archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Designing the Search Experience: The Information Architecture of Discovery is officially available for purchase from Amazon – congratulations to authors Tony Russell-Rose and Tyler Tate. As I mentioned in July, I was invited to contribute a piece. You can read my contribution in chapter four, “Modes of Search and Discovery”.

Now, go buy the book!

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?

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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.

Search and discovery is a ubiquitous and under-addressed question in the user experience and interaction design domains, so it’s very exciting to see former colleague Tony Russell-Rose and co-author Tyler Tate take it on their new book, Designing the Search Experience. I mention this for two reasons: first, because I expect it to be a good book. I’ve collaborated directly on a number of papers and projects with Tony (including the initial articulation of the Language of Discovery), and he has the rare ability to synthesize strongly research-based and theoretical perspectives with a thorough understanding of innovative industry practice. And Tyler’s work speaks for itself

Second; I’m excited to be a contributor. Tony and Tyler have gathered a number of recognized and respected practitioners and voices in the search and discovery arena, and it’s a privilege to be invited. My piece appears in chapter 4, and is a thorough readout of how we’ve used the modes of discovery to drive product design. I hope you find it interesting.

Designing the Search Experience is due for publication in the fall – look for the announcement, and then get ready to buy!

I’m speaking at this year’s UX Australia event in Brisbane, presenting a talk titled “Designing Big Data Interactions For Big Data In the Age of Insight Using the Language of Discovery “(that’s a mouthful…!).  The full description of the talk is here.  The complete program is available here, and includes a good mix of well-known UX thought leaders and new speakers.

I’m looking forward to finally seeing Australia in person; I was booked for the 2010 UX Australia edition, but had to cancel in order to finish my move from Amsterdam back to the U.S., and I’ve been bummed about missing a great excuse to take a very long flight to the other side of the planet

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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.

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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

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