Human Factors

The presentation starts with another overview of the Adobe XD Team and how the team was build up after the merger of Macromedia and Adobe and samples of their latest work are shown. The focus of the group lies in creating visions to get rid of digital experiences that “suck”.
Andrew shows the development of the Photoshop toolbar as an examplen and how its appearance changed over the year to become more usable and appealing in design. The slogan is “Experience Matters” and he shows the Wii, an Ikea store and the new Virgin blue virtual screen to stress the importance and success of carefully designed experiences.

The roles and goals of the XD Team within Adobe are:

- Inspire
- Initiate

– Implement
Their work and ideas seem to be pretty well regarded within Adobe.

What makes the team work?
- Emphasize Making (Generalist over Specialist)
- Promote Trust and Freedom
- Have Fun

How do they work together?
- Communication is crucial (communication is very informal)
- Process isn’t that important (focus on creating, not on following a strict defined process)
- Focus on the visions and goals

Their 5 rules of working:
- Simplify the problem
- Trust your instincts
- Share everything
- Fail fast (to suceed sooner)
- We are all peers before the objects

How we design:
- Useful.Usable.Desirable.

Next Andrew talks about the cornerstones that Tom Hobbs and Chris Heimbuch mentioned in their session on Monday as well
- What’s your point
- Content is King
- Create and experience, not an interface
- Choreograph sequence and flow

The author of the second book that I bought here at MAX, so again expectations are high. After a short introduction he dives deeper into the principles of successfully designing great user experience that is simple and works for people who just want to get things done in a fast and easy way. It’s important to get users uo to speed, as they tend to learn only the most necessary elements they need to know to reach their goals. He brings an example of some of his recent work and presents a sample navigation to show how his ideas develop from the first thought to the launch of the website (including some basic techniques to influence the user). Secondly he talks about supporting mental models and the importance of clear and non-confusing navigation. Third big step in creating great UE is elevating instead of innovating, which he explains by showing the steps in creating a list for online news. Designing for an activity is another important part of great UE and Robert guides the audience through another of his projects. Afterwards he’s talking about the missing third state of an interaction. In general there are three phases of what’s happening on a web page: 1. invitation stage, 2. manipulation phase, 3. completion phase (important indication that a process is done to give user confidence by creating a moment of feedback) and this last phase of completion should never miss in an overall positive user experience. The last point of his presentation is titled “poka-yoke”, which means error proofing (the expression comes from an asian background) and is mainly about saving the user frustration. His example points out the confusion that can come up if there is a character limit in boxes.

To end his presentation he points out a cool project that he thinks needs more support, called www.kiva.org. And he does a little bit of advertisement for one of his upcoming seminars as well as for his company www.miskeetcom, which focuses on socially-conscious sites, products and services that improve the world, in big ways and in small.

My personal conclusion of this session: from all the “famous” user experience experts that I saw so far, Robert Hoekman is the one I like most. His thoughts made sense during the whole presentation, he admits mistakes so others can learn from them and he has an inspiring and fun presentation style – it simply doesn’t get boring to listen to him. I’m really looking forward to reading his book.

I’m attending this session mainly to spend my time doing something useful. I couldn’t find any session that really interests me at this time (9.30 am!) and instead of just hanging around I think this is a good compromise. Chris shows some features of InDesign and how it works together with Flash, Acrobat, Photoshop and Dreamweaver by explaining how to create hyperlinks + Flash animations and enhancing + embedding videos. You can see that he really loves Creative Suite 3 and he’s very passionate about his work. It’s good to have a motivated presenter, especially when the contents of the session are currently quite irrelevant for your work… ;-)

My last session for today, after this one I will go up to the hotel room for a wee rest and get back for the last couple of minutes of the sneak peak session before the huge MAX party starts. They promised that it will be the best MAX party ever, although I can’t imagine something better than the roller coaster party in Disneyland 2005. So I’ll wait and see what awaits me tonight, but now is the time for another learning experience. Apparantly Jesse James Garrett is quite popular – the room is the biggest one I’ve been in so far and it’s almost full and people are still coming. I think I haven’t heard of him until earlier today, when I bought his book (which was almost sold out already, again an indication that he’s popular), so I’m really curious how it will be.

