As Cordell Ratzlaff asked at MX last year, “How many people are sick of hearing about the iPod?” He posed this question to an audience of about 600 in San Francisco, the birth place of the MP3 player, where you can’t go down any street without seeing one of their now infamous billboards.

Now I would like to pose the question, “Who is sick and tired of hearing about social media experts?” I know I am.

I’ve attended Podcamps and other events in the past couple of years and have been disappointed by both the quality of the conversation and the amazingly high number of people who are providing “expertise” in this area after years in a career like accounting or chemistry.

I’m not saying people with such a background can’t learn and provide insight about these tools to others, but the reality is there is nothing difficult, nor remarkable about having a Twitter or Facebook account, Podcasting, or posting your profile on LinkedIn…doing so does not make you an expert.

Where these “experts” fall short time and again is in failing to recognize that the tools that make up social media are just that – instruments to connect you with others in the real world. (You know that space, it’s what you see when you step outside your house in the morning!)

In addition, many in this field don’t have the social skills to accomplish this goal so instead they hide behind the technology and bash others who disagree with them; not exactly the professional persona I’d want to engage with on projects.

These tools are only of value or consequence if you are able to engage people in meaningful conversation. It’s great if you can provide context in 140 characters or if you can sound perfect in a podcast after you’ve had a chance to edit it 50 times; but of course meaningful relationships aren’t formed in 140 characters and you don’t get a chance to edit what you say when meeting someone for the first time.

As noted by Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro in a recent article in Interactions Magazine entitled, “What is Conversation, And How Can We Design For It“:

Conversation is a progression of exchanges among participants. Each participant is a “learning system,” that is, a system that changes internally as a consequence of experience. This highly complex type of interaction is also quite powerful, for conversation is the means by which existing knowledge is conveyed and new knowledge is generated.

I’m not questioning the value of these tools. In fact Podcasting alone has provided me with amazing opportunities to learn and share with others. I never introduce myself as a social media expert. I typically tell others

I’m an Information Architect and User Experience professional. I use Podcasting and Twitter to share ideas with others in an effort to evolve the conversation and provide greater context to content. It’s not about me, it’s about a genuine desire to share and inspire others within and outside my discipline.

My only advice is to be very careful of those who claim to be experts in this field. It’s only those who can engage others in meaningful conversation who will be able to sell the kings of any industry on the value of their true expertise.

We need the capacity for new messages to be generated and the resultant understanding confirmed or denied. We call interaction with these capacities “conversation.” Only in conversation can we learn new concepts, share and evolve knowledge, and confirm agreement.

To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “The [coversation] is the thing wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the king!”

Today I had the pleasure of connecting with Sam Ng from New Zealand and his work in building the tools for the Optimal Workshop.

Sam talks about his efforts in starting the company six years ago, and his many experiences that have lead him to the creation of Treejack, OptimalSort, and Chalkmark.

We discuss how these tools are making some of the traditional jobs of those within our disciplines, unnecessary. With that realization, there is also a wonderful opportunity to help clients create a better user experience and extend the conversation and ideas beyond what we’ve been able to offer to date.

Sam and I talk about how we’re shaped by our experiences and how we’re at a tipping point for our disipline based on the growth of the field. Sam predicts that the demand for user experience will outstrip the supply of quality user experience professionals in the very near future.

Economics, not enough time, and a lack of understanding about the work of the User Experience community have been the common reasons, from Sam’s experience, as to why organizations don’t adopt UX into work flows.

Will these tools ever replace the need for the UX profession? I argue that this will never happen and while Sam agrees with this statement he does believe that some aspects of user testing may be taken away from the UX professional. Again, this will allow the UX community to make better recommendations to clients when quick answers are required.

Sam believes there will be an interesting intersection of quantitative and qualitative analysis with the creation of tools like those offered by the Optimal Workshop.

Chalkmark, for example, is the most popular tool offered by the Optimal Workshop for the wider community at large; allowing them to do user testing in a couple of hours with limited time and budgets.

These tools are great at allowing us to ask more questions, which in turn will lead us to better answers. Evolving from a purely academic background, we need to dedicate more time to “wearing the hats” of our users and clients. With the evolution of tools available to the UX community, this will allow us the time, space, and budget to do just that!

Many thanks to Sam for taking time out of his busy day to talk with me and share his experiences in creating the Optimal Workshop.

Hope to see everyone in Toronto for the Idea Conference! If I haven’t had a chance to meet you please come by and say hello. :)

Looking forward to heading to Jamaica on behalf of Zed Jamaica with my colleague Kristina Mausser from Digital Word. I’ll be presenting a full day workshop on Information Architecture and User Experience and Kristina will be presenting a two day workshop on writing for the web. Then together we’ll be presenting a half day workshop on Social Media.

In the IA/UX/IxD communities we’ve focused a lot on design elements, how to structure and organize information, while always staying focused on the user.

We all design for other people, and yet I almost never hear thought leaders discussing the value of drawing from other disciplines and the emotional element that make us human, and resulting designs truly great!

This video is inspirational in many ways. Most talk about PS22 and the amazing sound these young voices create. However, let’s look at this from a more philosophical perspective for a moment.

