Brainstorming, like any other game, requires good rules for a good game. And knowing that there is plenty of research out there on groupthink, I always like to include a short sprint of personal, quiet thinking that we base the ideation sessions on.

The Plan.

Step 1: Students take 5 minutes to write down 3 ideas that they wanted to try and tackle for their final project.

Step 2: Their group helps them, for 5 more minutes, turn each idea into a problem statement. “How might we______?”

Step 3: Each problem statement gets 3 minutes of group ideation – all three people trying to come up with ideas to help resolve, improve or remove the problem.

Here’s what we got:

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Here is a little trick I learned from doing this session a few times at the Brooklyn Brainery: We have people tell stories about plane travel and then extract user needs that we’re going to solve for. One gentleman recounted a time when he was a boy and woke up to find he had drooled all over his neighbor. He was horrified, of course.

If you’re solving for the problem of falling asleep and drooling on the person next to you in a plane there are four main ways:

1. Make a drool catcher – no drool spreads!

2. Make an anti-drool pill – no drool happens!

3. Get all the drooling people together….at least no one else is bothered!

4. Make Drool Cool.

This is a really important ideation tool. In the 3-minute sprints, I asked students to examine their problems, and try to solve them from all of these different angles.

At the end of the session, we asked students to tell the group about one idea they liked and thought they could move forward with…everyone left with a packet of ideas to work with to develop their final project.

My first IA summit was an excellent and super-over-full experience.

Trying to parse it out is challenging…taking the time off to GET the information is hard enough…then taking time to make the the information USEFUL is the real challenge. As Karl Fast said in his talk about information overload:

"data is cheap. Understanding is expensive"

So there’s that. Here’s the Data:

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Two main themes were the importance of  content strategy and mapping experiences.

I went to a workshop by Kristina Halvorson and a talk by Karen McGrane both of which showed me just how much care and attention have to go into Content Management Systems and the types of data that have, do and will exist on a site. These two presentations have already allowed me to start to ask the right questions for an important internal project. So #winning on that.

One of the weirdest talks was by Andrea Resmini on "groundhogs in the Source Code". His talk along with Peter Stahl’s talk on Rhythm and Flow (and Dana Chisnell’s talk about How to Measure it) helped to begin to define one of the biggest problems we face in Interaction Design:

Place is where we pause

Space is where we move.

Andrea Resmini

We define our interfaces with key frames and wires, but the flowering of the interface, it’s organic movements, it’s rythmn and flow are much harder to document and describe. Did you see the Mad Men Premiere on Sunday? They’re pitching a commercial with storyboards – one person narrates and the other person hums background music. Lo-fi, hilarious, but also effective. But hard to email to the developers in Prague. So Protocasting came up as a great way to communicate these more intangible elements – take a video of yourself walking through the wires, adding the intangibles.

Two talks that really, really should be read together are Johanna Kollmann’s talk about Multi-channel UX and  Chris Risdon’s talk about Mapping the Experience. Oh, and Ben Reason’s Slides from the opening keynote relate to this, too. Mapping the user flow helps stitch our static wires into a flowing story. Without Story, you don’t have much, really.

Johanna asked the right questions and provided some great frameworks for analyzing systems. Chris gave some great case studies and tools.

Johanna gave us the concept of the Rich Picture – something we all do, but great to see it defined and it’s origins described…She also brought the Business Model Canvas into the dialog…which is great.

Two great slides from Chris’ talk is his summary of Touchpoint interactions and a thorough user journey map.

Some talks were just about doing our jobs better, with other people.

Discussing Design: The Art of Critique by the amazing Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor was such a one. It was just about best practices when it comes to giving, asking and receiving critique. Something we do all the time.

Leadership Skills: Managing Difficult Situations on Design Projects by Dan Brown was another. It began to parse out the different patterns we can use to various challenging situations, through the lens of our own traits and habits.He made these awesome cards that help you practice improv-ing through mock challenging situations. It’s great storytelling practice.

Another great talk, well delivered, was Josh Clark’s 7 Myths of Mobile Context.

11% of adults may NEVER see your site on the web – they only use mobile. So that’s a thing. Ebay sells a ton of cars on mobile. People are buying cars, on their phones, on the toilet. Also:

“an app isn’t a strategy. It’s an app.”

Yeah. That.

I think Jamie Monberg’s talk left me with some interesting notes.

