For all you non-Aussies out there, “grouse” usually means either a bird with feathered feet, or “to complain” in British army slang, but in Australian slang it means “awesome!” No one seems to know why.
Now that Web Directions is over, and now that I’ve had a weekend to sleep it off, I’ve got to say it was excellent! As you’d expect of a conference with three tracks and 670 attendees, it was two days of agonising over what to see, rushing from room to room and sketchnoting ‘til my hand was sore. This was all well balanced by the best conference wifi I’ve experienced yet, highly drinkable free coffee, and relaxing, drinking and laughing at the great after-parties.
The information was pretty dense in almost every presentation so I didn’t manage to sketchnote everything I saw, but here are a few of my favourites. You can see all of my Web Directions sketchnotes here.
Mark Boulton
Having had a slightly too big night the day before, I missed Matt Webb’s keynote (which I’ve heard was pretty damned grouse) so Mark Boulton started my Web Directions. Mark’s a designer of note and author & publisher who’s worked at the BBC, recently redesigned Drupal and runs a small agency in South Wales. His talk on typography was broad, and in places deep, going from typographic basics to a structure for type thinking to the challenges of embeddable fonts. He inspired some grumbling, but echoed my thoughts, when he said:
I don’t think Comic Sans really is that bad. There are no bad tools, just bad designers.
And his take on embeddable fonts was interesting: he said working within constraints and concentrating on structure makes for good typography, and warned that “opening the flood gates” with @font-face, Typekit and the like will lead to an extremely ugly, chaotic web. I strongly agree with the former, and fear the latter may be spot on. You can see his slides here.
Suze Ingram
Suze introduced us all to service design, something I’ve been hearing murmurings about for a while, but couldn’t have really said exactly what it was. Suze has obviously been paying a little more attention than I have, and gave a clear and concise introduction to the topic. Thanks Suze! She’s also obviously keen for service design to grow and flourish in Australia and has started the Service Design Hub to encourage that growth, and is working on “Service Design Camp” in 2010. Suze is keen to collaborate and drive service design forward—let her know what you think.
The web designers and information architects of five years ago are now calling themselves user experience designers, and a cynic joked after Suze’s presentation that we’ll all be service designers next year. Considering how much most service experiences suck today, I can certainly imagine worse outcomes. Check out Suze’s slides here.
Donna Spencer
As always, my friend Donna was charming & smart as she presented the basic information seeking behaviours that all users exhibit.
This was a list presentation, so no mind-bending new insights, but it went a long way to shake the accepted “people either search or navigate” myth out of my head. She showed that people explore, refine & narrow, compare, discover and more, depending on how much they know, what they’re looking for and how goal oriented they are at that moment. The bit that really made me sit up and think was when Donna quoted Cheryl Gledhill, who said in her presentation:
Recently I’ve been searching less, but finding more.
I’m hoping Donna’s next presentation on information seeking behaviours will deal with exactly this “bubbling up” behaviour we’re seeing more and more of on Twitter and other social networks. Have a look at Donna’s presentation here.
Christian Crumlish
Christian gets my vote for best presentation of the conference, and not just because I got to get up on stage and introduce him. He was very clearly passionate about his subject, got quite a few laughs out of his audience, and backed it all up with rock solid information and examples.
The self-described “Pattern Detective” of Yahoo’s Pattern Library (and ukulele virtuoso) gave us the five principles of social interface design:
pave the cowpaths
talk like a person
play well with others
learn from games
respect
The rest of his talk revolved around a fascinating diagram, showing the various elements of the social ecosystem, designed by Erin Malone, the co-author with Christian of the recently published “Designing Social Interfaces”. After his high-energy, insightful talk, I’ll definitely be buying the book.
I was also pleased to get to know Christian and his charming wife during their stay here in Sydney, and look forward to visiting them in San Francisco! That’s hands down the best bit of any good conference!
Grouse!
Writing a wrap-up like this can’t really capture the atmosphere of exchange, sharing and inspiration, nor the jokes shared over a beer or the intense discussion at dinner. Due to these, as well as the smart & generous presenters, Web Directions was indeed grouse! Some of my other favourite moments:
Elliot Jay Stocks:
Beauty is the experience’s visual layer.
Dan Hill:
IT is too important for the IT department.
Mark Boulton:
The fundamental flaw in Jesse James Garrett’s model is that he relegates typography to the surface.
Kelly Goto:
Hybrid designer / coders are magic people.
I’m now very sorry I arrived too late for Web Directions last year, and I’m already looking forward to seeing everyone again in 2010!
When my super smart friend Dan Willis asked me to be on his panel at South by Southwest next year, my brain started spinning, trying to imagine what technology will be doing to our lives in five years.
Back in 1992, I helped set up a virtual reality lab at VCU where I was studying design. I’m not ashamed to admit that, at the time, I thought people would be wearing gloves & goggles to conduct their daily business in the Not Too Distant Future. I got over it, of course.
One of the most exciting things I found at the time was a book called Artificial Reality II by Myron Krueger. In it, he put forward the idea of a layer of information projected inside your glasses, synced with the reality outside your glasses. So, for example, you could write a sign in the air with your finger saying “This is it!” outside your house, and save it on a friend’s private channel to help them find your house for the first time. Pretty heady stuff back in 1991, and today almost a reality.
The field’s called Augmented Reality or “AR”, and I’ve been hearing more and more about it every day, but until now, not really paying it too much attention. I took a closer look this week, and here are some of the most striking examples I found, which give a pretty good overview of the state of the field today.
