Day 1 IA Summit notes

Brief and rough notes from the Saturday IA Summit sessions.

Jared Spool, UCD "rocks" but not in the way that you think

• Good but quite different from the usual Jared talk; definitely more pontification, less on practicality and not as hilarious. If Jared keeps this up, he will start to rival Jakob for making over-simplistic statements that are partly true but can be really misinterpreted if not looked at with a critical eye.
• I do agree with Jared that the world we work in has changed a lot since the IBM/360 (which I programmed in high school). "User-centered" was needed to combat the other forces "in the good old days" (that were not that good). If you were blindly following a UCD methodology in the past, you were doing bad UCD to begin with. If you are blindly following any methodology you are doing bad work to begin with.
• I think what we do today is more about collaboration than the "put my discipline in the center of the process" battles from the old days. Collaboration with other professionals in the UX realm, collaboration with business, collaboration with development. And so on.
• Human bar charts: stroke of genius.
• Informing design is important but do not forget about another value of focusing on the user experience: the more strategic impacts of determining what to design in the first place.

Gene Smith, Tagging trends

• General trend: adding more structure to user-driven tagging. Sub trends: Automanual tagging, community-driven structuring.
• User + resource + tags model needs to be expanded now. Tags are being applied to the resource as a whole but also parts of the resource.
• "Innovative" systems being built upon tagging. IBM Dogear referenced.

Tingting Jiang, Exploratory search and folksonomy

• An entry in the mythical "research track".
• Compared hierarchical classification, faceted classification, dynamic clusters, folksonomy.
• Four user activities: Browse, search, being aware, monitoring.
• User + resource + tags model with lines showing what the systems are doing. Resource-to-resource is a dotted line (no one doing it, apparently).

Bryce Glass, Reputation systems

• Patterns: Levels, points, Top, Trophies, Ranking, Awards, Stats, Testinomials. Coming soon to Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
• More interesting (to me): The questions to ask the business to see what reputation system aspects are right for them.
• Business goals? Community spirit? Member motivation? Measuring reputation? Inputs to the reputation? Etc.

Jess McMullin, Experience impact framework

• How to work with your stakeholders better.
• Know who they are (e.g., 8 types of people).
• Know what motivates them.
• Know what they do, their activities.
• "Do what we do" in collaboration with them. Understand, solve and evaluate with them.
• Get commitment to action.

Brandon Schauer, Wow factor

• Business goal is customer loyalty: accomplish with "wow factors" within the experience.
• People remember the high, the low and the end of the experience. "Total sum" that can stress the "average" not as important.
• Build experience roadmaps to show how it all fits together, evolves over time, crosses channels.
• Planning the experience and staging the experience, not just designing the experience.