archive.Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve joined the Johnnies!  The good people at Johnny Holland Magazine just published Learning From Games: A Language For Designing Emotion.  This article is a introduction to the ideas I talk about under the heading ‘Architectures of Fun’, which is my perspective on the great research and design framework built by leading games consultant Nicole Lazzaro, of Xeo Design.  Check it out, and let the rest of the Johnny community know what you think about this powerful language for designing the emotional elements of experiences.

So many good books come out every year – even in the design and technology fields – that it’s hard to ‘make a selection’ as they say in Europe. To help through the difficult choices, let me suggest two new user experience books worth adding to your library.

Modular Web Design: Creating Reusable Components for User Experience Design and Documentation, by Nathan Curtis, of eightshapes fame. Components, frameworks, and modularity are near and dear to my heart (when applied in the right times and places for design purposes), so I can say with confidence that Modular Web Design is the best exploration of the what, how and why of modular design currently available. It should change the way you think about architecting experiences of all kinds, and – if you’re on board already – help you put this approach into practice with clear examples, advice, and guidance.

Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories, from the good people at Rosenfeld Media. Card Sorting is a thorough treatment of one of the most flexible, affordable, and lightweight methods in the user experience toolkit. Use my tool, but for chapter and verse on card sorting, read Donna Spencer’s book.

Buy both, and enjoy!

I’ve posted my slides and materials from the Beyond Findability workshop Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Matthew Milan and I put on at the IA Summit in Memphis recently.

This set of materials addresses some of the most important questions for practitioners considering a framework-based approach to design: why framewarks matter for user experience and interaction design, what frameworks are useful for, and how you can work with them effectively.

Why *do* frameworks matter? As I’m arguing, look around and you’ll see profound shifts changing the structural makeup of the digital environment, the contexts and boundaries of the experiences, and the role of professional designers.

For designers, very complicated and interesting problems are on the way: think of Mike Kuniavsky’s work defining some of the fundamental concepts behind the ‘smart things‘ that will inhabit this new design environment, such as information shadows and service avatars. It’s plain that this world will require new tools, and I believe frameworks are part of that toolkit. (See my column Everyware: Design for the Ubiquitous Experience for ongoing perspective.)

And check out the slides for the rest of the workshop

Nothing better than blues, barbecue, and Building Blocks!

That’s the title of my just-submited guest contribution to Nathan Curtis’ forthcoming book “Modular Web Design.” (I’m in good company; Todd Warfel and Andrew Payne are two of the other contributors.) When Modular Web Design comes out (follow on Twitter for details), you can turn directly to chapter four, ‘Variations’, and read my cautionary tale.

What about the rest of the book? I’ve seen the complete outline, and let me say that if you like modularity as much as we do and you’re designing interfaces, this is the book for you. Maybe you’re even working with some variation of the building blocks, or a similar design framework? And the cover features Legos!

Of course, if you *don’t* like modularity, there’s no need to sweat about it: the future has a place for everyone [We’ll be busy playing with our Siftables]. Just don’t be surprised if it turns out to be smallish, dry, and bit – uhh – box-like…

If you’re keen to help shape the way that the user experiences of the future are conceived and defined, join Andrew Hinton, Matthew Milan, Livia Labate, and yours truly in a full-day workshop / seminar titled “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times” at the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis.
We’ve got a lot of great material to share – and shape – on where this new[ish] discipline is headed, from four complementary but distinct professional perspectives (digital agency, in-house services group, management, design consultancy), shared by leading practitioners.

Here’s a quick description:
“Changes are happening fast in technology, the economy, and even the various User Experience professions. In the midst of such turbulence, conventional Information Architecture can have trouble seeming fully relevant. Some may see it as a commodity, or a narrow specialty that has little to do with the game-changing emergence of social media, ubiquitous & mobile computing, and the rest.
This full-day workshop will address such concerns with a boundary-pushing foray into IA craft and strategy. We’ll show how core IA skills are more relevant and strategically important than ever, and we’ll explore how we can extend IA to its full potential in 21st century UX design.”

Read more about Beyond Findability here.

Register here.

See you in Memphis!

In case you couldn’t make it to Amsterdam for EuroIA 2008, or if you were in town but preferred to stay outside in the warmth of a sunny September Saturday than venture into the marvelous Tsuchinski theater, I’ve posted the slides from my talk Frameworks are the Future of Design.
Enjoy!

Reading about the recent release of SocialText 3 I was struck by the strong parallels between the defining characteristics of enterprise environments in 2003/2004, and the emerging public Web 2.0 landscape. The essential characteristics of many enterprise environments are:

• Syndication: streams of modular content and functionality broadcast widely to subscribers within the firewall, such as enterprise data feeds, ERP, BI capabilities, CRM, custom capabilities shared via SOA
• Services (e.g. environmental, like the bees we used to have for pollination): identity, security, publication, data management, cloud storage, imap email, etc.
• Social Structures: tangible networks & communities of like-minded people, oriented around a common practice, purpose, process, or pain; think of all the matrixed, horizontal org structures and ad-hoc networks encoded via internal email lists, IM, sprawling intranets, corporate directories, etc.