Our brains are 2 million years old. We’re not the only tool-using animals out there. And we NEED to transact, physically, emotionally and financially with others. Technology is just a tool that helps us do that. It can be hard to use or easy to use, satisfying or frustrating. That is entirely up to us.

Maybe you could feed your baby and yourself at the same time. That could make the day a bit better, for sure.

What about four arms? Well…that could just be mind blowing!

But…Where do we stop?

Yesterday, in a call with a client, we were discussing a set of features that would enhance the main flow of their product experience…by allowing users to track and follow items of interest. I had fallen into a rabbit hole and so had the client – the features were becoming a sub-application on the site. It was a slippery slope, a distraction from the main flow… Would users even notice, let alone use the new features? Would they miss features that we *hadn’t* put in, that have never EVER even existed? In short, if we gave them *just* a three-armed breakfast, would they hate us for not giving them four?

So it comes down to fighting featuritis in a non-existent product. Fred Wilson talked about this yesterday:

It turns out, like most success stories, the answer was simplifying the service. Taking features out. Reducing the value proposition to a clear and simple use case. This was not done in a vacuum. This was done by releasing a less than perfect product to the market, finding a few customers who wanted a less than perfect product, and then listening carefully to those customers to get to the ideal product.

In other words, stay at the happy user peak:

look…it’s an ugly diagram, to be sure….but let’s overlook that, shall we?

Circulating Fred Wilson’s article in my office, one response was:

“Harder when the client isn’t a startup.

Just sayin’. “

which is why I always quote my old professor Bruce Hannah:

Mock it up before you Fock it up.

Co-creation with users, low and mid-fidelity prototypes, deep ethnography and iterative engagements with users and your prototypes can help mitigate the risk of a launch…but it can also be a double-edged sword, enabling feature creep.

So in the end…it’s up to us all to decide if three arms for breakfast is enough.

A piano teacher heard his student mis-play the piece….when he asked the student to correct the mistake, the student pointed out that he was playing it as written. Most pros sight read – which means they see cues and guess at the rest. That’s why ygu cgn rsad thds semtence.

This is why it’s SO important to have fresh eyes on a project, at key intervals. The eyes of someone who hasn’t been drinking the Koolaid. The eyes of someone with different (or no) assumptions.

On my current project, we had a visual designer on the project from the kickoff, in the sketching sessions, on the client calls. When we (finally) came down to making some mid-fidelity comps, he and I sat at a desk together and made what we thought was best, based on all of our assumptions.

The visual designer was a freelancer…and when the project got extended, we had to let him go on to his next project. One of our internal VxDs came onto the project, and the process of onboading him was so refreshing. Explaining it all, all over again, made me see how silly some of it all was…what was not essential, what could be stripped down. My assumptions, my learning, had backed me into a corner…and a fresh pair of eyes helped pull me back from the trees to see the forest in a new way.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk about Origami and visual thinking to a great crowd of VizThinkers. Liquidnet gave us a great spot, and the VizThink team brought a great crowd. Dean Meyers took some great shots of the event, some of which I’ve used below. You can find the rest here.

I really enjoyed seeing everyone with a rabbit at the end of the class and some lovely diagrams to take home. If anyone tries to fold from their diagrams…I’d love to hear about the results!

I’ve given versions of this workshop before – to a general audience, to designers and it’s been really interesting to hear how the Visual Communication crowd received it. I think there was some hesitation – it would surely be a fun evening…but would they learn anything about their own craft from mine? Does origami have anything to do with visual thinking?!

Dean’s comment about key frames really consolidated my point of view – it brings together Scott McCloud’s concepts of “blood in the gutter”:

with Leonardo DaVinci’s concept of “show and tell”…If you try to show all or tell all, it’s too much work. Show and Tell – pictures and words together – is magic!

I’d like to just take a minute and give praise where praise is due. I was really gratified with the comments from a few participants about my teaching skills. I mentioned this in the class, but I learned from the best. I’m just following in Michael Shall’s footsteps! The fact that any of us knows about origami at all is largely due to his tireless efforts to spread the joy of folding. I learned how to teach watching him wrangle a classroom of New York inner-city kids into origami masters! Read his obituary here…it’s hard to believe it’s been so long since he’s passed – I’ve lived longer without him than I did with him, but what he’s taught me has never left! I’m really lucky to have so many opportunities to give it back.

