I learned a whole lot, met some amazing people, and came away terrified and inspired all at once. Personally, my biggest takeaway was the amazing energy and professionalism of the speakers and presenters. It was awe inspiring to see so many young, enthusiastic people, with so much stage presence and speaking talent, taking the time to share their experiences and insights with us. Thanks to everyone involved – it was a thoroughly nourishing experience.

Highlights for me included the Dave McClure keynote, during which I realized I probably don’t have a choice but take a crack at turning the big idea that’s been bugging me for a decade into a startup. Either that or I’ll never sleep properly again. Yes, he scared me shitless, but he also made me realize that I’m doing this for the right reasons.

Another eye-opener was the presentation by Ash Maurya on Running Lean – also the title of his new book, available online here: http://www.runningleanhq.com/ I heartily recommend you pick up a copy – You can even pay for it with a Tweet (for a limited ime only). Ash methodically breaks down the phases of getting a lean startup up and running with a straightforward how-to guide, which documents the process of getting his own projects up and running, adn somewhat recursively includes references to the process of writing the book in question. Great stuff!

A couple of the services that I’ve tested in recent projects include User Testing: http://www.usertesting.com/ - an easy-to-use online service that lets you create simple tests that are distributed to their testing resources who may be selected according to various demographic parameters (age, experience, income, etc.). The testers then screen and audio capture their experiences performing the tests you set them. Despite the obvious difficulties associated with the motivation of a user explicitly paid to evaluate your site (it’s really not a substitute for ethnographic approaches in the wild), useful observations can be made if the test objectives are set carefully. It is cheap, easy and quick, and does not require leaving the office. Waaaaay better than nothing at all.

Loop11 http://www.loop11.com/ takes a slightly different approach, with a suite of tools and services with which you can easily wrap your site (no code required) and turn users into testing guinea-pigs. The advantage is that these may be real users with real motives for twiddling your site’s knobs. The disadvantage is that you don’t get the video and audio feed that user testing offers, which is a real bonus in terms of understanding the thought processes of users as they tackle your site.

The re-branding campaign was called “Breathtaking” and the apparently actual brand spec for the Pepsi logo redesign is here: http://www.fastcompany.com/files/PEPSI%20GRAVITATIONAL%20FIELD.pdf. Reading it now, what is breathtaking to me is the hubris and bullshit-quotient (“Emotive forces [that] shape the gestalt of brand identity” are compared to Earth’s “magnetic dynamics”…), but then I guess if you’re paying millions for a logo, you expect it to come wrapped in 24-carat justification.

Now, I’m someone who takes pride in my visual acuity and I like to think I pay a lot of attention to the logos, brands and visual communication devices that surround me, but until I read the Pepsi brand spec referred to in the guardian article I had not noticed that the different variants of Pepsi each carry a different variation of the logo. And that’s coming from someone who, if I drink a fizzy sugar drink (not often), will typically choose Pepsi.

Epic fail.

Anyway, to me it still looks like a little fat guy. http://www.utne.com/2009-02-16/Arts/New-Pepsi-Logo-is-a-Joke.aspx

I tend to think of design as something that begins before development in order to, first of all, validate the business hypothesis, then provide context and frame the problems being addressed during an Agile iteration cycle. Business and customer feedback from deployment of the cycle (sprint, whatever) subsequently helps inform future design efforts.

Even when the overall strategy is as banal as to simply throw shit at the wall and see what sticks, I have found that costs can always be mitigated to a signficant degree by having a little more customer insight and knowing, to extend the metaphor, which bits of wall are likely to be sticky.

Austin Govella has six useful points to bear in mind, touching the importance of on modeling, collaboration, and communicating effectively, amongst other things: http://www.thinkingandmaking.com/view/agile-ux-six

I was very pleased to see Kate Aronowitz making a strong statement emphasizing the importance of qualitative user research – even in the early stages of a startup (comment begins at 18:15).

