johannakoll's posterous

After finishing school, I took a gap year. To enhance my knowledge of the world, and to grow up - but not through travelling. Instead, I supported mentally disabled artists for a year in an art therapy group. I've always been volunteering: organising summer camps for children, selling cakes for charity, mentoring a teenager in London ( plus I also sold and drank alcohol to get money for a good cause...). My MSc project for Siemens focused on the workflow of outpatient care nurses, and those of you who know me better know why I care a lot about how my generation will deal with aging parents. 

Combine that with my passion for agile and lean startup, the desire to work in a balanced team, and my interest in the overlap between UX and product management, and it should be pretty obvious to you why I joined Sidekick Studios at the beginning of this year. You can read my intro and see a current photo of me on the Sidekick blog.

I'm currently working on getting a concept in the context of older people, communities and food from idea to reality. I aim to share my progress and learning here, kicking lazy blogger me back into action.

The programme at this year's IA Summit was one of the best I've seen at a UX conference in a long time.

The quality of sessions was consistently high, and first-time speakers impressed thanks to the mentoring scheme the committee had set up. This makes it hard to choose highlights. Below is a list of the talks I recommend to my team, grouped by theme. My own talk didn't seem to fit under one topic, so you can read more about it here. For a full list, see Martin Belam's collection of links and materials.

If you can only spare time for one talk, read Cennydd Bowles' closing plenary speech.
When the podcast is available, make sure you check out Jared Spool's keynote. In the meantime, get your hit of Spool here.

Cross-channel and service design
Samantha Starmer shared 5 principles, 5 methods, and 5 tools for creating cross-channel experiences (yes we like lists!). She illustrated these with great stories and examples, also from her work at retailer REI, and recommended a library of service design tools. If you work on retail projects, make sure to take a look.

Content strategy
Start with Karen McGrane's 'We are all content strategists now' (the slides are from IDEA). 
Think about tone of voice and copy with Carl Collins' excellent 'Interfaces are made of words' and his activity sheet. 
Wondering how to get started? Carrie Dennison tells you how to do content strategy on a shoestring budget. 
Karen also gave a workshop, I'm hoping that slides will be available some time, as they contain more examples of content strategy tools.

Agile
'Lean UX: Getting out of the deliverables business' by Jeff Gothelf is a must. Check out the slides or read the Smashing Magazine article. 
I enjoyed the case study 'Letting Go of Perfection: Developing IA Agility' presented by Serena Rosenhan, Joanna Markel and Chris Farnum from ProQuest. 
I didn't attend Joe Sokohl's workshop 'Nailing it down - Detailed design to preserve the UX vision', wish I had - wondering what discussions were had about (just enough) detailed design.

Data, analytics, measures
Data, web analytics and how to measure the value UX adds was a big topic at the Summit. Louis Rosenfeld addressed it in his keynote, Lynne Polischiuk and Julie Strothman shared stories and examples why it matters and how you get started, and Richard Dalton gave a practical guide to measuring UX.

Visual design
I missed Kim Bieler's 'Flab to Fab' talk, but the slides have excellent examples that will prove to everyone what difference visual design decisions make and why attention to details matters.

IA
Domain models! URIs! I missed Mike Atherton's talk 'Beyond the Polar Bear' about a large IA project at the BBC, but luckily saw his great karaoke performance.

Designing for women
And finally, if you design for women, Jessica Irvins' 'Shrink it and pink it' session is great, and you might also want to check out what Cheryl Platz had to say about women and interaction design at Interaction11 (there's also a video).

After my first time as a speaker last year, my objective for my talk 'We Love Change? Change Is Scary!' was to improve my storytelling skills, stage presence and confidence. After the early feedback session for EuroIA, I was keen on getting myself in front of an audience for my dry-runs. To make the most of the time colleagues and friends spent listening to me, I introduced feedback cards.

Facilitation makes feedback more valuable. Inspired by agile retrospectives, the feedback cards have a plus and a delta column. When preparing for the talk, I asked the audience to capture what their take-aways and what I did well, and what could be improved. Handing out the same cards at the IA Summit itself allowed me to go back and check if I managed to improve on issues that came up in the dry-runs. I'm happy to say, I did! The story seemed to work, and I felt more confident on stage (even improvising a little song and dance). I've uploaded not only the presentation, but a slidecast of my session. The audio is one I recorded for practice (I listen to and occasionally also watch myself), and not the live session - so worth checking out the podcast when it comes out.

