archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve posted the slides from my UXLX talk on the Language of Discovery. Thanks to a few days spent featured on the slideshare homepage, they’ve clocked over 60,000 views in the past week!  In combination with the buzz from the audience for the talk, I think this shows there is broader awareness and appetite for answers to the question of how designers will make big data accessible and ‘engageable’.

From the practical perspective, if you’re looking for a way to describe discovery and sense making needs and activities, there’s no better resource than this.  And the LOD is well-grounded from the methodological and research perspectives, having roots in HCIR, cognitive science, and a number of other academic disciplines that contribute to the toolkit for understanding human interaction with information and discovery activity.

I hope the language of discovery is part of that bigger picture of how creators of interactions and definers of experiences shape the new tools people use in the Age of Insight.

Also, the Lanyrd page for the talk aggregates the slides, sketch notes, and pointers to some other resources.

Sketchnotes from my UXLX talk are posted. Thanks to the crew at Livesketching for creating these, and sharing them (this photo is courtesy of flickr user visualpunch).

As I’m sure you can see by the level of density, I was moving quickly to cover a lot of ground…!

The complete set of sketch notes from UXLX is available as a set on flickr here.

Related posts:

I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be presenting a lightning talk at this year’s UX Lisbon, in May – I’m excited!  There’s a great lineup of UX speakers, and I’m looking forward to catching up with the international UX community for the first time since moving back to the U.S.

I’m sharing some of the work I’ve been doing at Endeca / Oracle, around the question of interaction and sense making for the emerging category of big data.  This is a UX question I don’t think is on the radar of many practitioners.  And for those who are encountering it, the framings I see for how to engage with this from the UX perspective are scattered and — frankly — small.  They tend to focus on the specifics of visualization, and miss the larger picture of how people engage in discovery tasks and activities every day, on small and large scales. If you’ve followed my work on other emerging interaction UX and interaction spaces like enterprise applications, games, mobile, social networks, and – before I returned to my roots in making products in a startup context – augmented reality, it’s easy to see I’m interested in the deep structure of new interaction spaces, and I think a forward-looking perspective on the broad and fundamental conceptual frame of reference for such new spaces is essential for anyone who intends to work in them in a serious and impactful fashion. So consider this talk an introduction to the package of ideas about technology, interaction, products, and their discovery aspects that I refer to as of the “Age of Insight” – the era in which everyone discovers, and everything is discoverable.

The 2012 UXLX program is online, the talk is titled The Language of Discovery: A Grammar for Designing Big Data Interactions, and the session description is below.

I hope to see a good mix of familiar and new faces at this growing event.  Thanks to the organizers for including me in the program!

The Language of Discovery: A Grammar for Designing Big Data Interactions

The oncoming tidal wave of Big Data, with its rapidly evolving ecosystem of multi-channel information saturated environments and services, brings profound challenges and opportunities for the design of effective user experiences.

Looking deeper than the celebratory rhetoric of information quantity, at its core, Big Data makes possible unprecedented awareness and insight into every sphere of life; from business and politics, to the environment, arts and society. In this coming Age of Insight, ‘discovery’ is not only the purview of specialized Data Scientists who create exotic visualizations of massive data sets, it is a fundamental category of human activity that is essential to everyday interactions between people, resources, and environments.

To provide architects and designers with an effective starting point for creating satisfying and relevant user experiences that rely on discovery interactions, this session presents a simple analytical and generative toolkit for understanding how people conduct the broad range of discovery activities necessary in the information-permeated world.

Specifically, this session will present:

• A simple, research-derived language for describing discovery needs and activities that spans domains, environments, media, and personas
• Observed and reusable patterns of discovery activities in individual and collaborative settings
• Examples of the architecture of successful discovery experiences at small and large scales
• A vocabulary and perspective for discovery as a critical individual and organizational capability
• Leading edge examples from the rapidly emerging space of applied discovery
• Design futures and concepts exploring the possible evolution paths of discovery interactions

Related posts:

I’m pleased to be presenting ‘A Taxonomy of Enterprise Search’ at the upcoming EuroHCIR workshop, part of the 2011 HCI conference in the UK.  Co-authored with Tony Russell-Rose of UXLabs, and Mark Burrell here at Endeca, this is our first publication of some of the very exciting work we’re doing to understand and describe discovery activities in enterprise settings, and do so within a changed and broader framing than traditional information retrieval.  The paper builds on work I’ve done previously on understanding and defining information needs and patterns of information retrieval activity, while working on search and discovery problems as part of larger user experience architecture efforts.