While waiting I just googled Jesse James Garreth and he even has a Wikipedia entry, that explains the number of people here and pushes my expectations even further… ;-)

He starts off with promoting his book (good that I already got it) and explaining what his company Adaptive Path does. He then goes on with the question “What is the web good for (or at)?” and goes back to the invention of television, which was only compared to things that were known before (it’s like radio but with pictures/it’s like theater without going out) and only some ten year after the invention people started to understand the real purpose of TV. He thinks that this is exactly what’s happening to the internet right now. He (as everyone else at this conference as well) sees the power of the internet in the content and in the combination of content and RIAs. He sees the beginning of the current hype in the late 19th century, when visions about the change of photography (from taking the pictures on glass to taking them on film rolls) changed the use of cameras from being professionals based work equipment to something everyone could use because it was so much simplified and suddenly usable.

Reasons for creating a new product could be to produce something profitable or reliable or, in the best case, something people say “I can’t live without it”. He goes back in history to show the development of some products that changed people’s behavior and desires, like video recorders or early word processors and how devices became more and more complicated and harder to use by adding more features. He does a quick digression on video games and digital music players leading to the success of the iPod. The reason why a product that came later to the market and had fewer features than the competition’s could ever get this popular, is, that people see their favorite products as people, too. He mentions a couple of more products and applications that changed the user experience over the last couple of years (eg. google calender, medicine packaging, flickr, mobile phones) and points out that it’s not only the website that makes the overall experience for the user, but the interaction of every party involved (call center, mail advertisement).

Getting to the end of the session he shows a video about the Adaptive Path’s vision of a new medical device called charmr for people with diabetis, a really cool device which sounds so useful that it should be created and hit the market!

This sessions covers mainly Adobe Express form the perspective of the XD team. Ty explains the team’s approach to creating new tools, where Observation is the first step of the process.

He goes on with the definition of Adobe Express: It is an online application suite that allows you to edit, create and share your media without leaving the web (build entirely in Flex). Ty then shows an example application of Adobe Premiere Express (a RIA for simple editing of digital video files) that can be customised to the clients needs. It’s currently used for example by Photobucket and MTV.

The early concepts of Express started with what was known to the team: the desktop. But it turned out that this was the wrong approach and we are guided us through some “historic” versions of Express to show the development over the years up to how it looks like today.

What’s next? Express is an ecosystem, not a singular product, so the concepts can be implemented and used in other applications for future visions.

Just on time for the start of this AIR-session – and there’s even a free book for every attendee: “Fusion Authority Quarterly Update, Vol. II Issue II”, nice, thank you.

The presentation starts with the question “How can AIR deepen brand awareness?” Basis are the following assumptions:

- Today, we have the power to control, create and share content.

- The value equation is fading, so to give a brand a positive look we need to provide value and do good.

AIR brings branded applications out of the browser and onto the desk top. Everyone loves their desktops and fit them to our own tastes and likes. Desktop applications require trust and belief in a brand. A web page is only a destination, while the desk top is part of our personality.

User surround themselves with touchpoints, potential environments where a brand can reach the user. The more touchpoints a brand uses the more chances a brand has to get noticed. Carefully identifying and shaping each touchpoint provides a holistic user experience. As an example Gabor shows Finetune.com, an online and offline usable music library.

Currently AIR excels at creating passive experiences and future applications will provide an active experiences. Advantages of AIR:
- AIR brings web design and development skills-sets to the desktop, which is necessary because the next generation of users are growing up on web based interfaces.
- The best UI designers in the world are currently working on web based experiences, with AIR they have the chance to create for the desktop as well.
- Cross Platform – build one, deploy many

Now Tony Mac Donnell comes on the stage and starts talking a bit more about the technical aspects of AIR. He goes on with more advantages of AIR: the opportunity to create nice atuff and having access to the file system.
The session ends with an outlook on visions and hopes for the future and a Q&A round.

Here’s the second chance for Jared Spool. This time I googled the title of the session before I came here and didn’t find a video on it. But the actual title is slightly different than the one that’s advertised, so I hope that this is something I don’t know yet, let’s see…

Aaaahhhhrgs, I know these slides – I’m out of here!