One of the key ingredients of a UX event is a series of talks, last night’s UK UPA event, themed around UX Design and Online Communities, was no different. I love watching a good speaker at work and it’s even better there’s something for you to take away at the end.

Angel Brown’s presentation of Trust in Digital health was one such example. High on enthusiasm from beginning to end, Angel took us through her journey towards an academic model of gaining trust. She also showed us her assessments of existing pharmaceutical websites that aim to share information between the medical communities and how they hold up against the factors required to incite trust amongst their users.

Blaise Grimes-Viort’s slides on managing communities triggered a number tweets with the question of what presentation tool he’s using, the likely answer to that is Prezi , aka the nausea inducer. Many of Blaise’s points on signposting, ego stroking and information surface shouldn’t be news to a room full of UX designers but what really made his presentation awesome was the simple and clear way in which he points out the success and failures of online communities out there, all of which were very well chosen to hammer in his points.

Kam star warned us of gamification’s pitfalls, explifying this with Tumblr’s experience of being bombarded by gobble-dee-gook posts from users trying to gain points. It’s not all bad though, Volkswagen’s Speed Limit Lottery (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iynzHWwJXaA) did successfully reduce speeding in Sweden. This brought us to his point: gamification is already a part of real life, and, quite frankly, we’re just capitalising on it.

Finally, Rob Falla gave us some insights into his Facebook game, Brand Bang!, developed for Bunnyfoot. The numbers showed continuing success of the game even after the initial iPad 2 competition to jumpstart the influx of players. Rob attributes this success to several factors: the game is actually fun, it’s built on a self-organising feedback platform (Facebook in the form of comments and likes), and the responsiveness of his team to that feedback.

All in all this was a great evening, thanks to UK UPA and Andrea Lewis for making it happen.

See more on the event: http://ukupa.org.uk/events/january-event-ux-design-and-online-communities/

Kathryn and Miriam will be discussing ‘How can you use a store locator to increase your market share?’
Retailers, banks and the post office could do much more with their online store locators, especially when accessed from mobile devices. By making some smart, creative improvements to this useful tool, they would increase sales to motivated, brand-loyal customers. They will illustrate the potential of these improvements through a user journey, showing how a customer would initiate a search, review results, filter information, and make a choice.

Lyzbelle will be explaining ‘What techniques can design researchers learn from insurance claims investigation?’
Design researchers can learn a lot from investigators in other fields. Insurance claims assessors follow specific interview protocols to reduce interviewee bias, build trust/rapport, navigate a variety of circumstances, and document responses properly—all in order to discover the reality and the facts of the loss.  These investigations also have to be carried out in compliance with strict regulations. She will illustrate these techniques with real-world examples of investigations into automotive accident claims, property damage claims, and employee dishonesty claims.
UX Cambridge is a new event, taking place at Clare College, Cambridge in the college’s new Gillespie Conference Centre.
For more details visit: http://www.uxcambridge.net/uxc2011/index.php

We would love to see you. Book now tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis:
http://www.uxcambridge.net/uxc2011/booking.php

Q: Tell me about the activities you participated in?

Kriss: On each of the two days I was the ‘Business Facilitator’ to a group of 8-10 Year 10 students. They were tasked with designing and pitching a new mobile app that allows young people to design their own t-shirts. The end results, in addition to various target setting and planning exercises, were a logo, a 60 business pitch, and a 60 second Youtube advert.

Q: What was your role?

Kriss: I was there to support and assist students in completing the tasks. I talked them through each task that was set, seeding ideas where they began to struggle, and encouraging students with their own ideas. Together, we defined group goals and personal goals. In the second half of the day, I took on more of a chairman role, ensuring that we stayed motivated and on time whilst preparing the business pitch and Youtube advert.

Q: What did your team create?

Kriss: My first team created an app called Marvin’s Tees. The second created O.T.Tees. Both apps were fairly similar in functionality but differed in their approach to the pitch and advert, some going for funny and some going for detailed and informational. Because of the audience (i.e. the rest of the school kids) the funnier stuff worked better.

Q: What did you learn?

Kriss: Largely I was surprised at some of the ideas that the kids came out with—things that I hadn’t thought of myself—that would be particularly effective in marketing their app, such as sponsoring a non-school uniform day in order to target a 14-24 demographic.

Q: What would you like to say to people considering volunteering in schools through The Tower Hamlets Business Partnership?

Kriss: This experience definitely exceeded expectations for me and was a wholly enjoyable couple of days. I won’t pretend that all of the kids were 100% interested the whole time, or that I didn’t find it frustrating when they fell short of what I thought they’d be capable of doing, but most are genuinely interested to try and find out about what you do for a living. Give it a try!

Kriss Watt from Tobias & Tobias volunteered through Tower Hamlets Education Business Partnership http://thebp.org.uk/

Google+ has implemented some nice privacy features and also raised some interesting questions about how social media usage grows. From the privacy (or “too much information” perspective) Google+ has gone some way to solve the  ”I’m not friends with Granddad because he posts everything publically” problem. But both the privacy and the limited number of users  makes learning the features a less social experience.

