Now that the audio’s available, here are the slides from my UX Australia presentation.
Any stack of paper can be printed with words which, when read, convey insightful, interesting & exciting thoughts to the reader. The same words can be posted on a web site and have the same effect. But when we present our ideas, it’s a completely different kind of communication, far closer to theater than it is to writing. Presenters who subject their audience to slide after slide of text are where the term “death by powerpoint” comes from, and the most ground-breaking ideas can induce catatonia when delivered by a monotone speaker who sounds anything but passionate about his subject. The best presentations I’ve ever seen were dominated by images, contained no more than a few (if any) words on each slide, and were presented by a speaker who knew his material backwards and delivered it with confidence, passion and humour. When I present, I try to be that guy.
This style always causes the same dilemma: should I share slides which make no sense at all without me talking & waving my arms in front of them? Luckily, Donna Spencer organised excellent recording for all of the presentations at UX Australia, and Slideshare makes it possible to sync audio to slides.
But most presentations on Slideshare don’t have any audio. I’m curious: when you put together a slide deck, do you keep Slideshare in mind and try and make your slides readable, or do you concentrate on the event, and try and put on a great show?
I spoke and gave a workshop on sketching at UX Australia a few weeks ago. Here’s my talk, which without the actual talking is perhaps a little obscure - I’m promised that the audio’s coming soon…
Coming up this week is OzIA. After seeing my sketchnotes from UX Australia (below), Eric was nice enough to sponsor me to be the official sketchnoter of the event. Thanks Eric! Can’t wait!
Web Directions
I was too slack and otherwise occupied to get a proposal in for Web Directions (boo!) but it’s on next week and the program looks like it’ll be a blast (yay!). I’m especially looking forward to hearing Mark Boulton talk about type, listening to Christian Crumlish talk about social interfaces, and playing with the augmented reality t-shirt, designed by Miss Failwhale herself, Yiying Lu and made technically possible by my mates at MOB. The whole week is set to be amazing, as it’s the inaugural Australian Web Week! After arriving in Australia two weeks too late to attend last year’s Web Directions, it feels like it’s about time I got to attend!
Edge of the Web
Last but certainly not least is Edge of the Web, out in Perth November 6th & 7th. I”m honoured to say I’ll be flying over to the left coast to talk about the train wrecks and best practices of online shop design, and attend the award ceremony for the Australian Web Awards, which I helped judge. Gary Barber was nice (or crazy) enough to let me ramble on about job titles to avoid, photography for failed painters and our the reality of augmented reality in a recent interview, which you can read here.
If you’d asked me how I felt last Wednesday morning, I might have answered “shoot me.” That’s how nervous I was about leading my workshop, “Scribble Your Way to Success!” at UX Australia last Wednesday afternoon. It was the first workshop I’ve ever given for complete strangers, and the first time I’d ever tried to teach anyone to draw.
In an attempt to control the utter panic that overtook me at having committed to doing a workshop, and inspired by my friend Donna Spencer’s blog post, How I Draft an Information Architecture, I went back to a method I’ve often used in the past to organise my thoughts for a pitch presentation. I thought you might find it useful, so here it is.
What You’ll Need
It starts (as so many good things do) with a stack of index cards and two Sharpies, black and red. You’ll also need a large, flat surface where you can spread a large number of cards out and move them around. It might sound odd, but I recommend that you pick a surface that isn’t white, or if your surface is white, use cards that aren’t. This allows you to really see the structure you’ll be creating. I used to use a pinboard and pins for this, but it’s far quicker and easier to place and move the cards around on a horizontal surface.
Brain Dump
The first step is to get everything out of your head and onto cards. Take the stack of cards and your black Sharpie, write an idea on a card, and throw it onto the pile. Then another, then another, and so on. Only write one idea (rule of thumb: maximum 5 words) on each card, and don’t worry about penmanship or eloquence - you’re the only one that needs to understand these. Don’t worry about order, don’t worry about “getting it right”, don’t sort as you go - there will be time for all of that later. Just like popcorn, when your ideas stop popping, you’re done. Don’t fight to squeeze every idea out - as you move along, more will come. Pick the low-hanging fruit and move on.
