in, let me play with it, then I want to join and register so I can keep using it.

There was also a nice sample of a simple table clean-up. Luke showed the progression of a basic enough data table that displayed information before, but after some rearranging it displayed information in a much more effective manner.

I highly encourage you to take a leisurely walk through Luke’s slides. I’ll plan on keeping up with him on his Functioning Form blog and I’ll be adding his book, Site-Seeing, to my reading list.

May 8: Updated my incoherent note taking into something that is hopefully more helpful.

A basic run-through of web design practices. Enjoyed Mark Wyner‘s discussion of some websites and their flaws or successes.

He also mentioned a book series he read growing up in which you finish a chapter and then have a choice of chapters to continue with. Unfortunately I didn’t write the name so will have to check with others. Sounded interesting.

I also had to check out one of the sites he touted, but more about that in a separate posting.

Fisrt session of the day after the morning workshop is with Paul Ingram on Inventrepreneurship. The quote that sums up his philosophy:

Ideas won’t keep. We must do something about them. Alfred North Whitehead

Get those ideas out there and do something with them. Paul, an exuberant and overtly friendly person from this viewer’s perspective, spoke on his patterns for accomplishing projects in a virtual partnership with diverse resources. A basic primer on how to get ideas done. Explore the idea and do it, if it flops or someone steals it that is okay it will probably lead to the next great thing. To-Don’t is his example of a silly idea that is pointless but is leading to the next great idea. Sign-up and make a list of things you’ll never do. I’ve posted my To Don’t.

Started the Web Visions day with a workshop on Improving Interface Design with Garrett Dimon. Garrett presented a clean and well-structured talk on best practices in interface design. He started making sure everyone understood what design is. Pulling from quotes he shared, design is not decoration but the experience crafted. It is how things work.

There was not a lot of discussion in this workshop. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps it was due to “speaking to the choir” syndrome. The information was understood and agreed upon by the audience, so perhaps not a lot of room for questions. No controversial issues.

I hope this doesn’t seem critical, the workshop was successful. There were times during his talk that made me think about issues at work and how we are addressing them. To me this makes it more than successful. I also truly enjoyed the stylistic slides in his presentation and they also contain numerous quotes and places that I want to reflect on further.