Here’s the abstract of the paper:

Classic IR (information retrieval) is predicated on the notion of users searching for information in order to satisfy a particular “information need”. However, it is now accepted that much of what we recognize as search behaviour is often not informational per se. For example, Broder (2002) has shown that the need underlying a given web search could in fact be navigational (e.g. to find a particular site or known item) or transactional (e.g. to find a sites through which the user can transact, e.g. through online shopping, social media, etc.). Similarly, Rose & Levinson (2004) have identified consumption of online resources as a further category of search behaviour and query intent.

In this paper, we extend this work to the enterprise context, examining the needs and behaviours of individuals across a range of search and discovery scenarios within various types of enterprise. We present an initial taxonomy of “discovery modes”, and discuss some initial implications for the design of more effective search and discovery platforms and tools.

There’s a considerable amount of research available on information retrieval — even within a comparatively new discipline like HCIR, focused on the human to system interaction aspects of IR — but I think it’s the attempt to define an activity centered grammar for interacting with information that makes our approach worth examining.  The HCIR events in the U.S. (and now Europe) blend academic and practitioner perspectives, so are an appropriate audience for our proposed vocabulary of discovery activity ‘modes’ that’s based on a substantial body of data collected and analyzed during solution design and deployment engagements.

I’ll post the paper itself once the proceedings are available.

Endeca invites customers, partners and leading members of the broader search and discovery technology and solutions communities to meet annually, and showcase the most interesting and exciting work in the field of discovery.  As lead for the UX team that designs Endeca’s discovery products, I shared some of our recent work on patterns in the structure of discovery applications, as well as best practices in information design and visualization that we use to drive product definition and design for Endeca’s Latitude Discovery Framework.

This material is useful for program and project managers and business analysts defining requirements for discovery solutions and applications, UX and system architects crafting high-level structures and addressing long-term growth, interaction designers and technical developers defining and building information workspaces at a fine grain, and

There are three major sections: the first presents some of our tools for identifying and understanding people’s needs and goals for discovery in terms of activity (the Language of Discovery as we call it), the second brings together screen-level, application level, and user scenario / use-case level patterns we’ve observed in the applications created to meet those needs, and the final section shares condensed best practices and fundamental principles for information design and visualization based on academic research disciplines such as cognitive science and information retrieval.

It’s no coincidence that these sections reflect the application of the core UX disciplines of user research, information architecture, and interaction design to the question of “who will need to encounter information for some end, and in what kind of experience will they encounter it”.  This flow and ordering is deliberate; it demonstrates on two levels the results of our own efforts applying the UX perspective to the questions inherent in creating discovery tools, and shares some of the tools, insights, templates, and resources we use to shape the platform used to create discovery experiences across diverse industries.

Session outline

Session description

“How can you harness the power and flexibility of Latitude to create useful, usable, and compelling discovery applications for enterprise discovery workers? This session goes beyond the technology to explore how you can apply fundamental principles of information design and visualization, analytics best practices and user interface design patterns to compose effective and compelling discovery applications that optimize user discovery, success, engagement, & adoption.”

The patterns are product specific in that they show how to compose screens and applications using the predefined components in the Discovery Framework library.  However, many of the product-specific components are built to address common or recurring needs for interaction with information via well-known mechanisms such as search, filtering, navigation, visualization, and presentation of data.  In other words, even if you’re not using the literal Discovery Framework component library to compose your specific information analysis workspace, you’ll find these patterns relevant at workspace and application levels of scale.

The deeper story of these patterns is in demonstrating the evolution of discovery and analysis applications over time.  Typically, discovery applications begin by offering users a general-purpose workspace that satisfies a wide range of interaction tasks in an approximate fashion.  Over time, via successive expansions in the the scope and variety of data they present, and the discovery and analysis capabilities they provide, discovery applications grow to include several different types of workspaces that individually address distinct sets of needs for visualization and sense making by using very different combinations of components.  As a composite, these functional and informationally diverse workspaces span the full range of interaction needs for differing types of users.

I hope you find this toolkit and collection of patterns and information design principles useful.  What are some of the resources you’re using to take on these challenges?

