#interaction 16

[designaday]

Design like you give a damn

I’ve been finishing up a presentation for my coworkers about Interaction 16. Yes, that was four months ago. I’ve been busy.

At any rate, rather than reading my prattle, watch this. It’s just as inspiring as I review it as it was the first time.

[designaday]

End-to-End Design Specs – Part XII: Inclusiveness

This is the final installment in a series I started almost a year ago. In the interim, I turned it into a talk that I gave at Interaction 16 called 10 Team Goals for Effective Design Specifications. The 10th goal is inclusiveness.

Certainly, you will be referencing your own specifications, but as in most things we design, we are not the sole user. Consider who else will be using your specs and what they’ll be using them for.

Developers are likely the heaviest users of your specs, so you need to understand how they use them. Do they print them out and have them laying on their desk while working? Do they view them on screen? Do they have to jump around in the spec, or is everything they need for a particular task on one page? What would they like to see included that isn’t in there now? What don’t they use?

Testers will use a specification to write test cases and evaluate the implemented product. How can you notify them of changes during development? Is there information you can include that will make automated test case maintenance easier?

Product Management may not need as great a level of detail as the developers, but they may rely on the spec as a record of what is making it into the next release. The spec is likely the best documentation they have of what is being implemented and how it works.

Sales & Marketing are always looking for material they can pull from to describe improvements in release notices.

Customers appreciate receiving a record of modifications made in a build.

Users can even benefit, if indirectly, as UI specs are great fodder for user guides and training materials.

Each of these stakeholders has different needs and will be using your documentation for different purposes. Some may be better off with custom variations on the standard specifications you deliver to developers.

In conclusion, remember that you aren’t creating documentation for its own sake. There are problems your documentation is solving. There are needs being fulfilled. Design documentation for its target audience.

[designaday]

Interaction Awards

I mentioned in my series on Interaction 16 that I was asked to fill the role of photographer for the Interaction Awards, which took place the last night of the conference. I put my Nikon D7200 to good use. The results aren’t professional grade, but I’m reasonably happy with them. I got them all posted on IxDA’s Flickr account last night.

[illuminesce]

Hey everyone! Riaz and my talk from Helsinki is up online. We're very proud to be a part of the wonderful speakers at interaction 16!

Check out Designing for Play: What Interaction Design Can Learn from Video Games.

[designaday]

10 Team Goals for Effective Design Specifications

If you’re following along, you are already well aware of the fact that I spoke at Interaction 16. I’m happy to be able to share that presentation now with all of you. The videos from the conference are being released on Vimeo, and the two first full days’ worth are available. There’s a lot of great content there you should check out. Here’s mine.

I’ll also be reprising my talk live at IxDA Pittsburgh’s Interaction 16 Redux event this Thursday evening alongside two of my local colleagues, Charles Hannon and Smitha Prasadh. Yes, we had three Pittsburgh designers speaking in Helsinki! Not too shabby.

[designaday]

10 Team Goals for Effective Design Specifications

I had a great time at Interaction 16 in Helsinki, and I plan to give a full report later this week. But first, I’d like to relate my own successful endeavor.

I wasn’t just an attendee this year—I presented a “medium” length talk based on the End-to-End Design Specs series I’ve been writing here on DesignAday. The talk was well attended and very well received. I spoke with several people immediately following and engaged with others via Twitter and email. There does seem to be some demand for this topic, as I suspected.

I’ve uploaded my slides to SpeakerDeck and SlideShare. The conference will be posting the video of my talk soon. If you are interested in having me speak to your organization, please get in touch.

[designaday]

A Cornucopia of Conferences

I pointed out in yesterday’s post that UX Australia published their call for speakers and that the new Abstractions conference will be doing so soon. Then today, I received email from Midwest UX 2016 announcing their call for speakers. That’s a lot to think about.

I have my talk for Interaction 16, 10 Team Goals for Effective Design Specifications, coming up the first week of March. It’s a 20 minute talk, but only a small portion of what I had originally conceived as a full-length talk, so I’ll probably submit that to MWUX and Abstractions. I’ve also been doing some writing about enterprise UX debt, and I plan to submit a talk on that as well.

UX Australia, though, is a little tougher. They pay speakers $800, but my flight would cost about twice that, and then there’s the hotel bill. To make that trip affordable, I would really have to do a workshop and fill it. That conference isn’t interested in technical topics, so I’m not going to submit anything on OOCSS. I may think about developing a workshop based on my design documentation talk or UX debt, but they may not lend themselves to hands-on exercises. Another possibility would be to turn one of my college courses into a workshop, like data visualization or game design. That would be fun, but cutting down a semester’s worth of content to around 6 hours will be challenging.

What to do, what to do…

[designaday]

Interaction 16

The program for Interaction 16, to be held in Helsinki, Finland this March, was just released this evening. I’m very proud to announce that I am one of over 100 speakers participating. Yes, you heard that right: over 100 speakers. That’s quite a few more than usual. Last year, there were 67.

There will be 6 keynotes, only 4 of which have been announced so far. There are 31 45-minute talks and panels, 25 20-minute talks, and 18 10-minute talks. That’s 74 sessions. Then there are 7 4-hour workshops, and 5 2-hour workshops. They haven’t published the actual schedule yet, so we don’t know how many tracks those sessions will be divided into, but it works out to 24 and a half sessions per day.

I’m one of the 20-minute talks: 10 Team Goals for Effective Design Specifications. It seems to me that with the popularity of Lean and Agile, design documentation has gotten a bum rap. I’m going to give it some love. Maybe I’ll see you there.