These same attributes are emerging as the hallmarks of the public Web 2.0 landscape. This is how the three S’s manifest for Web 2.0:

• Syndication: A literal and figurative torrent of content in the form of blogs, RSS, feeds, streams, APIs, for social objects of all types, as well as catalogs of rentable content
• Services: This layer is growing rapidly for the public internet, with OpenID / OAuth, mapping, visualization, backup, calendaring – the list is nearly infinite, and still expanding
• Social Structures: The Web (and soon the mobile universe) is profoundly social now, and will continue to become ever more so.

I think you can easily see the strong parallels. It’s this similarity between the older enterprise environments and the emerging Web 2.0 environment that user experience practitioners, — and especially anyone practicing information architecture — should note.
Why? As I’ve written before, modularity is everywhere in this new environment, it’s apparent at all layers of the information world, from utilities like processing power, to services, to the elements that make up the user experience. The effects of modularity in syndication, services, and social structures on developers and IT have been profound; practices, processes, organizational structures, and business models have all shifted in response.

This wave of change first affected the developers who build and work directly with code and systems. But inevitably, disciplines further up the stack are feeling the impact of this shift, though many of us (and I’m putting user experience in this class) may not know it yet.

How will we feel that impact? One obvious way is in the pressure to adopt agile and other modular product construction practices created by and for developers as the preferred way to structure user experience and design efforts. This is a mistake that confuses the different stages of software / digital product creation (as Alan Cooper explained well at Agile2008). Design is not construction, and shouldn’t be treated as if it is. And one size fits all does not work when choosing the process and toolkit used for creating complex digital products, services, or experiences.

One result of this modularity rules all approach to user experience is the erosion of bounded or well-structured design processes that balance risk effectively for the various stages of design, and were meant to ensure the quality and relevance of the resulting products and experiences. Erosion is visible the trends toward compression or elimination of recognizable design concept exploration and usability verification activities in many design methods.

More immediately – in fact staring us right in the face, though I haven’t seen mention of it yet in m/any user experience forums – is the growing number of situations wherein there’s “No designer required”.

Examples of this abound, but just consider this feature list for the Social Text 3 Dashboard:

• You decide what matters
• Create your dashboard in minutes
• Include 3rd party information and applications
• Track & attend to what’s most important to you
• Status updates flow automatically, as you work

If that’s not specific enough, here’s what comes out of the box, in the form of pre-built widgets:

• My Conversations – changes others have made to any Socialtext workspace page you authored, edited, or commented on
• My Colleagues – recent updates made by people you are subscribed to
• Workspaces – workspaces you have access to and their activity metrics
• Workspace Page – any page from any of your Socialtext workspaces
• RSS Viewer – results of an RSS feed you configure
• Workspace Tags – a tag cloud of all tags in a particular workspace
• All People Tags – a tag cloud of all tags on people in Socialtext People

No architect required for most people here… and this trend is everywhere.

And then there’s the awesome spectre ofcommoditization. Listening to a friend describe the confusing experience of trying to select a short list of design firms for inclusion in an RFP made the linkage clear to me. I’ll quote Weil’s definition of commoditization from the paper referenced above, to make the point explicit.

Please recall that commoditization denotes the development of a competitive environment where:

• Product differentiation is very difficult;
• Customer loyalty and brand values are low;
• Competition is based primarily on price; and
• Sustainable advantage comes from cost (and sometimes quality) leadership.
• Commoditization is driven by excess capacity.

Please note that I’m not implying user experience practitioners face overnight obsoletion.

But I am saying that I doubt our current disciplinary worldview and toolkit adequately prepare us for the realities of the new environment emerging so rapidly. Code, by contrast, is and always will be modular. (After all, that is the defining attribute of our alphabets.)

But user experience is holistic, and has to learn to build in its own way from these smaller pieces like a writer combining words and phrases. Eventually, you can create works of tremendous depth, richness, and sophistication; think of Ulysses by James Joyce, or the Mahabharata. These are richly nuanced experiences that are the result of working with modular elements.

My suggestion for one response to the oncoming wave of modularity and commoditization is to focus our value proposition in the creation of tools that other people use to define their individual experiences. In other words, shift our professional focus to higher layers of abstraction, and get into the business of defining and designing frameworks, networks, and systems of experience components. Practically, this will mean things like observing and defining the most valuable patterns arising in the use of systems of modular elements we design, and then advising on their use to solve problems. This is the direction common within enterprise environments, and in light of the appearance of public pattern libraries (Yahoo’s UI), I think I see it happening within parts of the user experience community. I’m not sure it’s happening fast enough, though.

I hoped to communicate some of these ideas in my talk on why frameworks are the future (at least for anyone practicing Experience Architecture) for the 2008 EuroIA Summit that just took place here in lovely Amsterdam. I’ll post the slides shortly. In the meantime, what do you think? Is user experience ready for the modularized, enterprise-like environment of Web 2.0? How are you responding to these changes? Is commoditization even on your radar?