The children singing are working together to create this remarkable harmony. They are a model for the rest of the world with children of difference races and I’m assuming (though I have no way of actually knowing) different religions, working together. Look closely at the expression on each child as they perform; you can see how they actually feel the music and believe in what they are singing.

The expression is old, but children are the future of this planet and also represent our future leaders in politics, religion, science, and yes, design.

I hope this video will inspire the design community, as it has millions around the world, to look outside your own experiences and realize inspiration can be found in the youngest minds and hearts; including those new to our respective communities of practice.

It continues to amaze me that even in the Information Age, where knowledge is exchanged and gathered at a pace never before seen in human history, that organizations continue to work in a top-down hierarchy. Where so-called “leaders” still believe that their title and subsequent power somehow entitles them to avoid accountability when projects fail and to accept all the praise when the team succeeds. This, unfortunately happens more often then we care to acknowledge.

What’s truly ironic about this situation is that people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting over the past couple of years, from around the world, rarely talk about their salary or position. People in every industry and every corner of the globe are seeking value in the work they take on. They want to know that when they get up in the morning and go to work, they are making a difference or building something great …not just punching a clock.

In the 2007 August / September edition of Scientific American Mind magazine an article entitled, “The New Psychology of Leadership” written by Professor of Psychology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland; S. Alexander Haslam Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Exeter in England; and Michael J. Platow reader in Psychology at the Australian National University note:

…effective leaders must work to understand the values and opinion of their followers – rather than assuming absolute authority – to enable a productive dialogue with followers about what the group embodies and stands for and thus how it should act. By leadership we mean the ability to shape what followers actually want to do, not the act of enforcing compliance using rewards and punishments…this new psychology of leadership negates the notion that leadership is exclusively a top-down process. In fact, it suggests that to gain credibility among followers, leaders must try to position themselves among the group rather than above it.

There are companies who are recognizing the need to give up control and learn from even the most junior members of their organization; however, in my opinion this transition isn’t happening fast enough.

With the largest generation in North American history retiring the wisdom of thirty years’ experience is leaving; and you cannot replace this knowledge with a new widget or other application. I would also argue that the “boomers” represent possibly the last generation for several to come that will work for the same organization, or even within the same discipline for their entire career.

We all learn through the application of ideas and learning from what didn’t work and why. As Cordel Ratzlaff noted at MX last year, if you want to create great products and and services you have to create a great corporate culture; where failure is acknowledged as the foundation of innovation.

The authors of The New Psychology of Leadership reinforce this notion stating that,

…there is a reciprocal relation between social identity and social reality: identity influences the type of society people create and that society in turn affects the identities people adopt.”

In short, leaders need to be cognisant of the identity they create for themselves and their team. This in turn will reflect employees’ ability to feel confident in looking for new avenues for ideas and innovation without the fear of being punished for such efforts.

Last year at Adaptive Path’s UX Week conference I had the pleasure of interviewing several speakers after their presentations for Boxes and Arrows.

One conversation I had was with Google’s Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin. We had an engaging and enlightening talk about aspects of their three hour workshop discussing the management of UX teams.

During her presentation Margaret showed attendees the cards below. (Click on image for larger view or simply download the PDF version)

It was suggested that leaders pull out cards they felt described their strengths. These same cards should then be given to employees to pull out what they felt were their leader’s strengths, as well as attributes they felt the leader needed to work towards.

Now I recognize there are few in positions of authority who would engage in such a conversation about their own leadership style. That said, it’s easy to see that the foundation of Google’s success is rooted in fostering a corporate culture where employees are asked what they would like to accomplish in their career at Google, rather than being told to sit in a cubicle, waiting for permission to share and innovate.

As the authors of the Scientific American Mind article, note:

Our new psychological analysis tells us the for leadership to function well, leaders and followers must be bound by a shared identity and by the quest to use that identity as a blueprint for action…If you control the definition of identity, you can change the world.

You can also hear my conversation about Leadership with Denmark’s Principal at FatDUX, Eric Reiss

ClickTale Web Analytics has just announced the first-ever Click Heatmap that is interactive and seamlessly integrated with ClickTale’s Link Analytics™ showing everywhere visitors’ click, hover and more.

The Mouse Click Heat Maps allows any subscriber the ability to:

See every click anywhere on the page, even those attempted on non-clickable elements. You’ll discover that visitors are clicking on parts of the page that aren’t links, but perhaps should be…Quickly and easily conduct A/B testing to dramatically increase your conversion rates…You can run the Mouse Click Heatmap on any recorded page saved inside your ClickTale account*, even if it was recorded before the launch of our Mouse Click heatmaps. No extra work needed.

Founder, Chairman and CEO at ClickTale, Dr. Tal Schwartz would like to invite anyone interested in trying ClickTale to sign up for a free trial today!

I’ve been using ClickTale for over a year now and the tools provided allow me to make intelligent choices about how to manage both i.a. consultants and my blog; and I’m not the only one singing the praises of this remarkable web analytics solution!