Discovery of features is normally enabled by two routes – word of mouth and by designed affordances (buttons, links) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance that tell us how something works. Word of mouth is as old as human communication. It’s easy to spread a message virally and we’ve been spreading the word using literal word of mouth, phones, email, SMS, blogging, Facebook and Twitter over the years. Our messages have been shared more widely and publicly over time and Google+’s privacy features actually slow the spread of information about Google+ within Google+. It turns out that I can send emails to friends who don’t have Google+ and they get invites, but this doesn’t help me understand Google+ better. Instead I expected to have features explained by people already on Google+. But in these early stages hardly any friends are on there and fewer are posting publicly because privacy features are part of the intrinsic value.

Why is privacy so intrinsic to Google+ ? Google+ has got an unaccustomed but very human social sensitivity because posting, friendship and following are asymmetric. People who add me to their friend “circles” aren’t my friends by default, people I follow don’t have to follow me.  I can share my picnic photos, foibles and joys with friends (as I might on Facebook, if I felt my privacy would be better respected). I can follow people who attend interesting events without them being my friends (as I would on Twitter). It also helps that information isn’t public by default, instead the settings nudge people towards keeping information private – it took me a while to discover how to post publicly.

This asymmetry and privacy raises an interesting point about discoverability – how does word of mouth work to spread the merits and features of a social-but-private tool? How do we find out how other people are using circles, segmenting close friends from acquaintances and managing semi-private information? I want to ask a question (or perhaps suggest a feature) and I’m not sure how best to get an answer. My question is  ”what is the best way to attach a photo from my Gmail to a post I want to share via Google+ circles?”.

Moving from Facebook to a more private communication tool gave me a moment of pause – how do I ask a question about Google+ from my friends? I could Tweet, change my Gmail status, put it on Facebook or actually share it through Google+. In this relatively sparsely populated ecosystem of Google+ we have a classic bootstrapping problem – there aren’t enough experts or advocates. The best audience for my question is probably the early uptake types – those who get the first invites to Google+ . But maybe the early uptake types are those who don’t care about privacy? Or maybe they are the people who’s interest is piqued by the opportunities for commerce. Maybe the early uptake people are so busy publicly Tweeting and Facebooking their public messages that they are too busy to move to Google+.

Perhaps the irony is that if I want to get help with Google+ features should I share my question publicly on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/search/googleplus? Or do I have to wait till Google opens up the nice quiet ecosystem, the noise starts (and the parasites join too)?

Let’s start by looking at what makes up a computer. For the sake of this post, we’ll assume there are two simple components – the “brain” and the “body”.

The body and brain of a computer (click for full size)

The brain (CPU, hard drive, memory, etc) does the actual work. It gets smaller all the time, which has led to things like laptops, smartphones and tablets which only became possible because the brain got small enough. And if the brain keeps shrinking, even if it becomes microscopically small, that’s not a problem – after all, we don’t have to be able to see it or touch it.

The body is different because it must be big enough to remain usable. Keyboards the size of postage stamps wouldn’t be much fun, would they? The human form sets a minimum size threshold for the computer’s body.

Anyone who’s been through a 30-minute Angry Birds marathon will have learnt the hard way that smartphones aren’t great for sustained daily use (and, yes, I’m talking from personal experience here). We couldn’t use them like we use our main computers, which is fine because they can’t actually do what we need our main computers to do.

So far, the cramped form factors of these handheld devices are consistent with their capabilities – but this might be about to change. We’re nearly at the stage where the smartphone’s body can easily house a brain capable of working as a desktop or laptop PC.

The extended device

As smartphone’s brains become ready to replace our main PCs, the only thing stopping them will be their small bodies and the discomfort caused by extended usage. But does this need to be the case? What if the smartphone’s brain extended itself into larger, more ergonomic bodies?

Tomorrow's powerful smartphones could control a whole range of devices (click for full size)

I’ll admit, I find it difficult to get my head around such a small device projecting itself on to a large TV screen. Something about it seems counterintuitive. But I can see the benefits, and the technology’s already heading in this direction.

The latest batch of HTC smartphones feature a technology called DNLA which lets mobiles stream video to televisions and other compatible display devices. If your TV isn’t bleeding-edge enough to support DLNA, you can get an adapter to do the job instead. So you can use your TV to watch the movies on your phone, which is obviously preferable to spending two hours hunched over your Desire HD.

A more innovative approach has been taken by Motorola, whose forthcoming Atrix smartphone will be accompanied by a special dock – a much larger “body” that, when plugged in, turns the phone’s form factor into a laptop.

Motorola Atrix with laptop dock

This is much more interesting than just streaming video to a television. It represents a dramatic decoupling of the computer’s brain from its body, and points to a future where phones, as primary computing devices, are accessed through a wide range of interfaces. When we pick them up and turn them on they’ll behave like phones, but we’ll also interact with them through numerous devices in our immediate environment.

Today’s computer may gradually vanish – our laptops and PCs becoming mere peripherals, mindless bodies controlled by the brains in our pockets. And it might go even further as the brain continues to shrink. Who’s to say that a similar fate doesn’t await the smartphone itself, that they won’t also become mere interface devices controlled by computers we wear as watches or jewellery? This might sound a bit sci-fi, but research fields like ambient intelligence and ubiquitous computing have even more radical ideas than these about where we might be heading.

