Listen to Part One of my discussion on Ethics and the web with Keane’s Joe Lamantia

In part two of this podcast with Joe Lamantia we talk about the third and fourth articles he wrote on uxMatters.com in the series Designing Ethical Experiences.

Please note that part 4 of this series will be published on September 8th on UXmatters.

We cover topics of bounded ethicality, how we rationalize our behavior in our daily lives both professionally and personally. We also discuss topics such as ethical fading, cognitive distortions, and motivated blindness.

Joe also talks about the importance of standards and sanctions as well as how we can use frameworks to aid in the discussions and dissemination of ethical practices in our own work.

Thank you to our new sponsors of the IA Podcast – ClickTale Web Analytics for their support.

A big Cheers! to Louis Rosenfeld at Rosenfeld Media for his generosity in offering a 10% discount on the first two publications by Indi Young on Mental Models and Luke Wroblewski’s book on creating good Form design on the web.

I’m looking forward to attending and Podcasting from UX Week that Adaptive Path is putting together. I’ll be interviewing some of the great speakers scheduled to attend. The conference is taking place August 12-15 in San Francisco.

Thank you as well to Christina Wodtke for suggesting I connect with Russ Unger and the team putting together the IDEA conference in Chicago from October 7th-8th. I’ll be publishing podcasts from this conference to Boxes and Arrows as well.

After I get back from interviewing presenters and attendees at UX Week in San Francisco, I have been invited to Podcast at the IDEA conference taking place in Chicago October 7th-8th at the Harold Washington Library Center.

The IDEA conference already has a brilliant line up of confirmed speakers that will make for some great conversations on the Boxes and Arrows Podcast.

Confirmed presenters include:

David Armano – Vice President of Experience Design, Critical Mass
Chris Crawford – Author and Inventor, Storytron
Dave Gray – Founder and Chairman, XPLANE
Andrew Hinton – Lead Information Architect, Vanguard
Jason Fried – Co-founder and President, 37signals
Bill DeRouchey Sr. Interaction Designer, Ziba Design
Jason Kunesh – Interaction Designer, Kuniform
Aradhana Goel Service Design Strategist, IDEO
Elliott Malkin Artist & Information Architect, dziga

This conference addresses issues of design for an always-on, always-connected world. Where “cyberspace” is a meaningless term because the online and offline worlds cannot be made distinct. Where physical spaces are so complex that detailed wayfinding is necessary to navigate them. Where work processes have become so involved, and so digitized, that we need new processes to manage those processes.

A huge thank you to Russ Unger and the entire team putting together the IDEA conference for this great opportunity. Cheers!

I had such a great experience podcasting at MX San Francisco, I sent a note to Brandon Schauer at Adaptive Path about the possibility of doing the same for UX Week.

Brandon and the team liked the idea so I’ll be heading down to San Francisco August 12-15 to interview and learn from the brilliant line up of presenters Adaptive Path has put in place.

The conference focuses the conversation around four different themes for each day:

Day One: The Fundamentals of User Experience
Day Two: Media and Service Design
Day Three: Play and Immersion
Day Four: The Future of User Experience

For a complete list of presenters at UX Week be sure to check out the schedule for the conference and sign up soon for what is sure to be a sold-out event.

I’ll be working at setting up interviews with specific presenters over the coming weeks. If you are presenting, or even attending UX Week, and would like to be on a Podcast drop me a note.

My hope is to be able to interview presenters and attendees for both Boxes and Arrows as well as the I.A. Podcast.

Many thanks to Brandon and all of his colleagues at Adaptive Path for this opportunity; it’s always a pleasure working with your team!

I had the pleasure of meeting Louis Rosenfeld at the IA Summit this year in Miami. While chatting with him, I learned about Indi Young’s new book on Mental Models, and after arriving home from the Summit, I found Luke Wroblewski’s book on Web Form Design had been published.

Louis has kindly offered a 10% discount on these first two publications. To receive this discount simply enter the key word “PARKS” when prompted in the “Discount Code” text box, during the purchasing process.

My hope is that this generous offer will advance the conversation about Mental Models and Web Form development at future conferences like the I.A. Summit and UX Week.

I personally own both books and they are a welcome edition to my growing library in the fields of UX and IxDA.

Thanks again, Louis!

