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Eric Reiss, FatDUX, DK

There are lots of great thinkers in our industry. You’ll meet a lot of them at EuroIA. But not all of them submit papers, so their ideas and opinions don’t make it to the formal programme. But we do want to get them involved, so this year, we’re going to wrap up our first day with a brand new kind of panel discussion: the IA Shuffle. Here’s how it works.

First, we need to find a panel topic. So, during the morning we invite anyone to make a suggestion for a topic by writing it down and putting it into a big hat. Eric will sort through the topics and announce the two or three most popular topics at lunch. He will then announce the winning topic based on the cheers of the crowd. If you like a topic, clap, yell, and stamp your feet.

Once the topic has been announced, anyone who would like to be on a panel to talk about it is invited to put their name on a piece of paper and put it into a hat. (In the interest of recycling, we will be using the same hat we used before.)

When the time comes to start the panel – around 17:45 on day one – four names will be picked from the hat. And they will form our panel! No, there won’t be a lot of time for preparation – that’s the idea. We want a spontaneous and lively debate between folks who don’t usually have an opportunity to speak at a conference.

Matt Roadnight, SprintAgile, UK
Jane Austin, IG Index, UK

This report will summarise experiences across a number of Agile (Scrum) projects, customers and teams where there was a significant UX aspect to the projects. It will explore where teams worked efficiently or not so efficiently. This will highlight each of the team’s key challenges, what made their approach successful or hi-light warnings for future projects. A common issue that each of these teams highlighted were extremities on the gap between customer, UX and development collaboration and understanding.

The session will outline experiences of four projects, and will be delivered as a short presentation accompanied by a white paper.

An introduction to Agile and Scrum followed by a review of four projects from a UX/Design activities perspective.

Project One What happens if your stake holders don’t really engage and the UX specialists wow the stake holders with amazing designs. This was a large project with multiple teams and a number of UX specialists, the designs were aspirational but the budget didn’t match.

Project Two What happens if we are “really agile” and go into your first planning session with nothing but a loosely defined product backlog?

Project Three What happens if your stakeholder group has a set brand sign off process for public facing websites that expect high fidelity artefacts?

Project Four What happens if you don’t spend much effort on working ahead on the backlog?

James Kalbach, LexisNexis, Germany

In a Boxes and Arrows article entitled “Searching For The Center Of Design,“Jess McMullin discusses what he calls value-centered design. He writes: “Value-centered design starts a story about an ideal interaction between an individual and an organization and the benefits each realizes from that interaction.“ The author, however, does not present specific ways to coordinate business goals and user goals. Luckily, a new class of UX deliverables that has emerged over the last 5 years that addresses this gap, giving designers a concrete means for arriving at shared value.

Broadly, these deliverables can be called alignment diagrams. At a high level, the different types and approaches to these documents have more in common than they differ. Overall, they leverage IA skills to uncover, organise, and represent how customer behaviour aligns with business goals.

Among others, examples of different types of alignment diagrams include:

• Customer Journey Maps
• Mental Models
• User Workflow Diagrams

The general process is straightforward, though not without its pitfalls. Roughly we can break down the approach into three phases:

1. Observe people on location where they live, work and play.
2. Represent behavior, thoughts, feelings, and goals graphically in a diagram or matrix
3. Align features, products, and services to customers‘ behaviours as a team

For the design of products, websites, or services, alignment diagrams have many benefits:

• Strategically, they expose gaps and opportunities previously not apparent
• Organizationally, they help build agreement between development team members and give a common language for discourse and debate
• Practically, they can be used to derive product artchitectures and site navigation systems

This presentation introduces examples of alignment diagrams and demonstrates their use on real projects. An overall method common to different types of alignment diagrams is presented and discussed, providing many practical takeaways for the audience.

Johanna Kollmann, Franco Papeschi, UK

Open collaboration formats offer insights on how to engage, collaborate and bring ideas. This talk explores how co-creation formats like hackdays or design challenges can be used to enhance a co-design process, involving (lead) users, colleagues or clients.

