The beta version of the fourth Web Trend Map is out, and it’s gorgeous. Go have a look at all the beautiful details, and if you’ve got any feedback, let them know. They’re only printing 1000 of them, so shoot them a mail to reserve a copy! It’s a lovely piece of info-porn for the studio wall.
And if you like this one, the first, second and third web trend maps are well worth looking at as well, even if they’re completely outdated by now.
If you attend two geek conferences back to back, you get to see alot of slide decks. And while the decks at SXSW and the IA Summit were chock full of good content, many of them had a few little practical problems, which would’ve all been easy to avoid. I’ve done plenty of pitch presentations, so I was thinking, “if I was presenting, I would wish I’d thought of that!” the whole time.
Here are ten practical tips for giving good deck, aimed at geek conferences, but hopefully useful for others as well.
Make sure that your Twitter handle is big and clear on the first slide. If you say smart things, people will want to follow you, and the backchannel will want to use the shortest name they can find for you.
Likewise, don’t forget a hash tag for your session, and keep it short. #gp is better than #greatpresentation, for example. Eating as few of the backchannel’s 140 characters as possible is good for your karma.
If you’re on a panel, tell the audience to ask questions through Twitter. It can be a nice way of answering what you want when you want, and dodging the long, drawn out, “I have something to prove” questions that everybody hates.
Use LARGE typography. From the back of a big room, type smaller than 64 px is going to be hard to impossible to read.
We’ve all got laptops with us. If we want to read, we’ll use them. Keep your slides visually interesting, but go light on the text. The best presenters use the least text in their slides.
Do not put slide-junk like the date, the name of the conference and your logo on every slide. We all know where we are, who you are and what day it is, and we’re having a hard enough time concentrating on your incisive insight without unnecessary distractions.
Anything you really want people to see should be in the top two thirds of any slide. People’s heads will invariably block the bottom third.
You never know how well set up the projector and screen will be, so keep away from the edges of your slides to make sure nothing gets cut off. As a general rule, keep a 10% zone on top, bottom and both sides free of content.
Make sure your type/background combo is high contrast. If you present in a well-lit room, grey on black will be hard to read. Highest contrast, but boring, is black on white. White - or any bright colour - on black works too, and generally looks fancier.
Unless you’re presenting some massively complex essay, present your material, don’t read it. If you’re reading your presentation, you seem stiff and you can’t connect to the audience. Even if you flub a line or two, you’ll always get more sympathy if you present without reading. Reading is a refuge for nervous presenters, but one you should work on getting over as soon as you can.
These tips won’t make you a great presenter, but they will ensure that your great presentation can be seen, looks good, and encourages backchannel discussion. Hope it helps!
A few things that have flown across my field of consciousness in the past week or two…
Jakob Nielsen recommends the use of mega drop-down menus.
I’ve been watching quite a bit of TED lately. My top three TED talks of late are Don Norman on emotional design, Stefan Sagmeister on design & happiness, and Phillippe Starck on toothbrushes, super monkeys & God. In other words, design.
A shocking piece of amateur data visualisation: what does one trillion dollars look like?
And speaking of data visualisation, Wikirank puts a fun data pr0n face on Wikipedia.
I’m quite enjoying Wireframes Magazine. It’s nice to see how other scribble.
Microplaza is starting to be a standard part of my info-grazing habits. It helps sort through links sent by those you follow in Twitter. Let me know if you want an invite – I’ve got 5.
The conferences I remember as simply wonderful are the ones I didn’t want to leave and couldn’t wait for more of the same a year later. Today, a few days after the tenth IA Summit, all I can say is that if next year in Phoenix will be more of the same, I doubt I’ll be there.
That’s not to say that it was crap – far from it. There were plenty of interesting sessions, and I’ll be getting to those later. But the quality was overshadowed by a discussion – in the sessions, breaks and evenings – that seemed, to this first time summit attendee, to be equal parts navel-gazing, tree-pissing and back-biting.
The House Must Evolve or Die Divided
“Big” vs. “little” IA, academics vs. practitioners, tribe vs. community – the posturing around these semantic issues in sessions with melodramatic names like “Evolve or Die” and “A House Divided” surprised me, as it had never occurred to me that they were issues. The summit old-timers, a.k.a. ten-years (tenures?), seemed to be talking to and about each other, leaving us newbies scratching our heads in irritation. Judging by how little this embarrassed anyone involved, it seems to be par for the course. For me, a great reason to skip Phoenix.