There is a certain delight in the macabre nature of these objects…having a plate celebrating viral videos or the shitty buildings that house mega-internet companies is insane and hilarious. But the desire is a real movement, I think…the timeline on facebook is a new way to take this stream of data (relentless and flowing) and make it into an object – my timeline has a beginning (my birth) and a growing end (the present time).

Apps like Social Memories take facebook detritus and turns it into gold – infographics, photos and posts immortalized in a book form…Seeing one in person is amazing. And it takes very little effort to do. A friend of mine did this the hard way – taking a year of conversations and stories and notes and turning it into a 400 page book of amazement.

On the flip side is the Cloud printer from Berg..it can keep up with the daily detritus and attempts to make it more tanigible…if not permanent and memorable.

So…on the Buildable-Desirable-Profitable Venn space…the plates are the most awesome to me, since they are desirable…but not very buildable. In their current form they are hand painted and craft-y…which is what makes them delightful. The books, pillows…they are similar in some ways to the Berg printer…but they are static and timeless…they preserve something. They are nostalgic in the way they freeze electronic memories in atom form. The Printer is a very conventional product in that way – focused on the now, on desire, on moving forward.

What’s next?

She talks about 10 steps that help create an engaging user experience.

4. Forget about Nancy, think user types

Personas are vital when it comes to structuring the content. Look at all the content holistically and think about what people are trying to accomplish. Doing this helps prioritise the content and allows the site to be structured around the user’s goals. But traditional personas – “Nancy, who is 28-35 years old, drives an economy car, has a four-year-old PC she primarily uses for email, earns between $30K-$50K a year and wants to comparison shop for a cheap airfare to visit her mother in Florida” – won’t offer much insight into the user’s actual behaviour.

Instead, group basic User Types into categories according to what they want to do on the site such as “browsing,” “comparison shopping,” “killing time,” “looking for specific content.” These groupings will provide you with much more useful insights about why users come to sites or applications, the context of use (where and how), what content they’re seeking and how much time they have. In turn, you’ll be better equipped to design the website or application around their behaviour patterns, thus making their fictional names, ages, professions and income levels irrelevant.

Number four is spot on…a persona is just data, not knowledge and certainly not a path to action. We always need to create a scaffold for the data to make sense…but more importantly, I enjoy highlighting the dynamic tension *between* user types. Even a crap-tastic diagram like the one below can help us have a really important conversation – what types of actions are we going to enable? How to we manage the tension between single and multi-functional needs? Maybe I just like diagrams, but I feel like we always have to make the leap from Personas to Persona-archetypes…and then to a diagram that shows how these archetypes relate or oppose each other.

Then, like in any good story, we can find a way to relieve the dynamic tension between these types.

The movie was an amazing portrait of some amazing lives and an amazing time in our history.The Eames managed to take commercial success in mass produced chairs and become storytellers, movie producers and toy makers. Today we think nothing of such things – the multidisciplinary studio concept is now well established – you can make silverware and movies and ads and buildings if you can get away with it…

The power of the collaboration between Ray and Charles is pretty amazing…I think the question of “who did what” is irrelevant once you look at how detail oriented, precise and deep Ray was…and I really have to admit that I didn’t know much about her contribution at all. It’s clear that none of it would have happened if they weren’t together.

One of the most poignant moments for me was the description of how Eames managed his relationships with IBM, Kodak and other such industry giants – directly with the CEOs, with a handshake. No contracts, no alignment meetings, no midphase revisions…none of the trappings of working with corporate America today – subcommittees, senior directors…many layers to get to the people who have the power to say yes, many layers that dilute and diffuse the power of an idea. I was left feeling reminiscent for something I’d never had!

I could say more…but I won’t. Just go get a ticket.

I had a lovely time last night teaching origami to the drunken design crowd that filtered through the Phaidon Bookstore. You can tell from the photo above that we had some design people on hand – look at that color selection on the trees!

With a large, loud space and three tables full of people, regular teaching would not work…I needed to get people collaborating. After teaching a few simple models, I got people to make Sonobe units. Some resources on how to make them are here and here.

Each table became a collaborative factory, churning out units to make cubes, octahedrons and dodecahedrons! And as more people showed up, people taught each other…which is awesome for retention.

Look how organized and color coordinated this crowd is!

So…yeah. That was awesome.

Thanks to everyone who came out to drink and fold!