Resources

If you want to find out more about change management, here's a resource collection from Harvard Business Review. HBR's 10 Must Reads on Change is a collection of articles, eg by John P.Kotter. If you like a short overview as an ebook, Managing Change and Transition (Harvard Business Essentials) is a quick and easy read.
The philosopher I mentioned is Eric Hoffer, who wrote The Ordeal of Change, which discusses change in the context of society.

There are several versions and adaptations for Virgina Satir's change model. I relied on online resources like this article or this one, and a family trained in therapy. If you want to learn more, Virginia Satir has written several books on family therapy, change and communication.

Feedback cards allow people to share further resources, ideas and questions with me.

A book that got mentioned is 'Managing Transitions' by William Bridges.

Carolyn Snyder (@csnyder) wrote that she'd like to understand more about the 'transforming idea' part of Satir's change model. How to help people to get to this stage, what does occur in a person's mind and feelings? I will chase my family for more on this, but someone else mentioned the Kubler-Ross stages of grief on their card: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. As change involves grief, this could be worth looking into to find out more.

So, what do I want to do better next time?

I need to speak slower, check the quality of the projectors at the venue, and include a slide with references and resources. It would have been good to present the experience architecture and value map with a fictitious case study, and to show photos of the tools in action (meeting room set-up). I will continue to collect examples, and read some of the recommended literature, to add new material in case I give an updated version of this talk some time.

If you have feedback for me, please post it as a comment.

I asked on Twitter:

"Looking for an automatic site map creation tool for content audits. Recommendations? Is Powermapper any good?"

Powermapper got support and good feedback! Other tools recommended were WinWSD, SortSite, iGooMap, Integrity, SiteOrbiter, or Xenu in combination with MindManager.

Here are your answers:

@davewpetersen: WinWSD ia brute force tool & SortSite (more tech audit oriented)
@amyk1203: powermapper is a good for starting an inventory. Support response is quick too.
@logorrhoea: I use iGooMap (Mac only, I think). Or try Integrity (also Mac, donationware, I think).
@leannebyrom: Powermapper works really well for site mapping
@doriantaylor: there is also SiteOrbiter
@boonerang: I rely on Xenu to get the crawl data right then port to MindManager or other tools
@guerillagirl_ pointed to the Omnigraffle Site Map generator
@carlrc Let me know if you find one. I use integrity to crawl links and then edit down that data in excel

Thanks, all!

Disclaimer:
This is my personal opinion, and I haven’t shared these thoughts with my fellow committee members before posting. They will probably disagree with some points.

When I moved to London in 2007, there was one monthly opportunity for me to network, learn about the London UX job market, find interviewees for my MSc thesis, and enhance my education by adding relevant talks from practitioners to my lectures at UCLIC: the UK UPA event. It’s where I made the connections that would then lead me to attend the first UX Bookclub or discover the then-small London IA pub meetups. I love the London UX scene, it has been great to see it grow to a self-organising community with many different events, from bookclub to field trip to barcamp to speaker coaching sessions.

My main reason for joining the committee were the events. I wanted to make sure that future students and people new to London, or to UX, had a friendly starting point. Before moving to London, I was more of an interaction design/IxDA kid, to whom the UPA seemed like an old aunt. The London UPA felt different, thanks to Claire, Lola, Hannah and others involved. The events are still successful, which makes me happy.

The summer elections, new committee members and especially the feedback the committee received were a wake-up call for me. Yep, I had been helping out with events, but have to admit I did little else. While not all criticism was constructive, it pushed me out of my comfort zone. Leisa’s blogpost has done the same thing, and it’s good that the discussion is now public. Hence my contribution.

I have been very critical about the committee. Other committee members aren’t on Twitter! They don’t know about London IA, book club, and the UX scene! They don’t know the UX blog of the day! They are suggesting event topics that sound boring! I was so narrow-minded and arrogant. While I engage with ‘my’ part of the UX community, other committee members connect with academia, ergonomics or human factors folks, and attend events on product design or accessibility. The UPA tries to reach wider, and the diversity of the committee is thanks to election, not selection. I’ve realised that some of my fellow committee members are not disconnected from the UX community, they are connected to different communities that make up our field.

I continue to be frustrated with the global UPA. Does the benefit of being part of a global organisation outweigh the constraints and red tape? The first European-based global president has made a difference, and the UPA has great people. I wish it would feel more like a global community. I’m not sure if I want the UK UPA to break free, but I’d like to see memberships (and money) in local hands. At the moment, I wouldn’t ask you to become a member. I’d rather see you pay for our events. If all of you would join, food and drink would be history. The benefit of being a global member is not clear to me, and I’m part of the organisation. This is wrong. The committee is discussing what to do, and opinions differ. We will share our thoughts and involve our members and non-members. I’m the international liaison person on the committee, so rather than complaining about the global UPA, I better collect input, get a plan together, publicise it, and reach out to the mothership.