I came across this fascinating experiment a few weeks back, but this morning was the first opportunity I had to really explore. Don’t Click It is a site that is designed to record the learned behavior of having to click on content with the mouse to reveal more information through navigation.

How hard is it to break our clicking habits? What happens if we remove the essential element of navigation from an interface, which we are accustomed to? Does it change our behavior of navigation? Is this change for good or for bad? What doe we gain from it? Do we miss The Click at all? Does this have any influence on our perception of the interface? Is clicking really rooted that deeply in us, that we can not resist it?

The current statistics from the site include 2 508 063 visits with 1 451 877 clicks. Of those who participated in the question posed after you click, 508 639 missed the ability to click on images and buttons whereas 881 953 said they didn’t miss the ability to click.

To observe how others are using the site, the Autopilot feature allows anyone to watch recorded sessions of how others interact with the site and when / if they clicked on any part of the page.

With more technology like the iPhone, iPod Touch, Photosynth and other technologies that are adapting touch screen technologies, my guess would be that not clicking will be increasingly hard to resist.

That said, it’s interesting to see how even the most basic behavior like clicking on a link or button has become ingrained in our experience of using and interacting with information. Taking such functionality away has the potential to reveal even more about how to create a good user experience where all information is easily found.

I’ve been on Twitter for the past couple of months, really enjoying some of the conversations that have been going on within the community I’m following.

Yesterday @septagonstudios sent out a tweet about Wordle, a web application that allows you to create your own tag cloud based on content you enter into a simple text box.

I went through my company’s site including random text from both my Blog and Podcast pages. The resulting tag cloud is shown below. The words that appear larger are the ones used more often.

Try this our with your own company’s site. Do the words being published on your site match the most important messages you’re trying to convey to your potential clients?

Click on the image for a larger version.

Inspired by my mother who was a Grade one teacher back in the day, I started reading Robert Fulghum’s best-selling book All I Really Needed To Know I Learned in Kindergarten, again.

I’ve outlined a few examples of how these rules apply to the way we work and socialize in the Information Age:

1. Share everything:

FaceBook, Flickr, YouTube, Podcasting, Blogging, MySpace.

2. Play fair:

Social Media Codes of Conduct are being discussed; Addressing outdated Copy Write laws; slippery slope of ethics when designing applications; creating a great corporate culture that allows people to make mistakes and innovate like never before.

3. Don’t hit people:

Though most adults have learned this lesson, many still “hit” others metaphorically by hiding behind the web with obscure user names like SensFan1986

4. Put things back where you found them:

Findability, Information Architecture, Google, and Search Engine Optimization.

5. Clean up your own mess:

Doing it wrong quickly and learning from mistakes to innovate; being accountable for individual thoughts through blogging and other social media.

6. Don’t take things that aren’t yours:

Downloading copy write material (how will this change with the demand to write effective copy write laws?), mash-ups of content in audio and video

7. Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody:

Passionately disagreeing with others is fine, but remember to be respectful of the author. It takes courage to share your ideas with the world and open yourself up to criticism. There’s nothing wrong with saying that you don’t agree and why; but ensure the conversation can evolve by sharing alternative ideas and experiences.

8. Wash your hands before you eat:

Before trying to “digest” everything on the web, find the content you read every day and subscribe to that content through RSS.

9. Flush:

“Flushing” out the most valuable information you need to find is a real challenge; yet a necessity to live the ideal, less is more.

10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you:

Absolutely! No real point about social media here other than to say Peanut Butter and Jam, along with warm cookies and milk are the greatest food inventions, ever!

11. Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some:

Put the lap top down and go socialize with other people. Pick up the pencil and start drawing instead of using Photoshop. The Internet will be there tomorrow, I promise!

12. Take a nap every afternoon:

With the long hours we keep at our jobs; being constantly connected on our iPhones; taking a twenty minute nap, just like a 45 minute work-out; would dramatically improve our productivity.

13. When you go out in the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together:

Watch your web analytics to know what you should be doing based on what your visitors want. Support each other based on your own expertise regardless of what you call yourself, IA, UX, IxDA, etc and learn from one another – stop trying to define the damn thing!

14. Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: the roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that:

Start looking outside the box when trying to resolve problems and innovate regardless of your roles or title. Just because someone has a senior title within an organization, does not necessarily mean they are the person with the best ideas.

15. Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we:

Social Media is a great medium for sharing of knowledge and innovation, but let’s not take things too seriously – we’re publishing ideas, not curing Cancer; so let’s keep it in perspective.

