I like music as much as the next person; I enjoy a really varied range of genres and styles but I don’t think I am as involved with music as most people I know. Everyone always has their iPod with them and they are always talking about this and that new thing they just downloaded. I tend to listen to the same things I listened to 10 years ago, though my interest is always piqued when someone recommends something to me.

But Concrete Blonde is in a different category for me. I’ve been listening to them since I was 12. There is really no good temporal reason for me to like Concrete Blonde. The band started in the early 80s when I was but a toddler and I did not hear them for the first time until 7th grade. A friend of mine had an album from her older sister, I believe, and while hanging out at her house one day she just happened to put it on. I was hooked immediately.

Johnette Napolitano’s voice is something out of this world. But more so are her lyrics and the emotions she expresses through music. I grew up listening to Ella Fitzgerald and opera, heavily influenced by my dad with a non-stop diet of The Beatles and 80’s pop from my mother, but Jonhette revealed a whole different world to me in music.

A year after my Concrete Blonde devotion was instated, I learned that the band dismantled. I was a crushed teenager when I realized that the first band I really ever felt a connection with was no more just as I found them. How sad that I would never get to see them again.

Luckily, they did get back together in 2001, which – believe me – caused me to jump and scream with joy and brought tears to my eyes the day I found out. I managed to see them live several times both back home in Brazil and abroad after I moved to the US, including Johnette’s solo concerts. The excitement is inexplicable.

Another side bonus of this experience was meeting and getting to know other fans from around the world who felt equality fervent about their love of Concrete Blonde and followed them around at every opportunity. It’s a fantastic relationship. Just today I wrote someone I saw last in 2004 during a concert to make sure we were going to meet this June. I didn’t even have to ask if they were coming too, I just asked which cities they were going. Fantastic people who I would not have otherwise met, if not for this common appreciation of Concrete Blonde and Johnette’s art.

So, this June, I am planning to go to as many concerts as I can during the 20th Anniversary of Bloodletting tour. I have never done this before and I have no idea how I’m going to make it happen, but I think it will be a fun experience and (since the band broke up again and is only reuniting for this tour) an opportunity I just can’t pass.

Please donate today and help us make this happen.

Simple, straightforward and embraces all dimensions that are relevant about meetings. I love how she used the hand-washing analogy. If you’re interested, join the Facebook page.

I translated it to Portuguese, just to exercise my language muscles. Download the PDF:

If we agree that quantifiable data, specifically the ever popular web analytics, provide you with rich detail to tell you WHAT is happening, it is comforting to realize that it is the type of data gathering that we already do – design research – that provides the qualitative color to answer WHY said things are happening.

What I am finding, however, is that it is more valuable to START with the quantitative work and get to the WHATs and ask WHYs based on those findings, rather than trying to figure out WHYs in exploratory mode (even if the WHAT’s are going to emerge at one point or another in this quest).

My point is that it’s not sustainable as an approach. It’s inneficient to start digging deeper to answer the WHY questions if you don’t have a baseline of WHATs identified.

The problem is that it is not intuitive for designers to start where they are uncomfortable. We are super comfortable with qualitative approaches – they are our go-to tools because that’s what makes sense for design research. However, quantitative research instruments really help narrow stuff down, but they do require you to understand those pesky numbers in order to a) dig in and get to concrete answers and b) understand what it’s saying so you can ask “why”.

In short, WHATs before WHYs are more efficient than WHYs before WHATs, but that requires designers to start with unfamiliar tools to then apply familiar tools. If it was the other way around I think it would be much easier for designers to bridge both approaches and come out the other end with more useful insights.

In other words, since we don’t particularly feel an attraction to numbers (to put it lightly), why would we start there? It’s such a leap from how we think about problems that it is counter intuitive. I don’t believe designers reject the notion of starting with Quant approaches (WHATS) to expand with Qual approaches (WHYs), but it’s inherently counter-intuitive to think that way.

How can I help designers do this when it goes against their nature? That’s what I’m working on right now. More on this later.

I was excited to go but apprehensive because I was meant to present on a topic that is new to me and I had not had an opportunity to have other conversations about it across the community. Also, after seeing the first two days of excellent content one is bound to feel nervous about their own stuff! It ended up being great – I talked about key performance indicators and measuring success in the context of user experience (slides forthcoming – I’m writing notes because they are not good enough on their own as they were only triggers for my talking points).