The site, My Starbucks Idea, is nothing profound or new. It’s a blog engine where users post their ideas and Starbucks respond to them. These ideas can be commented and voted on, and a raft of social media links help spread the word.

This has been done many times to varying degrees of success, but what struck me most about My Starbucks Idea was the obvious engagement of the users and their receptiveness to the responses from Starbucks. They were being listened to. They were being interacted with. A simple thing, really, but something that big companies are traditionally bad at doing for their customers, paralyzed by the fear of negative comments.

Of course it helps that the design is clean and simple, making it easy to follow and become immersed in. The website’s purpose is obvious and it’s easy to see both what people are suggesting and how Starbucks respond to those suggestions. The list of ideas put into action was prominent and larger than I expected. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Starbucks responded in a frank, honest and human tone, as opposed to the corporate tone of many companies.

Ok, so there are some problems too. One idea I ran across, a free shot for card holders on Monday mornings, was noted as being vetted two years after originally being posted. Another took around six months, and a raft of user comments, before responding to a request for a larger non-smoking area outside of the stores.

Categories are not easily accessible (the navigation has a couple of types, but search results have links to a number of others) and it took a while to figure out that the website did indeed touch upon the world outside the USA. And why oh why is the dropdown list of categories only available in the semi-hidden categories themselves and not in either the main categories or within any of the posts?

However all things considered, I thought that this was a fantastic website, playing a great role in providing a positive customer experience. Having seen so many of these kinds of ideas fall flat due to lack of investment or through a myriad of corporate issues, I was really happy to see one that appears to be successful. Well done Starbucks!

One notion that I take exception to, however, is that the iPad signals the death of the keyboard and that touch interfaces are destined for ubiquity.

Now, I’m no technological conservative – I’ve been using touch-screen phones since before the iPhone came out. But I think a more fundamental point is being missed here, which is that the roles computers play in our lives are multiplying greatly.

Computers used to play a relatively limited set of roles which could be supported with a common set of interface models, mainly centred around the keyboard and the mouse. The keyboard & mouse setup worked when the computer operator was sat at a desk, had enter lots of data from a large character set, and needed direct access to many (maybe even several hundred) on-screen controls offered by their applications.

Today, not every computer user is sat at a desk and in the need state described above. Computer users might be on the other end of a phone line from the machine itself, operating it through a (notoriously infuriating) voice interface. They might be delivering a parcel and collecting the recipient’s signature using a handheld computer’s (notoriously infuriating) pen interface. And of course the computer user might be using a personal device like a smartphone, which needs to be small and light and whose functions don’t require the sort of  intricate and precise interactions supported by the keyboard/mouse combo.

But this doesn’t change the fact that some computer users will still be in situations where the keyboard and mouse paradigm is appropriate. Therefore the keyboard will not die.

What things like the iPad illustrate is that we are using computers more than we used to – in a wider number of contexts and for a wider range of reasons. They don’t replace what we already have, they’re just a new addition to our collection of tools.

Below are a collection of resources to get you going down the information architecture and data visualisation path. Whether you just want to become more familiar with infographics and data visualisations for occasional use or are thinking of making it a career, the resources below will surely come in handy. There are also some beautiful examples and more roundups to see even more fantastic graphics.

http://www.noupe.com/design/fantastic-information-architecture-resources.html

Usability Post
A blog about design. Design isn’t what something looks like, design is about how it works. Making something usable means understanding what people expect from your product and thinking of ways to make the use of the product simple and enjoyable.

Boxes and Arrows
Devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of design; including graphic design, interaction design, information architecture and the design of business.

UI Trends
A dynamic light-weight repository for interesting user interface designs and trends for website and web applications.

UXmatters
A web magazine that delivers compelling content about developing effective user experience (UX) strategies and designing digital product user experiences that optimally serve people’s needs and satisfy their desires.

User Interface Engineering
A leading research, training, and consulting firm specializing in web site and product usability.

Konigi
A community-authored and maintained resource for the user experience design field, covering information related to its practices.

The study involved 66 graduate students with either normal or corrected vision being given a short story to read online. A preliminary reading test was carried out on participants so the study could predetermine their reading speed. Different text layouts were used, such as multiple column, full justification and so on. Study participants were tested for both reading speed and reading comprehension.

• Reading speed: Multiple-column layouts impaired reading speed when text was left-justified. However, left-justified text was read more quickly in a single column layout than full-justified text. The highest reading speed was 269.33 words per minute for two-column, full-justified text.
• Reading comprehension: No significant variation was found across the different text formats.
• Fast versus slow readers: Faster readers benefited most from the 2-column, fully-justified layout. Slow readers benefited from 1-column, left-justified text.

The study was perhaps limited by the fact that the participants, as undergraduates, were heavier readers of online text than the average member of the population. I’d be interested to see if any similar studies have been carried out with a larger sample size, broader age range and a more representative mix of internet ‘natives’ versus internet ‘newbies’. Does anyone know of any? If I find some I’ll post them here.