Firstly, we review existing open innovation and participatory design formats. Both presenters have been actively involved in projects that adapted traditional formats. After reflecting on the learnings from these projects and case studies, the talk discusses opportunities for interpreting open collaboration activities for a UX design project. We present a framework that describes the tools to hand, and advise on when and how to combine them.

Additionally, we point out how to apply an open collaboration mindset to our design processes, e.g. by encouraging collaboration between different user communities. Co-design activities improve the quality of our concepts and ideas

• co-creation activities improve the tangibility of our solutions and inform product development.

Attendees will walk away with:

• a framework and toolset for co-design and co-creation
• an understanding of how and when to use these tools
• insights on how open collaboration formats can support prototyping and development
• practical advice on how to pitch for and organise a project with extended participation and 'co-making' activities

D. Grant Campbell, University of Western Ontario, Canada

This presentation will use two descriptions of London, England, to discuss user confusion in information architecture.

Much of IA involves clarification: how can complex information spaces be made clear to users? In many cases, we achieve clarity by anticipating the user's need and selecting or suppressing details, just as the mind suppresses sensory information that is extraneous to a given task. Beck's map of the London Underground is a famous example of information visualization that achieves just such a purpose, by abandoning scale, and by emphasizing only those details necessary for a clear purpose.

As information for “everyday use” is increasingly offered through the Web, we can no longer rely on clarity of purpose. Information architects face users for whom clear needs are temporary moments in a longer process of confusion, perplexity and anxiety: poverty, legal and bureaucratic complexities, chronic health issues, palliative care, or grieving and loss. In such situations, clear maps of information spaces serve only to answer passing questions, and do not engage with the user's underlying confusion.

The depictions of London in Charles Dickens's Bleak House suggest a way of adapting to this problem. Dickens's descriptions of London do not clarify the British legal system, which is the target of his satire. Instead, they provide vivid metaphors of the confusion and despair affecting those involved in that system. Through images of fog, mud and contagious disease, Dickens does not clarify the law; he clarifies confusion, blindness and perplexity. This presentation will combine details from Bleak House with information research in information seeking and help page design, to suggest that information architects need to explore, not just imaginative ways of depicting information structure, but imaginative ways of depicting perplexity, and finding new metaphors that link the clarity and perplexity together as twin inevitabilities.

Claire Rowland, Alex von Feldmann, Chris Browne, Fjord, UK

The digital world is breaking out of ‘glowing rectangles’ to imbue everyday objects and environments with connectivity and the ability to process data.

This post-desktop model of HCI holds the potential for more naturalistic interactions but heralds a whole new level of complexity in user experience research and design. Moving beyond the screen means not just usability, but interusability: creating intuitable and meaningful interactions with multiple devices that span many interconnecting services.

What kinds of standards will emerge to ensure users know what they can or should interact with, how to do so, what it will do, what its role is within a variety of interconnecting systems, and what the consequences are of engaging with those systems? And how do we define aesthetically pleasing design for such interactions?

In this presentation, we will introduce our view of the core user experience design and research challenges with which creators of ‘internet of things’/’smart object’ systems and services will face, such as:

• Privacy and control of personal data across complex, interconnected systems
• How will users conceptualise and relate to smart objects, sensors and the services surrounding them, and what does this mean for design?
• Ensuring an appropriate degree of personal agency, control and responsibility for both users and the system in all interactions
• What social, cultural and other (perhaps unintended) consequences may ‘smartening’ objects have?
• How user research, prototyping and concepting may need to adapt to the demands of complex, mass-user systems

We will also propose approaches by which some of these challenges may be tackled.

Our work in this area is informed by our role as a research partner in a large EU sponsored project aiming to create guidelines and standards for the interusability of interconnected embedded systems.