While preparing for this talk I expected to have few people show up, precisely because of the reason why I am investigating this topic in the first place: designers don’t like numbers. I didn’t think the topic would be attractive at all (thus my “out there” title and description). The feedback I received and the types of questions asked during the event were really interesting and helped validate some suspicions about how our community sees metrics and numbers.

My main goal was to put something out there about KPIs and measures of success for UX so that we could start a conversation and really explore this topic. I have grown tired of how this topic ALWAYS ends up going into a “what is the ROI” conversation and never advances our ability to express what success means to us. Measuring success to show our value to others is a secondary goal, measuring success for ourselves seems far more valuable to me, which is why I am going to continue to explore this and try to focus the conversation on that goal.

The main theme I saw emerge from the feedback I received is that people felt validated; that I brought up the questions they all have but had not seen articulated in the community — which is precisely what I felt when I started looking into this 4 months ago. We can’t really learn and expand our understanding as a community if we don’t figure out what questions we’re trying to answer. And that is why, in my opinion, we always fall back on the pointless ROI calculation discussions.

I am very grateful for all who came, participated and found me later to discuss the topic. I am very excited about seeing what’s next.

After the presentation I actually started asking myself why the hell is it that I so rarely have to design for search behaviors. The reality is that oftentimes I’m designing for existing services where search is an existing capability and iterating it is never in scope.

One of the problems with that, which became more apparent to me after the presentation, is that treating search as a separate behavior from browse is really misguided. I thought about this problem before but could not quite articulate it very well until today.

Historically I had been taught and understood search and browse as distinct elements – which they are visually and from a UI elements standpoint – but from a behavioral perspective, they really are not, rather, they are part of a continuum. A spectrum of discovery behaviors if you will.

If we think, for example, about how faceted classification emerges in search interfaces and in browsing interfaces it becomes really clear how intertwined they are.

One of my questions to Peter during the presentation (which unfortunately did not get addressed but hopefully will be part of the UIE follow-up podcast) was if he had identified patterns of use of faceted search and if there were any emergent patterns that could help answer if faceted search is more appropriate for a particular kind of content or context — and when it might not be appropriate.

Faceted browse/search is a hot topic at work and I feel like it’s been historically a random requirement that ends up on a project brief because of process inertia. Someone saw it somewhere and thought it was cool so decided that it should be applied to the kind of content we are surfacing for our audience.

I have no good evidence to substantiate my hypothesis at this point (unless lack of examples in the wild is enough), but I suspect that for our content – namely video content, generally in the entertainment realm, frequently movies, series and other TV programs – having faceted search as a primary tool for discovery is really inappropriate.

I have definitely seen and appreciated the application in e-commerce and feel like there is a prevalent pattern there for its use. But on the content I design for, I just don’t know. If I am to rely on what I know from user behavior learned observing people try and get to the video content they want (across different platforms in a number of distinct scenarios of use) the attributes they need to make decisions are frequently few. The variation in behavior is little in terms of user motivation, and greater in content type (i.e.: people look for movies differently from how they look for series).

How can I make a compelling argument that this particular pattern is not the right fit when I am not sure what is? I’ve seen it fail in usability tests but that only makes people try to fix it and improve it, not to try a completely alternate solution that might be appropriate. Any ideas out there?

Also, I’m not on a crusade against faceted search, I am just looking for ways to 1) articulate that there might be a problem picking this particular pattern 2) explore other ways to do it (both in the context of use and content I described). Any ideas are welcome.

Regardless, I think it will help me in the future to frame the scope of what I need to design for when dealing with content discovery behaviors by thinking about them in the browse-search spectrum. At least I expect that to give me a better argument to combat feature requirements void of context.

[I'll update this with a link once it's published]

My question is an old concern about how new practitioners are being introduced to User Experience Design and Research practices by being fed a multitude of methods and not given much support about how to decide the right circumstances to use them.

It is not sufficient just to know how a certain method works. It is also not sufficient having used that method once or twice. What is it about our experience as practitioners that makes us better or worse decision makers? How do we choose to dedicate time and money to an 8-week long project to produce personas instead of a different approach?

