connecting*the*dots

Tonight @ 7pm in Congdon Hall, Room 138 at High Point University (Directions), John Ford and myself will be rapping about this little activity called blogging.

If you’ve heard about it before, but don’t know how blogging can assist you as a small business owner, an activist, a writer, etc., come on down and get both the back-story and the 411 on how to publish to the internet.

And if you’re already a blogger, well, come on down and live-blog our presentation!

In my long-term quest to become more localized with my business ventures, I recently partnered up with John Ford at Aldenta to design a web strategy for one of his clients: Louis’ Healthy Breads.

Louis is a local entrepreneur who pours his heart and soul into his amazing line of health food products. Prior to our initial meeting, John mentioned that he was passionate about his product, and after meeting him, I have to say that he’s as authentic as they come.

Okay, a gear clicked.

After speaking with his daughter, Ann (his soon-to-be-hired editor and marketing person) and hearing about his son, Grant (the Chief Chef of the operation), my original plan began to grow some serious legs.

Yep, we’re going to create a Louis’ Healthy Breads blog.

Logistically speaking, Louis’ hip to email, but he’s not technically savvy and he’s always on the go — visiting stores across the east coast and beyond, trying to land retail deals for his product. The best thing about his day to day is that he’s constantly meeting interesting people who are always sharing personal stories, ranging from pure testimonials to insight into their health issues and fitness goals. Hey, he’s a salesman from the heart; a great candidate for simple posting, but not necessarily the archival aspects of tagging or the community aspects of linking out.

Louis is already doing the conversational work of a blog, but his “interface” doesn’t have built-in permalinks, comments and trackbacks (heh). Our job is to figure out the best way to corral his conversational personality and guide it into a realm with a searchable past and a participatory interface.

As a next step, I sat down with Ann last week to discuss a blogging strategy for the company. We both realized that Louis’ strong suit is writing, so we’re going to play to his strengths and limit his role as much as possible, keeping his publishing responsibilities focused by sending emails to Ann for editing and posting. We applied the same thinking to Grant, who will be able to provide a “behind the scenes” look into the baking process, leads on new ingredients, etc.

By heading down this road, Ann has implicitly agreed to become the blogger, editor, curator extraordinaire. Essentially, she’ll be editing posts from Louis and Grant, applying structured tags to the posts, linking out to related conversations across the blogosphere, participating in related conversations, managing comment threads and tracking related information in her RSS aggregator.

The idea that I’m trying to impart is that we don’t need to “segment” people into groups or “target” them like they’re deer in order to “push” product. We already know that the majority of people who are drawn to Louis’ Healthy Breads share certain interests, desires; call them attributes if you will. Health enthusiasts gravitate toward the product, yet their reasons for doing so could be as diverse as a fear of heart disease and diabetes to wanting nutritious fuel just prior to a marathon.

Ann is going to make it her personal mission to explore these existing communities, enter the fray of their current conversations and build relationship with actual people (not segments). Once she finds these resources, she’s going to start tracking them for interesting conversational nuggets to point to and contextualize from the LHB blog. Then, and only then, will she (and LHB) come off as credible participants in the communities they wish to serve.

Checkout the above workflow (228k | .pdf) that I put together to help get them off the ground. Can you think of anything that I might have overlooked?

In 1997, at the age of 93, my grandmother — Reva Patrick Coon — asked me to design the cover for her first book.

Ties & Tales is her personal story of Dunsmuir, California — the place she’s called home since the early 1920’s. While much of the content focuses on our family, the book also provides interesting context to mainstream American history.

Three years in the making, G’ma’s memoirs are finally ready for the printer. And after a few attempts, I finally finished the book jacket this past weekend.

Now I’ve got to give her a call and ask permission to release the book as a blog…

UPDATE: I received the sweetest voice-mail message from G’ma today. I think she likes the book cover. ;-)

UPDATE II: G’ma gave me her blessings to publish her memoirs as a blog. The book is over 200 pages long, so I’ll probably convert each of her chapters into separate posts. Here’s a sample from chapter 1:

1 .. IN THE GARDEN

In 1732, the first of the Patrick’s left North Antrim, Ireland, and sailed to the United States where they settled in Kentucky, later moving to Indiana where they became grain farmers.

The McKinney’s, Irish with just a wee bit of Scotch (for flavouring, no doubt) emigrated to Minnesota and later Wisconsin.

My father, Thomas McVey Patrick, curly brown hair and snappy blue eyes, was an adventurer. He forsook the security of the rich farm life in Indiana at age twenty. Mounting his horse and taking only his knapsack, revolver and a very few good supplies, he waved farewell to his family and rode off. After six or seven months he arrived in Seattle, Washington.

[…]

title: Dunk
created: fall 1990
media: Rapidograph illustration
dimensions: 18″ x 24″

Building a successful UX team — the right mix of roles, responsibilities, method, etc. — isn’t an easy task. It really does depend on the DNA of the organization (size, politics, legacy issues, etc.) and the type of domain (application, information centric site, desktop software, etc.).

Here’s a visual outline that I tried to follow at Ameritrade — an extremely secure, authenticated trading platform, with unique opportunities for collaborative filtering, interface customization, sussinct client messaging and knowledge management (both on the unauthenticated and authenticated areas of the site).

If I had to do it all over again, here are the top three things I would’ve done differently:

Reduced the emphasis on methodology
Due to the placement of the team in the org, the legacy of design within the domain and the lack of designer input in modeling requirement documents, I pushed to implement a flexible, yet smart, IxD Goal-Directed methodology. I probably would’ve still sought to implement a similar methodology, but I wouldn’t have pushed so hard to get it.