There was also much talk of job titles and “a place at the table.” I’m sorry, but no one outside of the field of information architecture knows what the words mean, so what’s your title got to do with anything? A place at the table is earned through competence. Do excellent work, work that unquestionably demonstrates the value of what you do, and your place is guaranteed. Leave the titles fight for those who want to differentiate themselves form their colleagues, and get on with your work.
By the end of the summit it seemed that those in need of catharsis had achieved it. When Jesse James Garrett delivered the theatrical closing keynote, there were applause and cheers, growing in fervor until the penultimate statement:
We are not big or little information architects, we are not interface or interaction designers, we are user experience designers!
This speech earned JJG a standing ovation, and I almost expected him to whip out a big black “designer” flag and the crowd to build a barricade, though to keep what out I couldn’t say.
Hello Navel!
Right about then, I realised I’d been inordinately irritated by the whole discussion. I’d frowned and ranted my way through the conference, which wasn’t like me at all. Why was I so miffed?
The project process begins with strategy and information architecture, which leads to “visual” design, which leads to coding and launch. As an Art Director in a large agency I had a pretty stable position in the middle of the process for the last seven years, with a clear job description and title. Jobs just magically landed on my desk without me marketing myself, which left me free to expand my skill-set “backwards”, towards the start of a project. I already “owned” the visual design territory, but by the time I quit last year I was also heavily involved in sales, strategy consulting, sitemapping, wireframing and more.
Since I moved to Sydney and made the leap into freelance work six months ago, I’ve found it hard to define and communicate what exactly it is that I do, and find, if possible, something to call myself. The struggle of the IA community that I witnessed at the IA Summit mirrors my own struggle, and it’s pretty annoying to have an issue you’re avoiding and ignoring thrown in your face.
ZOMG! UXD FTW!
So I’m a user experience designer (um, and graphic/visual designer), and the rest of you are too. What now?
Well, I’d say you traditional IAs should all take a deep breath. There’s plenty to be happy about, and lots of work to do:
As an experience designer, you’re no longer locked in the HCI box. Experience is everywhere.
Design is a tradition extending back into at least the nineteenth century, so there’s tonnes of work to look at and plenty to read and learn from.
As a designer, you’re related to the “visual” designers you seem to have so little respect for. Get to know them, integrate them, and your work will be better for it.
Look around at how much the concept of experience design can include, and start dismantling the tiny fences of exclusion that you’ve built.
One Love…
And as snarky as all of the above may have sounded, the very last moments of the IA Summit washed away all of my irritation. Five Minute Madness – a summit tradition where anyone who wants to can address everyone about anything for up to five minutes – showed the IA community to be a close-knit, warm, passionate and yes, dysfunctional, family. Speakers honestly shared what they thought and felt. They sang, clapped and were moved to tears.
I found myself wanting to belong, to be one of these great people who obviously care so much about what they’re doing. I found it hard to believe that these people were the ones nit-picking about irrelevant definitions and job titles. And I found myself wishing them the best, wishing them the clarity to get over the pettiness and get on with some epic shit, and wanting to see them all again, maybe next year in Phoenix.
After SxSW interactive, Andy Budd and I jumped in a Dodge Charger and drove 10 hours from Austin to Memphis, for the tenth Information Architecture Summit. The trip was more interesting than it looks in this video.
After downloading my photos, I realised I wasted quite a few characters by writing the last post. What I really learned at SxSW, and my goal for the rest of the year, is this…
After 6 months of freelancing – which went by like that – I woke up, looked around me, and realised I didn’t have any colleagues and was missing the inspiration, exchange, critique and, yes, gossip, that goes along with having some. Before I knew it I’d booked tickets to the U.S. and registered for South by Southwest (SxSW) in Austin and the Information Architecture Summit in Memphis right afterwards. SxSW ended last week, and here are a few of my highlights.
People & Parties
I was going to start with all of the “content” – the talks we go to conferences to see – but then I remembered something I forget after every conference: the talks are nice, but what I still remember months later are the people I met and the talks we had, usually over a frosty beverage. And since SxSW has so many large, well-sponsored parties, the frosty beverages did flow.