Check it out here: http://startup2startup.com/2011/04/10/april-12th-interaction-design-for-startups/

After 2 weeks it became part of the family. After a month, it was clear we were going to need another one. Now, half a year later, it’s likely that we’ll be getting a third at some point. My three-year-old daughter can now recognize most of the letters of the alphabet, knows her animals, her colours, and assumes all computers have touchscreens.

This is computing for my Dad, who never got comfortable with the Mac/PC flavor of computing. I’m sad that he’s not here to see it. It would have turned his world on it’s head and opened the internet up to him.

It’s not perfect. Much of the net still thinks it’s an iPhone and serves it mobile web pages, although more and more sites detect it and increasingly serve it appropriately formatted media.

Apple are idiots for blocking flash videos. It fundamentally weakens the iPad experience, making it much easier for Android-based and other devices to compete favorably. Eventually, there will be HTML5, but in the meantime, everybody suffers because of Steve Jobs’ hubris.

Typically, Apple didn’t really do any market research – their assumption is that they can design for themselves and that is what everyone else will want. Rookie mistake: Self-referential design results in missed opportunity. As a result, the iPad needs a case because the ally casing doesn’t let it sit comfortably anywhere; Despite being the ideal kids computing environment, it’s not really kid-proof, not is it oriented towards kids. A quick look in the app store to see how many kids apps there are tells you just how much of a marketing mis-fire that was. Maybe overtly doing stuff for kids just isn’t cool enough?; The iPad is great for watching movies – and it would be much better if it came with a stand. As it is, you have to prop it up on something. Don’t even think about the Apple flip-case with the built-in stand – it falls over all the time. In fact, ignore the Apple cases altogether – get a 3rd party one. They’re cheaper and and better designed.

Overall, the iPad is a wonder that has fundamentally changed our family’s computing habits. We surf and read email wherever we want to be in the house – something that laptops somehow never managed to enable. We browse and share web pages by passing the iPad around the table. We watch on demand movies in bed, iPad propped on a pillow. My daughter nagivates apps and menu systems like a pro, even though she is barely beginning to learn to read.

But the we-know-whats-best-for-you-better-than-you-do Appleness still drives me nuts.

Although I know Tim would prefer not to strictly categorize himself as either “artist” or “designer”, any more than would I, I think it’s clear from our bodies of work that his product could be more easily categorized as “art”, mine as “design”.

During an evening fireside conversation over a glass of a (surprisingly good) Co-Operative highland single-malt, we returned to our favorite topic, and it became apparent that there is little functional difference between his experience with clients, and mine: Both groups have specific ideas about their needs, and make certain impositions regarding the nature of the final product. Both expect to be able to negotiate, influence and approve the final result that they will receive.

Andy Chen has an article over on Design Observer that frets about the art vs. design issue as part of the selection process for a new Head of Department, and I think maybe he’s missing the point.

Since talking with my brother, I’ve started to wonder if we’re all over-analyzing a terrifically simple issue? Art and design together describe a continuum, with (probably theoretical) “pure” forms at either extreme, with “pure art” serving no purpose other than to satisfy it’s creator, and “pure design” serving to meet a defined goal (such as the requirements of or client).

For more or less all practitioners, our work lies somewhere in between, with compromises being made all over the place. The final result is, invariably, some mixture of original intent, process, accident (happy or otherwise), time constraint, and level of interest.

We’re all used to the dated, utilitarian look and feel of Google’s web services, reminiscent, as they are, of GTK or Windows XP styling, but for the most part they remain relatively uncluttered and, more importantly, they’re free. It would be curmudgeonly to look this gift horse too closely in the mouth. However, what is inexcusable is that a similar grim ergonomy has been transplanted to the default visual paradigm of Android, Google’s mobile platform. It, too, is ‘free’ in theory – although it is unlikely that one will be able to obtain an Android phone without parting with a decent wad of greenbacks.