16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK:

Take a look around you and outside of technology for inspiration and ideas. There’s no way to show the value of our work, evolving all social media, without surrounding ourselves with others who don’t necessarily agree with the conversations we produce.

The owner and creator of ClickTale Web Analytics, Tal Schwartz, sent me a note the other day about a brilliant new tool that tracks how users interact with forms on your web site.

Form Analytics is based on ClickTale’s unique ability to record and play back all visitor actions inside online forms including mouse movements, keystrokes and interactions with controls such as drop-down lists, check boxes, radio buttons, and more.

Reports generated by Form Analytics include: Time, Blanks, and Refills.

The Advanced Time report…

…displays the distribution of visitor interaction with each field inside the form from the moment the page was loaded. The height of the bars in the histogram is proportional to the maximum number of visitors interacting at any one time. The shape and size of the distribution, gives a deeper understanding of the way visitors are interacting with the each field.

The Blanks Report…

…displays a chart of how frequently visitors leave fields empty when submitting the form. A high rate of blanks may indicate that a field is redundant, or possibly requesting something too personal or confidential, and may be a candidate for removal.

The Refill Report…

…shows the fraction of visitors who refill each field. Usually, a refill occurs when the form generates an error as a result of a field being incorrectly filled-out or when a required field is left blank.

Congratulations to Tal and his team at ClickTale on improving upon an already brilliant web analytics tool!

A great book recently published by Rosenfeld media talks about how to create the best user experience online when creating forms, written by Luke Wroblewski entitled Web Form Design Filling in the Blanks.

You can also hear Luke talk about Content Page Design Best Practices from this year’s IA Summit on Boxes and Arrows.

Dave Malouf, founder of the Interaction Design Association recently blogged about his experience in teaching the importance of sketching to a class of User Experience professionals.

He asked his students to sketch 10 drawings about their project only to find out that most felt that number was far too high.

…it is still sad that so many UX professionals still do not understand that a sketch is not the drawing/visual equivalent of an elevator pitch. That the “napkin drawing” is not really the practice of “sketching” from the point of view of designing.

As I’ve discussed in past Podcasts as well as Blog posts, learning from other professionals such as those within Interaction Design, is critical to the advancement of my own profession as an Information Architect.

Specifically it has helped me understand how different professionals approach problems on a variety of projects so I am better able to communicate ideas to any multi-disciplinary team.

I tend not to get caught up in semantics when dealing with projects as I find it bogs down the process. That said, semantics are very important when trying to communicate new ideas to other professionals. As Dave points out, sketching should really be referred to as Hand-drawing:

I’d like to offer some semantic clarification and maybe it will help us to move forward if we change terms a bit within our own corridors. Doing a quick drawing to communicate to people an idea should not be referred to as a sketch any longer. It is a hand-drawing. A sketch or the practice of sketching for designers should always have multiples, should be for personal or team ideation, and should be very rapid and rough, to the point of being trash before the pencil even leaves the paper.

If you’d like to hear more about Dave’s ideas I had the pleasure of speaking with him about the Foundations of Interaction Design on the Boxes and Arrwos Podcast.

I was scrolling through Twitter the other day and @craigritchie posted a link to an interesting article about a unique take that KDPaine and Partners is taking when trying to measure social media.

It seems that almost all of my conversations lately have been about the need for some sort of standard metrics for social media measurement. My response is always the same as it has been for the last 2 decades of measuring communications: There can be no standard because there is no standard goal for “communications.”

KDPaine and Partners are calling the un-standard for measuring social media, the Optimum Content Score (OCS) . In essence their process is to define what constitutes the perfect article, TV spot, Blog post, Podcast, etc and then clearly define the opposite. Once these lists have been created…

You can then rate each item, posting, article or transcript according on a scale of + 1 to -1 depending on its content. You then average your score for the month/week/quarter (whatever timeframe is most appropriate). You will also need to do the same for your competitor’s items. That way you can quickly see who is doing better or worse depending on your industry.

This doesn’t seem remarkable to me; but I understand the need for such a process as many organizations still fail to define the purpose, and subsequently the scope of content, that is of value to them and / or their clients.

Remember, the medium is the message!

What do you want to communicate to your audience? This will define the medium as well as the scope of the content that is best suited for your company when communicating to anyone within or outside of your organization.