Brian Donohue, iQ Content, Ireland

Our client, a bank, asked us to come up with an idea for a personal budgeting app, and to make it something that was actually a bit of fun so you’d share it with your friends. The obvious challenge here is that most people think personal budgeting is about as much fun as cleaning a bathroom.

Our reflexive cringe at the idea of doing a home-budget disguises the critical failing of most budgeting apps: the app does almost none of the work for us. Another problem with many budgeting apps is they ignore a lot of places where we do spend our money -- our vices. So we designed an app to tackle both of those issues.

This is the result: http://www.spendometer.ie

In this talk, I’ll discuss the variety of design decisions that went into this app, from the concept, the content, the visual design, the interaction design (which used a Madlibs style), and the social networking component. I’ll also share the analytics for the app, to show which parts worked well and which didn’t.

Belén Barros Pena, Lab49, UK
Bernard Tyers, Nokia Siemens Networks, UK

Usability testing is an information architect’s bread and butter, but applying it to the study of mobile applications and websites brings considerable challenges. Which device should we use for testing? Can we use an emulator? How do we prototype for mobile? Can we just recycle the tasks we use for desktop software tests? Do we test in the lab or in the wild? How do we record screen, fingers and facial expressions?

We don’t intend to address all the above in just 45 minutes: that would be madness. We’ll focus instead on the last question.

Follow us in our quest to set up a mobile usability testing environment on a tight budget. We’ll show you how others do it: from Nielsen to Google to Little Springs Design. We’ll roam around London electronics and professional video stores searching for brackets and webcams. We’ll put our DIY skills to the test and waste a lot of silicon trying to build our mobile recording device. We’ll scour the Internet for free software. And we’ll finish it off by running a usability test in front of your eyes.

If we can do it, so can you! You’ll come out of this session knowing exactly what you need to do to record mobile usability tests.

Why do we do it? Because we want a mobile usability testing kit at the ready on every information architect’s desk. We’ve been the voice of desktop users for a while now: let’s not forget about the mobile ones.

Stefano Bussolon, Hyperlabs, Italy

The use of tags to classify web resources has become a widely used pattern, not only on blogs and flickr and delicious, but also into the intranets and in the e-Enterprise contexts.

The problem: though the tag cloud could give a taste of the contents and an easy, alternative way to navigate the information space, a non structured list of alphabetically ordered words limits it's information scent.

The solution: every time an user (or an editor) uses more than one tag, she implicitly creates an association among those tags. Given a sufficient number of tagging actions, a proximity matrix of tags can be created, quite similar to the one obtained by the results of a card sorting, and the same statistical tools used in analysing the card sorting results can be applied, like the hierarchical cluster analysis, the principal component analysis, and the k-means.

The case study: during the timespan of a month, I collected around 120,000 bookmarks trough the API of delicious. I generated the square proximity matrix of the 200 most used tags, and performed a factor analysis with 12 factors. I used a simple ranking algorithm to cluster the items onto the 12 factors emerged.

Results: though some outliers, the clustering algorithm gave very meaningful results.

Conclusions: clustering the tags of a folksonomy can help the researcher to discover the implicit mental models of the users and provides a straightforward way to dramatically increase the information scent of the tag cloud.

Peter Bogaards, Informaat, The Netherlands

The experience belongs to the user is a common phrase in user experience design. Therefore, we focus on the thoughts, emotions, and sensations of a person using our designs. Human experience is driven by the design of our artefacts, systems, and environments. In our field, we design for a compelling user experience through an optimal balance of structure, content, interaction and presentation. We collect feedback and improve our processes, deliverables, and tools persistently. But improvements do not come from our discipline and practice alone. We must also look for new inspiration, ideas and approaches in uncommon places to move forward.