September in Amsterdam approaches: in addition to the inevitable mix of clouds, rain, more rain, and tiny slivers of sunlight, September means EuroIA 2008, where yours truly will speak about design frameworks.

In case you can’t make the conference, here’s a text only summary of my talk. Pictures will follow the presentation – promise!

It’s a DIY Future
The Web is shifting to a DIY [Do It Yourself] model of user experience creation, one where people assemble individual combinations of content gathered form elsewhere for expressive, functional, and (many) other purposes. The rapid growth of widgets, the resurgence of enterprise portals, the spread of identity platforms from social network destinations to blogging services, and the rapid increase in the number of public APIs syndicating functionality and data, are all examples of the DIY shift.

Architects of the Future
For design professionals, the defining characteristic of DIY future is co-creation: the participation of a broad spectrum of people in creating experiences. In this new world, the role of designers is to define the tools co-creators use to assemble experiences for themselves and others. These tools will increasingly take the form of design frameworks that define the modular components of familiar structures such as social networks, functional applications, collaboration platforms, personalized dashboards, and management consoles.

Why Frameworks?
Frameworks are the future for three reasons. First, everyone can create sophisticated information structures now, and designers no longer serve as a gateway. Second, the definition of frameworks allows designers to continue to provide valuable services and expertise in a cost effective manner: It’s something designers can sell in a commodified digital economy. Third, designers have an good combination of human insight and architecture design skills; this hybrid way of thinking can serve as a differentiator and strength.

One example of the sort of design framework information architects will create more of in the DIY future is the Portal Building Blocks system described herein. Providentially, this design framework addresses many of the problems inherent in the current architectural schema for DIY self-assembled experiences.

History Repeats Itself: The Problem With Portals
The rise and fall of the Web 1.0 portal form offers a useful historical lesson for creators of the new generation of design frameworks underlying DIY self-assembled experiences.
Despite early promises of utility and convenience, portals built with flat portlets could only grow by expanding horizontally. The resulting experience of low-density information architectures was similar to that of navigating postwar suburban sprawl. Like the rapid decline of many once-prosperous suburbs, the inconvenience of these sprawling collections of portlets quickly overwhelmed the value of the content they aggregated.
The common problem that doomed many very different portals to the same fate was the complete lack of any provision for structure, interaction, or connection between the self-contained portlets of the standard portal design framework.
Looking ahead, the co-created experiences of the DIY future will repeat this cycle of unhealthy growth and sprawl – think of all those apps clogging your iPhone’s home screen right now – unless we create design frameworks that effectively provide for structure, connection, and interaction.

The Building Blocks – An Example Design Framework
The building block framework is meant to serve as a robust architectural foundation for the many kinds of tools and functionality – participatory, social, collaborative – that support the vision of two-way flows within and across the boundaries of information structures. This means:

• Allow for rapid growth and structural change
• Establish a common language for all co-creation perspectives
• Encourage construction of scalable, reusable structures
• Create high-quality user experiences
• Enable sharing of assets across boundaries
• Enhance social dynamics, such as 2-way conversation flows

The Building Blocks framework defines two types of information architecture components in detail – building blocks (or Containers), and navigation components (or Connectors) – as well as the supporting rules and guidelines that make it possible to assemble complex user experience architectures quickly and effectively.

The Containers and Connectors specifically provide for structure, interaction, and connection at all levels of the information environment; from the user experience – visual design, information design, interaction design, information architecture – to functionality, metadata, business rules, system architecture, administrative processes, and strategic governance.
Case Study: Evolution of an Enterprise Portal Suite

The Building Blocks began life as an internal tool for lowering costs and speeding design during the course of sustained portal work done for a Fortune 100 client. Over a span of ~24 months, the Building Blocks provided an effective framework for the design, expansion, and eventual integration of nearly a dozen distinct portals.

The design framework evolved in response to changes in the audiences, structures, and contents of portals constructed for users in different countries, different operating units, and several organizational levels.
The portal suite went through several stages of evolution and growth:

• Experimentation
• Rapid expansion
• Consolidation & integration
• Stability and continuity

Lessons In Designing Frameworks
Successful co-created experiences – Flickr (commercial) and Wikipedia (non-commercial) – combine deliberate top-down architecture and design with emergent or bottom-up contribution and participation in a new kind of structure Kevin Kelly calls the “hybrid”. Frameworks support hybrids!

Hope to see many of you in Amsterdam!

The I.A. Podcast (by Jeff Parks of I.A. Consultants and BoxesandArrows podcast fame) just published the second of two interviews discussing research on ethics, design, social media, and conflict.

Play and download the second interview here.

Subscribe to the iTunes and feedburner feeds for the I.A. Podcast here.

These podcasts are based on the Designing Ethical Experiences series I’m writing for UXMatters: watch for publication of the final article later this summer.

Thanks again, Jeff!