archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve posted slides from my presentation at Strata to slideshare; they’re available for both viewing and download. I shared quite a bit of new material with the audience at Strata: most notably a new collection of mode chains and example scenarios capturing patterns in discovery activity in the consumer domain, to complement our understanding of and descriptive patterns for enterprise-centered sense making.

O’Reilly recorded the talk, so I’ll post the video as soon as they make it available.

Thanks to all who attended.

Big data types, visualization wonks, analytical savants, and all those interested in the discovery space as the leading category of interaction in the Age Of Insight should join me in NY next week for Strata. I’m super excited to be sharing the Language of Discovery: A Toolkit For Designing Big Data Experiences at this East Coast edition of Strata.  If travel and time allow, I’m going to take in some of the NYC Data Week events scheduled for the same week.

Slides and video will be available after the conference, but there’s no substitute for being there.  And besides, New York is beautiful in October, so what more reason do you need to join?

Related posts:

Not one but two sets of sketch notes are available from my UX Australia talk Designing Big Data Interactions with the Language of Discovery!

This set is courtesy of flickr user uxmastery – a complete set of sketch notes from UX Australia is available here.

And this set is courtesy of flickr user CannedTuna — you’ll find the complete set of Gary’s sketch notes from UX Australia here.

Thanks to both note takers for crafting and sharing these notes!

The lanyard page gathers all the published resources for this talk: http://lanyrd.com/2012/ux-australia/sxbtz/

Slides from my talk at UX Australia are posted now.

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.

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.

“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!