Rough in Some Structure
Now that you’ve got a stack of ideas, start sorting them. First, flip through the stack quickly and make a few smaller stacks of ideas that go together. Now look at each of those stacks and sort them into some sort of order, as in “this idea leads to this ideas leads to…” Now take your sorted cards and lay them out on your table. We read top-to-bottom & left-to-right, so I tend to put “chapters” one after the other from the top, and within the chapters ideas build up from the left, as you can see in the photo above.
Get the Details In
Odds are that you got new ideas and noticed things missing (hrm, how do I get from that idea to there?) while laying your cards out. No problem, think a moment and add what you need at this point. If you can’t think of what you need right away, don’t get hung up on it - make a note in red, and move on. At this point you can also add chapter titles (in red in the photo above), timing (the stopwatch icons on the right of the photo), notes to yourself about possible imagery or diagrams, whatever.
Now step back and take it all in. Read through the cards from start to finish and note where the ideas flow, and where the holes are. Move chapters around and see if things flow better. If you want you can take the time to fill the holes now, although the point of this exercise is to get ideas & structure down quick.
Once you’re more or less satisfied, do what you need to move this structure into Powerpoint or Keynote. Take a photo to refer to, write down a hierarchical list, or bring your laptop over to the cards and whack in a slide with each card’s text, which is how I do it. Now the real fun begins - Powerpoint acrobatics! But that will have to wait for the next post…
What a Blast!
Although I was terrified, the workshop seems by all accounts to have been a success, and I enjoyed it immensely! The nine remarkably nice participants made my day by kindly and obediently jumping through whatever hoops I put before them, and they remained creative, friendly and funny throughout. Thanks guys! More than one of them best possible feedback afterwards, “I never thought I could draw, but now I know I can.” And that was the whole point.
I enjoyed it all so much, I can’t wait to do it again! If you think you and your colleagues would benefit from breaking down the “I can’t draw” barrier to collaborate & communicate better, generate ideas faster & easier, and simply enjoy your work more, let’s talk.
I’ve been watching Mike Rohde, the unchallenged King of Sketchnotes, for a while now, with a “why didn’t I think of that?” attitude and a healthy side order of “get your ass into gear and start doing that too!”
This year’s UX Australia conference served as a perfect place to get started. Considering how smart & inspiring most of the speakers were, I had the right amount of “yeaaaah!” to almost get myself going. Considering that I taught a workshop called “Scribble Your Way to Success!” – during which I taught people who thought that they couldn’t draw that this belief was complete bullshit – I had the right amount of guilt to actually get myself going.
So, instead of spending hours agonising over the best way to describe the best UX conference I’ve ever attended, I’ll let the pictures do the talking.
What I learned from these sketchnotes (other than the smart things the speakers said):
Sketchnoting makes for stronger, more memorable notes than just text notes. I assuming this has lots to do with the left/right brain activity I talked about in my workshop.
The paper in the Windsor & Newtown visual diary I’ve ben using is too thin, and there’s quite a lot of bleed-through. I also miss the warm tone of Moleskine paper, so I’ll be going back to the good old Moleskine sketchbook with the thick drawing paper.
I’m not confident enough with sketching people, so I dodged the portraits through the whole conference, although I did draw half of Alex Wright, a little Paul Otlet, and Guillermo Torres and Ayne Valencia’s hair. Next time I’ll suck it up and see if I can’t get closer to Mike Rohde’s great little portraits. Being afraid to suck at something shouldn’t keep me from trying.
Other than the fact that he’s a far better illustrator than I, Mike Rodhe’s sketchnotes hang together so well due to the simple, consistent elements and the large text, among other things. I’ll emulate those aspects of his notes a little closer next time.
What these sketchnotes don’t convey about UX Australia was how surprised and impressed I was with the sense of community in the Australian UX scene. By way of comparison, last year’s IA Summit in Memphis was full of navel-gazing, rockstar posturing, and no small amount of friction, which left me with little desire to attend in 2010. Now that UX Australia exists, I know I won’t have to. It was full of practical ideas that I can use in my work, fun jibes at how seriously we sometimes take ourselves, and intense conversation between intelligent, grounded individuals. By the time Friday night arrived, I wanted to start a company with all attendees so we could do this sort of thing every day.
It’s been said many times already, but here’s mine: congratulations to Donna Spencer, Steve Baty and all their helpers for not only hammering a stake into the ground of the international UX scene, but also hosting one of the best conferences I’ve ever been to. I can’t wait for UX Australia in Melbourne next year!