We suck at communications. The focus on events has left no time to work on the underlying strategic problems. No one knows what the community is up to. I only learned about the valuable different backgrounds and interests of committee members by being on the committee. We’re not a UK UPA. One response to tackling all these issues are the current elections. I’m excited by the candidates. We need someone based outside of London, we need someone to improve our communications, we need another person to work on professional development initiatives.

Don’t let the things you can’t do stop you from doing the things you can do. It seemed like we were making up too many excuses, right? Lack of communication slapping us in the face. We’re doing. Despite all criticism, the new website is an improvement and I’m thankful for the push to get this live. The committee has been meeting more frequently, for all of us to get to know each other, and to tackle the strategic problems. Yes it’s taking long, and we’re still not sharing enough, but please bear with us. I’m working on suggestions to improve visibility and accountability of what we’re up to, and on improving our communications, together with the currently-to-be-elected new comms person. Stuart and I are looking into our speaker selection process - given the number of people who want to present, we need to be transparent about how we decide who gets the slot. If you have input for any of these activities, please let me know.

The committee is the most challenging of all my UX activities. Being part of an elected group of volunteers feels different. I feel even more responsible. I’m glad I’m not a politician. Democracy, transparency, member input, all bloody hard. I love Meetup to group-organise the Agile UX events. Design Jam is a new format, our group of London organisers shares a clear vision for it. The Agile UX retreat peer group shares a vision, but communicating what it's all about is a challenge. I'm learning from these other volunteer activities, and they benefit from my reflections on my UK UPA involvement.
Organising something more or less on my own allows me to make things happen quickly. Putting on something new with a small team of friends has a start-up feel to it, we experiment, we tweak, we own. Trying to figure out how a peer group that's held together by offline retreats can grow, and share with a wider online audience, is fascinating.
Due to its history and set-up, the UK UPA is a different beast. Some think it’s ugly, some think it’s beautiful. I’m happy that there is a discussion, that Leisa, Ian, my fellow committee members and all of you who have tweeted, commented, DMed and talked to me do care. That gives me the energy to try to make this work.

The topic for this week’s London agile ux event (organised via the meetup group) was ‘Startups’ - small companies, where the need for good teamwork and the shared love for the product you’re building with the desire to ship often naturally create a collaborative, agile environment.

Collaboration allows us to step out of our silos and define the role we take in our team based on our skills, and based on what needs to be done. Being the sole UX person at a startup is a growth opportunity, but it can be very though - so little time, so much to do. Sjors Timmer has been there, and he shared his favourite tricks and tools (many of them built by startups) that allowed him to do good work under time and budget constraints. When you research a topic or competitors, use delicious as a search engine. Look out for how people share their sketches, wires and designs on Flickr. Use Posterous to build up your inspiration archive (check out Sjors’ posterous). Look at this list of tools (on Sjors' slides), find a way to do your work better, there’s so much out there to support you that there’s no excuse. Thanks for sharing, Sjors!

From being the UX team of one at a startup to being a team of UX freelancers whose client is a startup. Andrew Travers shared his story of ‘the project from hell that turned out to be great.’ One week to deliver a UX strategy, moodboards, a design concept, a presentation - oh, and also three days of research and usability testing. Sounds scary. So what made this project a success story?
Factor 1: the team. On such a short project, the time it takes to establish the team and find a way of working can be the biggest challenge. Andrew referenced Hannah Donovan’s excellent dConstruct 2010 talk: musicians who improvise together listen to each other, have eye contact, and they also hand-pick who they play with. Andrew’s project team was thoughtfully put together by Leisa Reichelt. Also, the client was continuously involved, so the UX consultant team and the client team felt like a team, too.
Factor 2: proximity. Not only the UX and client team were close, they kept their end users close, too. Yes, it was tough to squeeze in three days of research, iterating the prototype for the next session based on the insights from the one that was going on. But moving this quickly did not only help to prioritise what aspects of the service really added value for users, it also allowed the startup to validate once more that they were on the right track, and got everybody excited.
Factor 3: intensity. Startups are intense, if you do a project with them it’s not ‘just another project’ - it’s about their business, their existence. What you’re designing is the manifestation of their business. Hence when you’re dealing with a startup, all UX is strategic.
Andrew’s slides are available here.