Now, Googlesoft is rubbing salt into our wounds with the hilariously botched launch, this week, of Google Buzz, a truly Microsoft-style theft of someone else’s good idea. The launch, which automatically made public lists of every user’s most frequent Gmail contacts, was a product design misfire of truly epic proportions, and a testament to the reality that Agile methods unbounded by rigorous design guidance can result in decidedly non-optimal results.

While it’s true that the Agile methodology is pretty good at letting engineers stumble towards overall product improvement without the need for significant up-front planning and research, as this week’s fiasco amply demonstrates, such headless wandering comes replete with the occasional disastrous (and costly) embarrassment, never mind the more frequent functional dead-ends.

It turns out that Buzz was only tested internally prior to the launch, and that it was well received, perhaps illustrating just how far the rarefied Google intelligentsia has drifted from it’s chummy ‘Do No Evil’ origins. When one is building products for someone other that oneself, one does actually have to do some original market research to find out what the target market needs. If only the Buzz product design team (assuming that there are designers as well as engineers on the project) had asked a few simple questions, like “what is our target market?”, “is our internal testing group representative of our target demographic?”, the embarrassment, and the consequent brand devaluation, could have been avoided.

It’s not all bad. For a start, I would not have had this rather pleasurable opportunity to compare Google to Microsoft.

What is clear is that, as user expectations evolve, adequate market research, requirements definition and interaction design become ever more critical to digital product success.

Windows Phone 7 is a major clean-up, but it had to be. Apple has rightly poured scorn on Microsoft’s previous design mis-fires and Redmond was heading for redundancy in the mobile space. Design-wise, the Zune player was a step in the right direction, but is an irrelevant product in a market that has already been lost. Mobile is a far deeper space, and one in which the race is still open – certainly for a number 2 or 3 slot.

Albert Shum and his team have done a grand job, and although only time will tell if the platform is usable and effective, it does look spectacular, making use of many of the same motion cues first seen on the iPhone, although with it’s own unique vocabulary of wipes, fades, slides and zooms. Of particular interest is the use of larger-than frame titles and edge-of-screen visual cues hinting at additional content within each of the ‘experience hubs’ that form the heart of the workflow model.

After devouring the presentation materials, interviews, and online demos, I was somewhat disappointed to realize Windows Phone 7 will only be available in the fall. On the other hand, if I’m honest, I’m not thinking of upgrading my iPhone 3G before then anyway – and believe it or not, I am definitely going to take a serious look at Windows Phone 7 before going the default Apple route.

I’m guessing the early announcement is partly to steal some airtime from iPad chatter, partly to respond to Android, and mostly to give their various service offerings time to bulk up on content – the launch announcement talked up the XBOX Live and Zune service integration, but pointedly failed to show even a single concrete example. Add to that the fact that over half the launch demo appeared to be carefully prepared flash animations, not an actual device, and the whole thing felt distinctly hurried.

So, Windows Phone 7 has an appealing design and interaction model – but that’s not really a differentiator, it’s a catch-up feature. After all, Apple have that already in spades, and everyone else is working on it (Well, OK, Google’s Android appears to be stuck in the eighties, but the rest of the world has moved on). Microsoft are touting a number of key differentiators, including the multitasking model (vs. Apple’s explicitly uni-tasking model) which, while true, nobody cares about. There are also the dynamic Start screen tiles that apps can push to and appear to have API access to. These tiles are far more interesting and a real differentiator, offering some huge potential benefits to end users over iPhone icons. Another differentiator which I think is very important, but which was not mentioned, is the portability of Zune media – unlike iTunes, where bought or rented media is effectively locked into each separate instance, Zune media follows your account, so you can access it from anywhere you can log in. I am perpetually frustrated with iTunes in this respect and would love to have this functionality.

It was very refreshing to hear the phrase “user and design experience is paramount” (or something to that effect) come from Steve Ballmer’s lips at last. If Microsoft can can do the math and see the benefit, then hopefully Avid and Adobe will follow. Fingers crossed!

Watch the Windows Phone 7 demo video here