In a shy moment when I couldn’t bring myself to talk to any strangers, Dave saved me.
It was a pleasure to see and laugh so much with Henriette again!
Strange that I had to go to America to meet Donna, but we had a great time together.
Dan and I got on like a house on fire, and discovered we’re brothers. Donna’s brothers.
Presentations & Panels
Dan Willis gave a great talk, “Everything You Know About Web Design is Wrong”. Shortly summarised: much of the web is “print in disguise”, we haven’t developed a “grammar of the web” yet and are still copying from the medium we’re used to. Dan’s ideas for that grammar are: random voyeurism, self-aware (but uncontrollable) content, user-created context, ambient awareness and experiential content. To understand all of that watch the video below or give the podcast a listen.
Best sound-bites: “beautiful failures are winning awards…” and “embrace ignorance and don’t be distracted by failure.”
Paul Annett is not only visual designer at Clearleft, but also a magician. His card trick has over 11 million views on YouTube…
His talk “Ooooh that’s clever!” contained plenty of examples of “delighters” (one of my favourie words, introduced by the Matts at last year’s dConstruct), a discussion of the Kano customer satisfaction model and quite a great deal of charm.
The “Wireframes for the Wicked” panel with Donna Spencer, Nick Fink and Michael Angeles laid down a solid foundation for what wireframes are, what kinds there are and when best to use each. They kept the presentation (which was a little basic) short, and left plenty of time for good quality discussion afterwards. Can’t find the podcast for this one I’m afraid, but here’s the deck.
After the panel, Michael was nice enough to give me one of his sexy new grid sketchbooks and an interview, appearing here shortly!
Definitely the funniest thing I saw was “UR Blog Sux and Print is Dead”, a panel with the folks behind I Can Has Cheezeburger?, Stuff White People Like, Passive Aggressive Notes, and my personal favourite old-time internet famous chick, dooce. Not surprisingly their panel was a chaotic improv of one-liners and hilarious rants about death-threats, being internet famous and getting a book deal. Favourite sound-bite from Ben Huh, Mr. ICHC: “The base emotion of the internet is douchebag.” Definitely look for the podcast of this one once it goes online, and ROTFLYAO.
“Designing Change in America” was a panel with the guys who designed Obama’s campaign,Scott Thomas & John Slabyk, moderated by Alissa Walker. They demonstrated pretty clearly the power of good design, and demonstrated how much you can get done if you’re passionate and don’t have any bureaucracy in your way. Favourite sound-bites: “We were building an airplane while in flight…” and “Three words: respect the people you’re working with, include them on decisions and empower them.”
And the crown jewel of the conference was Bruce Sterling’s keynote. If you ask me, Bruce is one of the smartest Americans alive, and in his usual style, the keynote was a sound-bite fest, simultaneously hilarious, insightful and moving: “the elderly are going to be the backbone of a non-commercial social web”, “Italy, Germany and Japan used to be our smoldering race-hate enemies, but today they may well be more civilised than us Americans”, and my favourite, “the cure for depression is action”. If there’s a talk that should be up as a podcast it’s this one, but we’re still waiting.
Not My Last
So all up I had a great – if totally tiring, occasionally overwhelming, and sometimes slightly stressful – time at my first SxSW. I’m so glad I came, it absolutely had the desired effect, and I look forward to eating the BBQ & nuclear tacos, drinking the sponsored beers and seeing all the great folks again next year!
A smart use of Twitter: I’m at the Information Architecture Summit, being held this year in the beautiful Peabody Hotel in Memphis. As usual at such geek gatherings, there’s a healthy backchannel running on twitter under the hash tag #ias09. The hotel is following the stream, and answering our questions, such as: Who serves good bbq? Where can we get a real espresso? They’re even using twitter to greet guests, and deal with complaints about rooms at the hotel. And, of course, they throw in a little marketing for their famous ducks. Event venues take note!
Douglas Bowman, a damned fine designer, just quit his job at Google due to basic, deep-set cultural differences:
When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.
Back when we did a project in cooperation with Microsoft, they were desperately seeking visual designers, they made me an offer, and I briefly considered a move to Seattle. What stopped me pretty quickly was the realisation that they’re a mountain of engineers, and being a singular designer under that mountain would make me about as effective as being under Mt. Rainier. Their culture relegates design to mere decoration, and there’s little to no chance they will ever understand what design is and what it can do at a deep, cultural level.