Gastronomy and the culinary arts can enrich our professional lives as user experience designers. Both have a long history, are mature fields of practice and focus on experiencing. The eating experience is the user experience ‘avant-la-lettre’. It is carefully orchestrated, tested and improved. In the kitchen and in the restaurant. Done well, we enjoy the quality of the ingredients, preparation and presentation through our eyes, palate, and olifactory and gustatory senses of smell and taste. Also, meals are set by dimensons familiar to us information architects, such as content, order, time, and space. And you don’t need to be Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver or Ferran Adriá to know that the meaning of a profitable dining experience is set by what is created, how it is presented, and how it is served.

In this presentation delivered in Europe’s culinary capital Paris, I will identify concepts, processes and dimensions from gastronomy and the culinary arts which have comparable or identical counterparts within user experience design in general and information architecture in specific. Analogies which will inspire our community. Also, I will present some initiatives in which the design of the eating experience and user experience design are explored, discussed and even merged.

Tomek Jakubowski, UseLab, Poland

Focus: Strategy design. Communication and achieving consent with the Client during project. Project management. Strategies for innovation without „Design by Committee”.

Topic: Ideation toolkit - set of tools guiding innovation process.

Starting new project brings new hopes of new ideas put into effect. Unfortunately, in the process, these expectations often turn out to be futile, as Client’s expectations diverge from the Designer’s. In most of the cases it’s caused by different understanding or different beliefs, how the final result should look like, even though there is consent about goals. In this situation, execution of Client’s power is likely to occur and „design by committee” takes off, which finally results in poor decisions and mediocrity of the project.

The presentation will explain the rationale behind a process, that creates social context, where Designer communicates with the Client on artificial level, made of „smallest possible reductions” - building blocks for ideas, scenarios and processes. In this communication context there is little space for execution of Client’s power on design, and instead Client is drawn into the creation process. This shift in perspective results in Client’s advocacy.

In simple words, it’s all about making the Client think the ideas, solutions we want in the design, hit upon Client’s heads first.

The presentation will partly feed on case study of Wolters Kluwer Polska.

Jeff Gothelf, The Ladders, USA

Traditionally IA has been a deliverables practice. Wireframes, sitemaps, flow diagrams, content inventories, taxonomies etc defined the practice of IA (IxD, UX Design, whatever, etc). While this work has helped define what an IA does and the value the work brings to a business, it has also put IA’s in the deliverables business – measured and compensated for the depth and breadth of their deliverables (instead of the quality and success of the experiences they design). In addition this has forced niche specialization into our practice that has limited the success and growth of IA’s outside of the large organizations that can support these niches.

Enter Lean IA.

Inspired by Lean Product and Agile development theories, Lean IA is the practice of bringing the true nature of our work to light faster, with less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed. It breaks the stereotype of the solitary designer working silently in a corner for a period of time with only occasional peeks into that work before it’s “done.”

This talk will explore how Lean IA manifests in terms of process, communication, documentation and team interaction. In addition, we’ll take a look at how this philosophical shift can take root in any environment from large corporation to interactive agencies to startups and what we, as IA’s, must do to drive the profession forward, evolving and staying ahead of the digital space to maintain relevance and value to our industry.

Paulo Roberto Floriano, TerraForum, Brazil
Juliana Marques, HSBC, Brazil

This presentation will be focused on the process of designing an intranet, from the beginning, to the “end”. This is because the presenter was the project manager and was directly involved in this major two-year project. The objective is to cover all the basis on user research, strategy, information architecture, content strategy and the project conduction itself – since it involved a team of more than 25 members. The case is related to the HSBC Brazil intranet, an award winning project (Nielsen Group’s Intranet Design Annual).

