UI 7 West Recap

Day One

The first day of UI 7 West was great. There wasn’t near as many people in attendance as I had expected, but my first session, hosted by Kim Goodwin of Cooper, was awesome.

The session was all about learning Cooper’s goal directed and user centered design process. The main reason I had wanted to attend was to get a bit more information of creating personas and Cooper’s overall approach to user advocation and design. I learned quite a bit. Their method of creating personas was similar but a bit more in depth and quite a bit more structured and data driven than the one that I’ve been using. I am going to be incorporating quite a bit of those processes and methods into my own. I think there was lots for me to learn in this.

Kim went into quite a bit of detail about how to go about gather information from your users, mostly focusing on interview techniques and the types of questions one should ask. She also indirectly explained where the process of gathering user information and creating personas and scenarios fit in with an over all usability process.

One thing that stuck with me was the clear separation of usability testing from the rest of the design process. She didn’t cover that at all, but made it clear that actual user testing didn’t come into play into well after a fairly detailed design was in the works. This makes total sense to me and I’ve found that this is often not the way things are done.

The whole concept of user centered, goal directed design as a concrete design process is really, really great. It allows for user advocacy and at the same time sets the design team up in various ways to be able to cut through red tape, politics and the too-may-cooks-stirring-the-pot situation. It also reinforces the idea that a “graphic” designer and an “interactive” designer are two totally different things. I think that people are beginning to realize that more and more. Those of us in the business have known this for quite a long time.

I plan on slowly working some of these methods and ideas into my own design processes when I see opportunity to do so. As I develop those I’ll be more than happy to share them here.

Day Two

The second day was a sampler day. I attended sessions hosted by Mitch McCasland, Derek Powazek of Fray fame, Gerry McGoveren and Andrew Chak. All the talks were very good and I got something good from each.

The highlight for me was the McGoveren session. I’d read his book Content Critical and was looking forward to hearing him speak about Web content strategy. He went over quite a bit of information and I picked up some good tips on content strategy, writing for the Web and publishing strategy. To be fair, I also got quite a bit out of Derek’s session about Web community as well.

More to come on that in the future but look for not only some minor changes here at Asterisk*, but some fresh content and community ideas of my own building on what I’ve taken from these sessions.

The day ended with a fairly low key and sparsely attended reception, during which I got to meet Eric Meyer, a down to earth guy who I have great respect for. He introduced himself to me as Jeffery Zeldman. You have to love that.

Day Three

On Wednesday I got to spend more time with my new favorite comedian, Eric Meyer as well as Molly Holzschlag learning more about CSS, XTHML and Web standards. To be honest I wondered how useful this would be for me. I have spent quite a bit of time getting myself up to speed with all of this and I felt like I had a good handle on it. I did figure that there was a good chance that I would pick up a few good nuggets.

That was an understatement. The session was great and I learned quite a few new techniques and concepts that will help me right away. The first part of the day was spent with Molly going over XHTML and setting the stage for a de-construction / CSS rebuild of the UI 7 West homepage that Eric Would take us through later.

The XHTML portion wasn’t chock full of new stuff for me, but there were quite a few little things that I picked up. Molly also did a very good job of bringing some things to the front of my mind as well as validating (pun intended) some of my word and coding habits.

What I found a bit more interesting was the CSS rebuild that Eric lead us through. It was great to see how he would handle certain problems and I got lots of ideas out of that. He is a great instructor and hearing him in person really reinforced many of the concepts I’ve read in his books. I was able to pick out a few nuggets that will help me out as soon as I get back to the office.

At the end Eric and Molly showed a true, useful, yet unconventional use of CSS. They had done their whole “PowerPoint” presentation with one HTML document styled in CSS and presented with Opera. The manuals were printed off this document with a print style sheet and that document will be posted for Web access as well. Very cool. If you are interested you can see some other examples of this on Eric’s site.

Day Four

The last day of the conference was the User Interface Engineering (UIE) Research Forum. A day long event where the people from UIE let us in on a whole bunch of really great user research they’ve been doing.

The first two presentations were about the reality of usability guidelines, by Will Schroeder and faceted metadata and searching by Marti Heart. These were both fairly interesting. I found Marti’s presentation a bit academic but I can see how the use of facets will be more and more relevant as it gets fleshed out. It’s something to watch, Will’s presentation was nice to hear, if nothing new. The idea that we know nothing concrete about how users use Web sites, and that all we have is suggestions, is one I’ve been talking about for a long time. One thing he said that stuck with me, it that it is much, much easier to disprove a guideline than to prove one. Take that Jakob.

After lunch we had UIE’s Scent of A Web: Getting Users to Their Content given by Christine Perfetti. This was the best talk of the day. She talked about common usability myths and how a truly successful Web site was one that always pulled a user to the content they are seeking. She mentioned that a sites home page is probably the most useless page on the site and really should only be used as a window to the rest of the content. In essence, and these are my words not hers, a successful home page would be a portal. I think I agree with this for the most part, but I’m not sure if this type of design is possible most of the time. I don’t think most marketing types would be cool with most sites looking like Yahoo.

Still, it’s a good notion and I think that if a balance can be reached here, between the portal type pages and the pages full of marketing positioning and feature content, that would be a good place to start helping the user get what they want. Christine did mention that this can be done effectively as long as the elements on the home page are geared toward (or at least not hindering) getting users to where they want to go.

As much as I hate to say it, having spent so much time advocating for my users, when I think about all that I’ve heard and learned this last week, I now realize that many times the goal of a Web site is not to help the users get to the content they are seeking. In fact I’d go as far to say with many sites, while this is a goal, it’s one that needs to be balanced with other goals. Don’t agree, just ask your marketing department or your CEO. And frankly that isn’t a bad thing. Still, a little guerilla design and gorilla usability can go a long way and still meet a Web sites other goals.