Sixth Sense
Probabaly the most exciting AR application I’ve seen so far, Sixth Sense is unique in that it augments reality by projecting graphics & data out onto the world.
Browsers
An augmented reality browser is software that puts a layer of information over reality, exactly as Myron Krueger foretold back in ‘91. I think it’s inevitable that these will become the hub of our digital lives and a software battlefield.
Layar
Nearest Subway
Marketing
Wherever you’ve got a new technology, you’ll always have someone trying to use it to better sell you stuff. Most of the AR marketing is extremely gimmicky so far, so here just a couple of well-done examples.
Lego
Mini Cabrio
Games
I predict that games will be to AR what porn was to the early internet. It’s just too good a match. Maybe it’s just because it’s so new, but AR feels like magic — it’s fun just because of what it is, no matter what you do with it. Employing that sense of magic in play is a no-brainer. I also predict a rash of rather painful real-world accidents, if the Roku’s Reward video below is anything to go by.
ARhrrrr!
Roku’s Reward
levelHead
PITStrategy
Art
It doesn’t seem like there’s too much experimentation going on in this space yet, but as this video shows, there’s plenty of potential.
Tagged in Motion
Weirdness
Of course, just like marketing gimmicks, wherever there’s a new technology there will be someone building disturbing, sleazy software to entertain creepy, sweaty geeks. Ewww.
Manga Girl
What’s Coming?
Augmented Reality is a very young field, and exciting enough that we designers should be keeping a close eye on it. But just like any technological jump, everyone will eventually get used to it, the sheen of coolness will fade, and it’ll go from being a sexy gimmick to an everyday tool. What then?
AR is such a large enough step away from the desktop / window / mouse world we’ve been clicking in for so long, that I’m certain it will totally bend the brains of us experience designers. We’re so used to thinking in 2D layers of information and linear paths of interaction, it’ll be a while before we really figure out how to squeeze the most out of AR experiences. At the moment the space seems to be dominated by academics on the one hand, and money-grubbing marketers on the other. I’d personally like to see a few of us practical, out in the real world, thinking designers make something out of the AR primordial soup, and I’d love to have a chance to get into it myself.
To keep up with the world of AR, check out these blogs:
These videos are surely just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m pretty new to the world of AR. Have you seen anything stunning out there that should be here too? What’s your favourite AR app? Which of your day-to-day tasks do you look forward to having augmented in the future? If you could have any AR app you wanted, what would it be?
Now I know for certain that I’m just too old (or old-fashioned) for this social-networky friendy microbloggy stuff. Andrew Baron, Rocketboom founder, is selling his Twitter account, and his more than 1,600 followers on ebay (where else?). If we take this seriously, and assume that it’s actually not just a cheap publicity stunt, who the hell would offer him $1,125 (at the moment) for his followers? Isn’t it blatantly obvious that the people following him are doing so because he is Andrew Baron and that the vast majority would stop following him in seconds as soon as his Twitter account has been taken over by whoever wins in the end? They’re not exactly a captive audience, y’know?
Then again, his follower count has increased by over 200 folks just since yesterday, and he appears to be getting cold feet, so let’s just go with the cheap publicity stunt theory for now, shall we? [heads up via]
Early last year I lost a few extremely creative and intelligent colleagues, which was sad. What wasn’t sad at all was why they left—to work on a project which inspired and excited them all to the point that they’ve rarely spoken about anything else since. And now, finally, after plenty of sweat and stress, they’ve given birth. Tempodome is live. My first impression after a few minutes kicking the tires is good. They’ve built it with a nice, simple design which creates a suitable mood, and at the heart of it is an exciting idea: live concerts online. The idea of doing something cool online with events and music seems to be in the air this year, judging by how many cool ideas I’ve heard about, but Tempodome is the first so far to get their ideas online. So a hearty congratulations goes out to the Tempodomites, and I’m looking forward to your first concert and your future!
While having a smoke this morning, colleague Gregory Jacob reminded me of the subject of design “theft”, which I wroteabout back in 2006. Back then, the discussion showed that there are many varying opinions of where inspiration stops and theft starts. Greg’s example, which takes the cake in my experience, is without question way over the border.
Greg’s a Flash guy, with a pleasingly minimal personal site. He received a mail from a friend this morning, with a link to a stunningly similar site. Have a look:
After a little research it was clear that Foued, due to laziness, deficient creativity or most likely a combination of both, had simply downloaded Greg’s SWF and the XML which defines the site’s content, and after a little text editing, uploaded both on his site.
It Gets Better
Not only did he shamelessly rip off Greg’s work, but he then submitted his rip-off to numerous awards sites, and won on four of them.
Not only did Foued win awards with stolen goods, but one of them, Dope, had already awarded Greg for the exact same site.
I’d like to take the opportunity to congratulate Greg. Not only a 1:1 rip-off (as we all know, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”), but four awards, and one of them twice. Well done Greg!
Too Easy to Do, But Also to Find
Things like this just leave me extremely confused. Let’s assume that Foued Azzone is not remarkably naïve, and knew full well how wrong this is. So he uses a stolen design, right down to the file itself, to promote himself and his talents. And in a medium which is so fast, and so everywhere, that the chances of this theft remaining undiscovered are zero. And in a medium where stuff like this gets publicised like wild-fire, irrevocably poisoning is own Google-juice. What could he possibly think this would do for his career? How could he ever dream of this being good for him?
As always, my friend Donna was charming & smart as she presented the basic information seeking behaviours that all users exhibit.