Introduced blogging as a means for knowledge sharing
KM is such a terrible term. In essence, an outward facing blog with a solid search engine and a rich tag approach could’ve served as both a conversation point for speaking with clients and providing answers to non-client account related questions. Internally, we could’ve dropped our stiff, architected KM tool with central controls and replaced it with internal blogs for every employee.

Focused on research, behavior, information contextuality, design and presentation
Editorial is *such* a complience issue within the financial industry, collaboration with designers on interfaces was beyond difficult to manage. I probably would’ve traded that card for the client-side team, where the rubber of behavior and design explicitly hits the road of server-side code.

Live and learn ;-)

Just the other day I found myself on a 10 hour trip home from New Jersey. Normally, the drive kills me, but thankfully, I had hours upon hours of Echo Chamber Project podcasts sitting to my right. When I made it home at 3:00am (I missed the damn turn at 85-440), I plopped on the couch and fired off a note to Kent Bye, thanking him for the virtual company.

Well, Kent got back in touch the next day and asked if I’d like to chat over Skype. Here’s the result (part of the audio becomes scrambled for 30 seconds, twice).

The cover is for my grandmother’s memoirs, and the working title is, “It Is Me.”

I’m thinking about keeping the image clean on a white background, but that could change. As could the image. I’d greatly appreciate any constructive feedback.

Insight:

1. Reva Patrick is of full-blooded Irish decent; the orange and green suit her soul
2. I do know that the title isn’t correct English (she was an English teacher)
3. Milton Glaser’s Dylan poster was an inspiration

After a ton of hard work by many people, the redesigned Media Matters for America site has launched.

OLD:

NEW:

Behavior Design knocked out the visual design, we shared the information design, I handled the tagging schema/information architecture and we all tag-teamed with the Media Matters crew.

Now that the site is live, I’ve a bunch of tagging and findability methods I’d like to discuss here, but not tonight. Tonight I digest my sushi dinner with friends in San Fran.

So it’s Friday night and I find myself cruising around the web after a night out and a tooth brushing away before a night in. In my travels, I landed on JJG’s blog and subsequently stumbled into his Ajax essay on the Adaptive site. I’ve got to admit something; before tonight, I’ve never read one iota about Ajax. The only real conversation I’ve had on the topic was a recent conversation with a client-side developer pal and after reading Jesse’s well defined description of the approach and the benefits. My initial reaction was pretty much, "well, duh!"

I don’t say that to offend Jesse, nor downplay the great client-side work anyone is doing right now, it’s just that I’ve been immersed in online application design for years now and have always tried to communicate these types of solutions to developers. I say "these types of solutions" lightly, as I’m primarily a designer, not a developer, so from my perspective these communication calls have been screaming to be stiched together for a while now. All said, I refuse to rake engineers over the coals. We’re here now.

Jesse spoke to the difficulties of designing online applications due to the technical workarounds which have been historically necessary to successfully support innovative interface behavior. While I agree with the level of difficulty, I disagree with the approach to design, for while practicing interaction design, I don’t model persona scenarios based on technological constraints. As David Fore of Cooper exhorts, the period of scenario modeling should be a period of making magic. That’s how innovation occurs while supporting user needs. I’d much rather engage an engineer in a position to support a brilliant solution than bland, useless features/interface behaviors. So first, come up with the right behaviors, then encourage technology to make it come to life.

Okay, that could come off as a bit pushy, unrealistic and non-tech savvy. One has to understand the constraints of the media when designing for it right? Sure. But not at the cost of potentially handcuffing a more useful experience by limiting possibilities. So how can one design for the user, while considering possibilities of Ajax?

While at Ameritrade, when the opportunity to start the UX Group came my way, I was lucky to be able to convince management to include our relatively small client-side development team in the mix. That brief organizational commitment created a huge opportunity for me to espouse innovation and collaboration across both designers and developers. I didn’t know how long the group structure would last, so I instantly switched up working from the level of context scenarios and began to approach the issue holistically.

We must have used the phrase "push the browser until it pushes back" more times in our weekly staff meetings than "war against terror" has been used in the White House over the past few years. Come hell or highwater, our (paying) client behaviors needed to be supported in our online applications, so in turn, I refused to limit us to any narrow definitions of client-side technology. Thankfully, my CSD guys (and gal) latched onto my mantra with vigor and did the heavy lifting to evolve our conversations into their domain (code), while myself and the IxD’s returned to the iteration of modeling user needs into interface behavior. Did they use the Ajax approach per se? No, but they pretty much pushed the browser until their SOP—which supported the design team’s further pursuit of forward thinking behavioral patterns—is now reflected in some of the latest Ajax app behaviors, such as Gmail. Business as usual of design and development at Ameritrade started to evolve.

Were the solutions as soundly executed across the board as the current Google attempts in leveraging the Ajax approach? I’d have to say no again, as we were performing Ajax-type workarounds on the fly. But the mere fact that the team addressed dynamic interface scenarios on a case-by-case basis, with dynamic executions on the presentation layer, led our marketing group to center their next campaign around the slogan, "Welcome to the 21st Century. Now trade like it." The ripple
effect of the progressive experience design was contained, as it only applied to the authenticated, Apex trading platform, but Barrons seemed to notice it by giving us a 4 star rating (up from 2.5 stars the previous year).

A switch to a complete Ajax approach at Ameritrade today would entail a short period of refactoring, but would make the current authenticated interface move from "singing" to "harmonizing."

As long as the IT politicians and system managers keep their paws out of coding philosophy, Ajax should mark the sweet spot of the golden age of presenting complex scenario relationships as simplified behavioral experience in the browser. Elegance in action. Personally speaking, I just never want to hear "that’s not feasible" again when proposing the design for such a dynamic solution.

Remember Belushi’s reaction to the insipid acuistic guitar love song in Animal House? Exactly.