DCIA: User Experience Week Redux

DCIA hosted a great event tonight revisiting Adaptive Path’s recent User Experience Week here in DC. Dan Brown put the event together and he did a great job. The panels were well balanced and the moderation kept things moving. There were even handouts. We hosted the event at my SRA office in Clarendon. The session was broken into three panels, with each panel taking a day of the conference (at least for days one, two, and three).

Kevin Hoffman and Nathan Curtis discussed Day 1, Web 2.0. The basic gist of Web 2.0 is the idea of a more open collaborative web. The Adaptive Path folks spoke of concepts like mass amateurization and relinquishing control, wherein everyone contributes to the content of the site. The business model here is that the site is a tool and an experience, but that all the content is provided by its visitors (or perhaps we shall call them participants). Another major feature of Web 2.0 is Ajax, which is a combination of XML and Javascript to create highly interactive and dynamic web pages. Wikipedia is a good example of mass amateurization and Flickr is a good example of Ajax. Nathan raised some excellent issues, to which the Adaptive Path folks said ‘too early to tell’. What is the impact of Ajax on the interaction design process? With a more stateful application, and more dynamic interactions, the basic web page model falls apart. What is the impact of Ajax on the power politics in design teams? And finally, how are the work products for designing Ajax-driven sites different than what we all do now?

The next panel was Hallie Wilfert, Jason Wishard, and Lisa Hoppes. They spoke about Day 2, information architecture. The big discussion here was Peter Merholz’s genres talk [PDF]. Hallie wondered aloud what the difference is between a genre and the document type, since in her practice they created what Peter called genres but they called them document types. Big discussion. Peter has definitely found a topic people get animated about. My take on Peter’s thesis, which I said by way of answer to Hallie’s question, is that genres are like user-centered document types, where the intent and use of the document is as important as the content elements that compose it. I mentioned BBC’s content modeling seminar at the IA Summit, which focused on finding and cataloging the elements of existing document types and rationalizing them. If I am not totally misrepresenting him, Peter would take the process one step further (or perhaps a couple steps) and tie every document type to a user’s task, thereby synthesizing its function with its form. The result is actually much more flexible and powerful because it takes the document type back to the purpose it serves, and perhaps allows the designer to imagine other forms that would serve that purpose better. Since document types on the web are all fairly new and experimental, a shift in form that served the user’s need better would be welcome. Other topics in this session are Adaptive Path’s well-known mental model gap analysis diagrams, and the impressive Wells Fargo case study.

The last panel was Meg Peters, Christie Milks, and Alex Rudloff on Day 3, User Research. I was fairly sleepy at this point, so I’m just going to list some resources for the topics of discussion: contextual inquiry, field research, remote user testing, and ‘Jared’s method’.

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addenda: Damon has pictures

Filed under Experience Design, Information Architecture, Interaction Design |