The good peo­ple at Chi Nether­lands just posted video of my talk “Play­ing Well With Oth­ers: Inter­ac­tion Design and Social Design for Aug­mented Real­ity” at the Web and Beyond 2010 here in Ams­ter­dam in June.  It’s couched as a col­lec­tion of design prin­ci­ples for the oncom­ing cat­e­gory of social aug­mented inter­ac­tions made pos­si­ble by the new medium of aug­mented real­ity.  But this talk is also a call to action for all mak­ers of expe­ri­ences for the emerg­ing engage­ment space of every­ware to focus on the human and the humane per­spec­tives as we explore the new inter­ac­tions made possible.

The out­line of the talk is roughly:

1. Overview of aug­mented reality
2. Social inter­ac­tion per­spec­tive on cur­rent AR experiences
3. Def­i­n­i­tion of ‘social aug­mented experiences’
4. Com­mon inter­ac­tion design pat­terns for AR
5. Social ‘anti-patterns’ lim­it­ing design of aug­mented experiences
6. Design prin­ci­ples for social aug­mented experiences

(The audio qual­ity is quite good, and the cam­era­man cap­tured most of the slides nicely — so this is a record­ing worth watching.)

This year’s TWAB fea­tured sev­eral talks on aug­mented real­ity, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing and related top­ics; you’ll find record­ings of these on the Chi Ned­er­land Vimeo chan­nel: http://vimeo.com/chinederland

Many thanks to the orga­niz­ers and vol­un­teers for putting on such a well-run event!

TWAB2010: Joe Lamantia – Playing well with others: interaction design and social design for augmented reality from Chi Nederland on Vimeo.

Thanks to all who came to the Muziekgebouw on a lovely early summer day to talk about the emerging engagement space of social augmented experiences for the third edition of The Web And Beyond conference in Amsterdam.

For reference, here’s the session description from the official program:

Augmented reality blends the real world and the Internet in real time, making many new kinds of proximity, context, and location based experiences possible for individuals and groups. Despite these many possibilities, we know from history that the long term value and impact of augmented reality for most people will depend on how well these experiences integrate with ordinary social settings, and support everyday interactions. Yet the interaction patterns and behavior we see in current AR experiences seem almost ‘anti-social’ by design. This is an important gap that design must close in order to create successful AR offerings. In other words, much like children going to school for the first time, AR must to learn to ‘play well with others’ to be valuable and successful. This presentation reviews the interaction design patterns common to augmented reality, suggests tools to help understand and improve the ’social maturity’ of AR products and applications, and shares design principles for creating genuinely social augmented experiences that integrate well with human social settings and interactions.

I’m posting slides for my ‘Understanding Frameworks’ portion of the Beyond Findability workshop on strategic practices just given at the 2010 IA Summit.  This portion of the full-day program emphasizes understanding and identifying the common things that make up a design framework, concentrating on the simple structure that designers need to grasp in order to create their own effective frameworks for solving design challenges. I hope you find it informative and useful!

Design frameworks offer substantial benefits to all parties involved in creating high quality user experiences for products, services, digital media, and the emerging interaction spaces of augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, and cross-media storytelling. Frameworks allow designers to better adapt to the rapid shifts in the digital environment by leveraging increasing modularity, granularity, and structure, and accommodating the far-reaching changes inherent in the rise of co-creative dynamics. This presentation – part of a full-day workshop delivered at the 2009 & 2010 Information Architecture Summits – identifies the elements common to all design frameworks, and offers best practices on effectively putting frameworks into immediate use.  Altogether, it is a short course in the creation and use of customized design frameworks for addressing the complexity of strategic experience design.

I’ve posted my slides for the Where 2.0 panel “The Next Wave of AR: Social Augmented Experiences” organized by Tish Shute. After a review of the current state of augmented reality experiences in terms of the social interactions supported (using the metric of ‘social maturity’), it shares 9 principles for creating social AR experiences that people will enjoy and value.

Special points to those who spot the embedded April Fool’s joke…

“Beyond Findability: IA Practice & Strategy for the New Web” the full-day workshop that debuted at the 2009 IA Summit, is back for 2010.   Featuring an expanded lineup that includes Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone, Cindy Chastain, and me, the workshop explores leading edge theory and practice to equip experience architects for the challenges of designing social experiences, the DIY Internet, engaging business strategically, and more.

Read the full description here, and then register here!

Bonus: All workshop attendees will receive a free copy of Social Mania – the social patterns design card game unveiled at IDEA09.

Last year’s rendition was positively invigorating, with participants from experience-based businesses like Zappos, and practitioners from leading firms like Adaptive Path.  But this one goes to eleven: we hope you’ll join us!