The final talk of the day was by Basheera Khan, co-founder and UX Director of startup Play Nice.ly. Startups are ‘agile by design’ as they attract people with entrepreneurial mindsets, who are driven and willing to try new things. Startups have a high number of ‘T-shaped’ people (as discussed by Bill Moggeridge): one speciality, and working knowledge of lots of other stuff. Natural if there’s lots to do, and only a small team to do it. At Play Nice.ly, collaboration is intense. The product vision is omnipresent and discussed constantly. Skills over roles, a shared understanding of what the product is about, open discussions, having fun together - in her talk, Bash reflected on why this dies as soon as a company reaches a certain size.
One important reason is the team, the people. For Andrew’s project, the team was hand-picked. Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin emphasised in this talk that you need to hire a team of peers, people who you want to spend all day with, every day. We see some companies, such as Twitter, taking this very seriously. Smaller companies are also brave enough to let people go who don’t fit in. In larger organisations, tough contracts and slow processes can make this challenging.

Bash's slides are here.

In the group discussion spinning off the final Q&A, we discussed how agile has principles and tools that could help to preserve the startup feel, to help to keep the team close and intensely engaged (an interesting read: Jean Tabaka’s ‘Collaboration Explained’). Retrospectives, visibility of work, collaborative planning sessions, etc. facilitate great teams, but often UX people are isolated by working ahead and running behind, hence left out of the ‘let’s build this’ excitement. An interesting point to follow up at a future meetup!

Thanks to Bash, Andrew and Sjors, and to Mat Walker for sorting out the venue. If you’d like to participate in the discussion, or have a great idea for a meetup, join our group here.

While at dConstruct 2010, I checked out 'Suspending Disbelief', an exhibition by Lighthouse featuring work by Julian Oliver, Caleb Larsen, Andrew Friend and Becca Gill & Jay Kerry.

My favourite was Andrew Friend's work. Not only because I have to have that underwater hiding place, but also because I found this very funny. Seeing it as a user story, what an acceptance criteria :)

Over the summer, I have been in several situations where feedback was collected from a group of contributors:

   * agile ux retreat retrospectives
   * internal design critique sessions
   * London IA presentation coaching workshop for Euro IA speakers

Each of these occasions followed a different process, which allowed me to compare and reflect on what makes a feedback round truly useful. It's often the simple, basic ingredients of successful collaboration we forget when working with others.

Group feedback needs facilitation and structure

Group communication that isn't leading to something tangible is lost communication. For the receivers, feedback should be actionable. The process should allow feedback contributors to combine their own reflections with those of others. For interested people who weren't present, a synthesis of all feedback can be valuable.

1. Process and structure
For the agile ux retrospectives, we used a format well-known from agile retrospectives. Each contributor records their feedback on post-its. All input is collected following a structure that has been agreed with the group. This can be 'good - room for improvement', 'positive - negative - ideas for improvement', 'less - more - start - stop' or whatever categories work best for the purpose of the session. After clustering feedback, either the facilitator presents a summary, or each contributor briefly talks about their inputs.

An agreed process and structure focus the feedback and prevent the session from going off-topic. These ground rules are helpful for making sense of and synthesising the feedback, which makes sharing the outcomes easier. A process also ensures that everybody can have input.
While I focused on group feedback, I've found agreeing a process - and a shared understanding of how to give and accept feedback - helpful in one-on-one feedback sessions.

2. Facilitation
At the London IA coaching workshop, I was both in the role of the audience giving feedback, and on the receiving end. The contributing group was rather large, and we had no agreed process, and no facilitator.
When you are the person receiving the feedback, you can't facilitate the discussion at the same time. A group feedback session needs to have a process owner, who ensures that everybody has a say, that the discussion is not going off topic - but also that the things that need to be said are being said. If the receiver and facilitator are the same person, there's a risk they'll protect their baby by shutting up the people who wanted to help with their input. So, the more personal the feedback is - your talk, your wireframes -, the more important is a neutral facilitator.

3. Note-taking and sharing
Our internal design critique sessions were very informal. For one, we all threw comments at a set of wireframes in a group discussion, while one team member took notes. For another, we individually commented on the designs using post-its.
While the second approach's advantage was individual time to think about the design, the first approach benefitted from the group discussion. Sharing our feedback meant we learned from each other, and it triggered further interesting discussion. That said, the group discussion critique session would have benefitted from notes being taken publicly on a flipchart rather than on a notepad - some good thoughts got lost in the heat and fun.
Make sure your contributors have the opportunity to share their thoughts, and visualise what has been said.

Deciding how to give feedback, appointing a facilitator, and making sure the discussion is recorded - common sense, but especially when winging collaboration sessions, I've overlooked how important these principles are. Next time, I'll look at my checklist. What other ground rules should I add to it?