I had thought about rooting my HTC Incredible for a while…for one, the free WiFi tethering is awesome. The other was just to be geeky about things. Eventually, changing my phone interface became easy. Changing the interface made me pay more attention to the variations, subtleties and possibilities for a mobile interface. All too often, I think we design what we know or what we expect. If everyone on a team is an Apple person there is a tacit assumption about the “right” way to do things. On android, playing with CyanogenMod and MIUI opened my eyes.

The real reason I started, though, was that my phone started to act up…it told me it was running out of space, even though it wasn’t…and made it hard to do basic things. It stopped checking mail, it wouldn’t sync things…it sucked. I threw it back to the factory settings, but it seemed to happen over again. So, as a long-time windows person, I thought I would just reinstall a fresh OS…that usually does the trick. But I realized – if I’m going to loose all my apps again, why not root the phone and have some fun? And a new ROM might resolve the issues. Maybe it was the boggy HTC sense running on my Incredible that was the real problem.

As I was saying…the internet can get you into trouble, but not out. Lifehacker has an awesome, always up to date guide for rooting your android device. Phones run on file systems called ROMs. You flash new ROMs and you have a new phone!

It was pretty straightforward indeed…and in a few hours, I was up and running CyanogenMOD, digging the red-tinged screen mode I could turn on and off for night vision, the better facebook app I could now install, the WiFi tethering.

But at some point, I got bored…and installed MIUI. Sleek, iPhone-esque and very, very customizable, I became enamored of the drop-down drawer that allowed me to turn my WiFi, 3G and sync on and off constantly, to help save battery life. I was also able to replace icons easily, and still had access to apps that others who were unrooted couldn’t – my friend Miles couldn’t seem to get the GoTo Meeting app I downloaded…which made it easy to call in AND see a presentation, all on my phone. sick!

But all was not well…things started to crash unexpectedly. Everything. Gmail. SMS. Maps. Fuck. This was not good. I rebooted, factory-freshed the thing…sometimes it made a difference for a while. Sometimes the app that helped me install new ROMS would crash. That made the process impossible.

I finally decided to wipe the UI again and install a fresh ROM…but I goofed. The version of Cyanogen I installed didn’t have google apps installed – no gmail, no android market. I had downloaded the Google Apps package, but the installer failed. I couldn’t update the app that was supposed to backup my ROMS and install fresh ones. I was dead in the water. My phone was worse than a brick…it was a lame duck. The ROM manager that was supposed to help me go back to a safe system kept crashing or hanging when I tried to install my backups. Why was Clockwork MOD failing? The internet failed to give me a fix!

The Internet got me into this mess. I turned to the internet to get me out of my mess. What about unrooting the phone? It turns out, that is possible, but harder than rooting. I tried this method…you install a zip file on your SD card and reboot into safe mode…but the file wouldn’t unpack. I tried this several times. In anticipation of this working, I had to download a set of Android SDK files, set up a protocol call ADB on my laptop and created a file structure on my laptop that I would flash onto the phone. But no dice.

I had a very painful evening out with no phone numbers and no maps! I went back to the old days of making little post-it maps of streets I was heading to if I didn’t know where they were and dashing down phone numbers to be able to connect to people. Without google apps, my contacts wouldn’t sync, obviously. I even went into the Verizon store, considering a new phone over trying ceaselessly and fruitlessly to revive my phone. I hated all of them. Android phones seem to have gone blobby. Also, I didn’t want to spend $300.

Then I discovered that there was a software solution to the problem of laptop-to-phone flashing that should be easier than the method I was trying. RUU flashing involves a software package that connects to your phone and, in about 10 minutes, returns it to a stock ROM. It seemed straightforward. I breathed a sigh of relief. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. The classic conundrum of the semi-technical, I encountered a series of error codes, the first was about USB connectivity. It wouldn’t see the HTC phone. In a shot of insight, I downloaded the HTC sync software package to allow my laptop to see the phone, not as a USB device, but as an HTC phone. Then I got an error code about battery life – it thought I was at 30% when I was at 90%. How to fix that? Restart and pray.

In the end, it worked….10 minutes later, I was watching the droid splash screen and the HTC sense startup. 5 minutes after that, I was surfing the net.

I may wait a few days or weeks…but I will root again. I will soon miss the MIUI tweaks, the tethering, the freedom. I will get myself into more trouble and get out of it again.