Koen Claes, Emakina, Belgium

Itʼs striking how “Nobel prize winning research” by “the worldʼs most influential living psychologist” seems to indicate how user experience design is kind of missing the point. It turns out, we (UX designers) are focusing on the wrong element. It turns out, we shouldnʼt focus on the “experience” part at all.
Of course, this original research was not studying UX design directly; it originates form the domain of behavioral economics. But, some interesting parallels can be drawn nonetheless. Particularly interesting is how it illustrates the profound distinction between experience and memory.
It turns out, we all have two selves: an “experiencing selve”, and a “remembering selve”; which act as almost complete opposites. So why is this distinction important? Because itʼs your remembering selve that makes all decisions! Your other selve has no vote whatsoever. Or, as concluded: “We actually donʼt choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.”
Implications on UX design are obvious. UX design merely for the sake of creating great experiences is pointless. Itʼs stopping prematurely. UX design is important, but not for the X. Like f(x) = y, UX design should be entirely in function of the memories it creates, or: f(experience) = memory. Because only memories matter.
Not only does this lesson add an interesting philosophical layer of reflection to UX design as a whole, it can have a practical impact as well; right down to the color of a button.
Understanding what exactly makes something stick to memory, would allow to use those techniques to steer what you would like users to, either, remember (like the USP, or the price tag), or, forget (like the experience of a long annoying form, or the price tag). In other words: UX design should be a tool for planting memories...

Peter Boersma & Henning Fischer, Adaptive Path, NL

Faceted navigation (aka parametric filtering) has been an attractive but poorly understood option for solving navigation and design issues related to the display of large numbers of mildly differentiated products.

In order for faceted navigation to be an effective solution, you need to have an effective metadata scheme in place and need to exercise
some design and merchandising discipline. And even then the requirements from users, business and technology make other solutions more practical or simply better..

In this presentation we look at good (and bad) examples, some from our own international experience in e-commerce projects, and draw lessons for practitioners and organizations thinking of introducing faceted navigation onto websites.

Hugo Schotman, Unic AG, Switzerland

Just as the whole mess of targeting multiple browsers begins to come somewhat under control a new challenge dawns: we now (really) have to support not only regular web browsers but also mobile and other devices with their additional challenges and opportunities. Creating an Information Architecture for mobile client platforms can be more challenging than doing the same for "regular" desktop web browser clients. How do you go about creating an Information Architecture for multiple platforms with maximum consistency across platforms? In this talk I will describe an approach for creating an Information Architecture for multiple platforms that starts by looking at the platform with the most constraints and consequently builds on that to include the capabilities of the other target platforms. This approach is somewhat comparable to the technique called progressive enhancement for targeting different web browsers.

Martin Belam, Guardian News & Media, UK

The design pattern of 'sign in with Facebook' or 'use your Twitter account' to register and use other services socially on the web has become more established over the last year, but integrating this into a website can be a tricky user experience to get right. It also poses specific challenges to the Information Architect.

This presentation uses real examples of documentation produced during a six month project attempting to solve this problem for a large media company. It illustrates some approaches that worked, some approaches that didn't, and will focus on three key areas.

1. Documentation
How do you document task flows when so much of the user experience is in the control of a third party? The matrix of possible user journeys is immense, especially when you factor in complications like merging existing accounts with social network details, or the user forgetting password details somewhere along the process. Add to this the fact that terms and conditions under which data can be transferred and persisted seem to be in a state of flux, and you have potential for some very confusing diagrams.

2. Future-proofing your service
People have argued that services like Facebook can become a single sign-on point for the web, and that we needn't build our own registration flows again. As an IA, how can you inform the business to make the right choices to ensure any service built is future-proofed against changes in the "social registration" landscape.

3. Ethics
Defining the "social registration" process also raises ethical issues. Given the major debate about the privacy issues around Facebook profiles and data transfer, how do you determine and validate the right level of privacy warnings to keep you users informed of how much of their data is being processed, without deterring them from using a service.

Matthiew Mingasson, OgilvyOne, France

We, UX designers, are truly passionate people. Passionate about ideas, technology, complex projects and advanced design concepts. We are passionate about iterative processes and collaborative applications. We love to surround ourselves with techniques, methodologies, tests and benchmarks. Why? Because we are constantly pursuing the right decision. The problem is, in the midst of all these complexities we tend to get mired in the details. Somewhere between personas and usability testing, wireframing and paper prototyping, we need to pause and ask ourselves, “Why am I doing this right now? What is the best move to make here? Is this the best possible decision for the overall project?”