What distinguishes the practitioners that not only choose methods and know how to apply them, but choose the methods that are most effective for a given problem?

A few years ago, Jared himself told me a story about an experiment where two distinct research teams (unaware of each other I believe) were given the exact same research goal and employed the same methodology to achieve it, and came up with different results and findings.

When that sort of thing happens, I wonder: Can we really trust our methods? But more importantly, if we accept that our methods are not really scientific and that we can’t really have a high level of confidence about the results we end up with, how do we choose one over another?

Somehow we just do. But some do better than others. Some do MUCH better than MANY others. If you have the opportunity to work with practitioners with enough experience and knowledge, you see excellent arguments for why to do A versus B for a given set of circumstances. So yes, only experience will help one make better choices, but everyone’s experiences are different. As a way to try to educate new practitioners we coach and mentor by teaching the methods and also giving advice such as “be flexible” and “don’t marry a particular process” and “figure out what kind of problem you are trying to solve first”, which are all excellent advice, but not strategic enough and often not practical enough that it can really help someone make a decision when they are faced with a new challenge.

Jared’s opinion is that our field is still too young and we haven’t yet been able to articulate the criteria we use in that decision-making process. I agree, however, it worries me that many think they are advancing in their practice because they know more, when in fact, they just learned new methods, but don’t really have the skills to assess risks, and benefits, between choosing one over another.

Being a runner gets you to the finish line, knowing which way to run wins the race. I really hope we become better equipped to pass on knowledge about how we make choices and why because, paraphrasing Jared, knowing a lot of recipes a restauranteur does not make.

“Hi, everyone. If you decided you were interested in IA/UX but you didn’t know much about it…and you wanted to find out more…where would you go? What books would you read? What blogs would you add to your feed reader? What seminars would you attend? What tutorials would you take? What tweeters would you follow?”

Having no context I took 5 minutes are made this recommendation. I am sure I would tweak and change this significantly if I had any other inputs, but this was my 5 minute recommendation and I thought I’d share:

The starter book is Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web. After that, The Elements of User Experience followed by Don’t Make Me Think. All other books people recommend are wonderful, but not to start with.

Become a member of The Information Architecture Institute and find yourself a mentor; it’s the most valuable investment anyone can make when starting out.

I don’t follow blogs. I let the community curate content for me instead. Following the right people on twitter means they send me all the good blog posts. Also, you come across the relevant blogs via the discussion lists (specially the one you get access to when you join the IA Institute). Connect with people first, content second. It’s helpful to connect to the UX/IA/IxD groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Slideshare – it will help attract good content to you. You’ll immediately have access to all kinds of people you’ll become interested in connecting with.

Attending seminars: Go to all the free stuff happening locally. In Philly there’s PhillyCHI and Refresh Philly to start with. Online, spend your money wisely and pick the topics that seem more interesting to from UIE Virtual Seminars and Rosenfeld Media Webinar Series. Make sure you keep track of The UX Workshop for free broadcast of local events in other cities.

For community and education, attend the IA Summit. If you are starting out, that’s the first conference to go to. And Interactions. For more focused training, UIE’s User Interface Events and Adaptive Path’s UX Week and UX Intensive.

On Twitter, there are too many interesting people to follow and big names in the field. They don’t necessarily share any relevant information or advice relevant to starting out. These people do: @jmspool, @whitneyhess, @halvorson, @sladner, @mmilan, @austingovella, @leisa, @mediajunkie, @emalone, @stephenanderson, @billder (I share a lot of stuff too: @livlab)

Lastly, start a blog. You learn significantly more by sharing and capturing your own thoughts than countless dollars spent in training.

And if you are going to start on all this after lunch, print this to read during lunch: http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/

It’s bad. I have used a number of different services and they are all bad. So when my friend Kit Seeborg told me about her new start-up, BumperTunes, I thought, they could definitely help with the lousy quality music these services have to offer!

So, in the spirit of encouragement for Kit & team, who are really focused on the podcasting market rather than conference calling, I just wanted to share what I have to listen to between 5 to 10 times a week (sometimes multiple times in a day):

please-help-my-poor-corporate-ears.wav

Update: If you have other examples, please record and post here! It’s easy. On Windows, just go to Programs > Accessories > Entertainment > Sound Recorder (fire up your lovely conference call tune and hit record)