If companies have such a deep and immutable culture (Google = engineers, Apple = design) how can they include and learn from the other? Should they even try? Maybe they are what they are, and so successful at it, because of the concentration and blindness to any other way to do things? When all you’ve got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but you also get really good at banging nails.
I wish Doug an environment where design is an ingredient of the culture and where his considerable talents will be taken full advantage of!
This was originally published last July on Stowe Boyd’s blog /message, reproduced here with Stowe’s permission due to my odd feeling of wanting to have all my stuff in one place.
A new week, a new wave of invites. Hello New Social App, I’m an edgling, so I’ve got a pre-punched hole in my cheek for your hook. If you’ve got a new app that’s even mildly interesting, odds are I’ll jump on an invite and check your shit out. Why? It’s a mix of an admittedly petty urge not to be left behind, the excitement of an unexplored landscape, and the joy of turning friends who’re further from the edge on to new and exciting things. So I’m your perfect target-groupie, right?
Well, I was. My attitude’s changing. I certainly have my waves of social media fatigue (who doesn’t?), but that’s not it. I’m getting sick of having to work to understand you, New Social App. After this week’s identi.ca rush, I noticed how tired I am of expending energy to understand the value of a new app every week.
My identi.ca experience went like this: me and 172 of my best friends are standing around eating chocolate ice cream (Twitter) together. Then somebody shouts, "hey guys, the guy next door’s got ice cream too!" And about a quarter of us drop our ice cream and rush next door to see what’s up. The guy next door (identi.ca) does indeed have ice cream. It’s chocolate too. Tastes the same but he’s forgotten the spoons, and most of the people I was sharing ice cream with a few minutes ago didn’t come with. So we all rush back again, resume our ice cream party, and forget about the guy next door almost immediately.
There may be some amazing technical advance behind identi.ca, some subtle stirring in The Force that makes it special. Maybe I’m just not Jedi enough to feel it. Social apps have got it pretty easy so far. Most of their target-groupies are Jedis: pre-alpha-early-adopters who build things themselves and enjoy teasing out the hair-splitting advantages of any new service and blogging about them so that Padawans like myself might also give a damn.
But where’s the social web going? The future of the social mob are those in the center who’re taking hesitant steps towards the edge, and they haven’t even heard of The Force. That’s your plumber, your dentist, and yes, your mother. The more "normal" it becomes to use these apps, the less interesting the technology behind it becomes. My New Social App, you’re soon going to have to start preaching to someone other than the choir.
I’m an edgling in spirit, but I’m no coder, so I guess I’m a good canary for your coal mine. You should know that I and your mother don’t care about your software architecture, we don’t care about how many days it took you to get built and we don’t care if Scoble or Arrington like you. All we want to know is: "What can you, and you alone, do for me?" If we can’t understand this in 15 minutes (at the very most), you’ve lost us.
The pre-registration page helps to lure me in, if it’s done right. A few sites have this covered:
Twitter: a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
FriendFeed: Discover what your friends are sharing.
Feedly: a more social and magazine-like start page.
But they all drop the ball as soon as they’ve got their hooks in. I’m interested, I sign up… what now? How do I find friends? What can I do here? Um, there’s nothing going on here, is there? Why should I keep using this thing? Silence. Buh-bye.
One of the few services I’ve seen that does this right is LinkedIn. They’ve got a didactic interface which immediately gives me things to do, explained in simple terms. By doing these things I learn what they are and what their value is for me. They take me by the hand and show me around. They make me feel welcome.
Another exciting development in this direction is commoncraft and their videos which explain web technology in plain English. They’re so simple and make everything seem so interesting and easy that Twitter added "Twitter in Plain English" to their home page. Twitter didn’t develop the video themselves, but at least they took notice. Commoncraft may not understand technology (I can’t say I know) but they definitely understand communication, and that’s what society’s all about, right?
So, my New Social App, open the door, invite me in, and tell me up front what you can do for me. But don’t forget to serve drinks and give me a friendly tour. If all you want is registered guests at your party, I’ll be there like every other edgling that gets an invite. But if you want more than zombies standing in the corner dribbling ice cream, make sure I know why your ice cream’s the best, show me the ropes, and make sure I’ve got a personal reason to stay and love you.