These questions can be very difficult to answer and can cause a lot of confusion within the team if never properly addressed. Classic project management processes have always given us a horizontal point of view on things. A horizontal view is good for monitoring the work, planning and budget but it still has a strong weakness: the inability to provide us with a big picture perspective, to help us see our project from a higher point of view. The Natural Planning Model is not a process. It's a simple approach that can provide UX Designers a solid sense of readiness, fluidity and creativity, by giving them a bird’s eye view of their project.

Based on the practical combination of UX Design and the GTD productivity method (“Getting Things Done” by David Allen), this presentation will walk the participants through the 5 steps of the Natural Planning Model for Designers. Theoretical, practical and visual examples will demonstrate how the Natural Planning Model can be applied to UX Design, and will provide experience on the most simple and efficient tools for UX project management, so we, passionate designers, never get stuck in the details ever again.

Axel Rösgen, Carmen Fehrenbach, SapientNitro, Germany

It is not online or offline. Customers gather information and buy their desired products and services in both worlds: The new flat screen, the three week trip through Asia or their car insurance. There is no unique and simple pattern for the when and why. The internet as well as the real world provide tremendous possibilities to get information on product details, prices, reviews and recommendations. Be it a friend in the bar, the staff in the shop, a review in the online forum or a post on Facebook.

With the growth of the mobile internet and camera equipped devices that just need a bar code on the product to get more information it has even become more complex. All this makes it important that we and our clients think much broader when creating new offers. Multichannel marketing and multichannel commerce are two important pieces of that pie. But they are not the only ones.

We want to give some insights in customer behavior and show methods to address these. Learn how to use quantitative web analytics and qualitative user research methods to understand better how our customers behave and think in both worlds. With some examples we want to show how this can be addressed and what role(s) an Information Architect can play in that interesting game.

Christophe Tallec, Utilisacteur, France

At Utilisacteur, since March 2010, we are both an innovative service design provider industrializing its services and a consultant, giving users the possibility to take an active role in their services by any way, product and service system. Who knows, better than the user in a specific position and time of his service use, some kind of information or could share knowledge that would help the rest of the community? The transportation field was a good start regarding all the challenges we are facing to meet the low carbon economy stakes. We work on the paradox that there is a faster potential change on the user side of a service if he is aware of a better way to use it, than it is possible to change heavy infrastructures, transport systems and urban organizations in our cities. We launch Uinfopark(r) at mid may, a participative service willing to turn private mobility into a more participative one, focusing on parking as a vector of change. Amongst several levels of information exchange between active users "prosumers", which provide them several forms of service, the first one is to allow users to tell the rest of the community when they will leave their parking spot. This collective intelligence becomes a soft infrastructure set upon the heavy ones offered by the service providers which users cross during their mobility journey. The service is an interface of shared interests and discussions between all the stakeholders, exploring how dynamic pricing from both private and public entities could influence the users behaviours (positive discrimination for carsharers..) and ease a massive change. Uinfopark(r) has teamed up with some cities in France and will release the service in May 2010 in French and English. The service has several participation levels, evolving with the dynamic pricing scenarios we are beta testing (where and for how long you are parked, if you propose a ride, …) .

Hendrik Sommerfeldt, Braincycles, Germany

The case study covers some general information about Samsung Electronics and its ventures in different areas to set up context for the case and drills down into the sustainability and voice of the customer programs conducted by the "giant". The second part of the talk will dive down into the adaptation process of a VOC concept designed for Asian markets to the German/European market and how the project was run including some detail on the very simple tools used in the process. The closing of the talk then will summarize our learnings from the process, an outlook into the future of the program and how the adaptations to the original concepts were ported back into the Asian markets.