Congratulations to Dr. Schwartz and the entire team at ClickTale on adding yet another tool that ensures anyone can make changes to their site to improve the user experience quickly and intelligently.

Hank “the tank” is owned by my good friend Kate. A few years ago we went on a road trip to get this “little” guy as a new born puppy up in Orillia, Ontario.

Over 15 hours later we arrived back in Ottawa with Hank who, at the time, could barely lift his gargantuan head off the floor.

Kate has graciously offered up Hank as the official mascot for my company, i.a. consultants. Weighing in at a whopping 145 pounds, Hank is a pure-bred Bullmastiff and easily one of the gentlest and kindest dogs I’ve ever met.

I look forward to bringing Hank to future events to share his years of experience in eating, snorting, and snoozing. I welcome him as an invaluable member of the team ensuring we keep all aspects of work and life in proper perspective.

Here’s to you big guy! (Click on the image for a larger view)

Today I had the great pleasure of talking with Steve Baty from Meld Consulting and Donna Spencer at Maadmob about their extraordinary efforts in putting together UX Australia.

Donna and Steve describe how they wanted to create a conference that modeled the essence of User Centered Design in every detail.

Calls for presentations weren’t required to have a focus towards a specific discipline; diversity of experiences lead to innovation. One only needs to look to the speakers presenting at UX Australia to see how this approach to creating a conference will inspire others long after the event has wrapped up.

Even the smallest details for the conference were given to the global community to ensure a great experience . A contest was held to create the badges attendees and speakers would wear during the conference.

The competition winner is Matt Balara. He triggered the discussion about requirements (on Flickr and on Twitter) and iterated the design based on the feedback. Matt will get a one-year subscription to Saasu (one of our fantastic sponsors)…We decided to use Tom Voirol’s design, which was based on Matt’s, with an upside-down schedule at the bottom. Tom will get a subscription to an Optimal Workshop product (who are also a fantastic sponsor).

Most of the conferences in Australia such as Web Directions and Edge of the Web are web focused. This is the first conference being held in Australia that is focused exclusively on user experience.

Both Steve and Donna hope that people will start to expand the notion of user experience beyond the creation of great web services. The opportunity to learn and inspire will come not only from the great diversity of presentations but also from attendees flying in from every corner of the world.

In addition to UX Australia, Donna recently published her book Card Sorting – Designing Usable Categories, through Rosenfeld Media, and was the lead consultant in building the Optimal Workshop’s online card sorting tool Optimal Sort

Steve is a member of the board with the Interaction Design Association, initiated the UX Book Club, and is one of the “Kahunas” at Johnny Holland, the peer written webzine that will be recording and publishing presentations after the event.

With a conference designed down to the last detail according to the ideas and wishes of those attending, this will undoubtedly be a remarkable experience for one and all!

Last year I had the pleasure of attending my first Idea conference in Chicago. The experience was nothing short of remarkable!

Learning from the Interaction Designers, Information Architects, and User Experience Designers from around the world I found inspiration and ideas that have helped me assist clients on many projects.

This year I’m pleased to announce that the conference is coming to Toronto and will be held at the MaRS convention center where I’ll be podcasting the event for Boxes and Arrows, IDEA and the Information Architecture Institute

IDEA2009 brings together the world’s foremost thinkers and practitioners: sharing the big ideas that inspire, along with practical solutions for the ways people’s lives and systems are converging to affect society.

To kick off the event, Nathan Curtis from Eight Shapes is running a pre-conference, full-day workshop entitled Modular User Experience Design & Deliverables.

User experience design teams suffer from a decentralized, blank canvas approach to creating and documenting a design solution for each new project. In this workshop participants will learn about modular user experience design techniques, where they can improve consistency, accelerate production, and raise the credibility and influence of your work.

Then on September 15th the conference begins with an incredible range of speakers sharing their experiences in a variety of disciplines, including:

With all of this experience and insight in a single event, what makes the Idea conference even more incredible is the price point for registering.

Kudos to Russ Unger, Mario Bourque and all of the organizers and volunteers for providing people with an opportunity to learn from not only the speakers, but other subject matter experts attending the event, without draining the coffers of training budgets.

I look forward to meeting everyone in Toronto for Idea ‘09.

This morning I had a two hour Skype conversation with the President of FatDUX in Copenhagen Denmark, Eric Reiss. I first saw Eric present at the 2008 IA Summit, in Miami.

The night before he handed out hundreds of small rubber ducks to attendees. The next day when people saw a poor user experience he insisted that people throw the ducks at the big screen where his slides were displayed, as a sign of disgust! It was one of the most memorable presentations I’ve seen in years.

At the end of this year’s IA Summit in Memphis, Eric and I had a passionate conversation about the current state of the user experience communities (IA, UX, IxD, HCI). We continued our discussion this morning focusing on solutions rather than the circular, and I might add completely useless, online discussions about defining each discipline.

In our chat I noted a quote from The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid:

Did the focus on process, perhaps overlook the increasing demand for knowledge in modern organizations? We suspect it did. Consequently, looking at reengineering in the light of knowledge…may help reveal both the strengths (often hidden behind catcalls) and the weaknesses (equally hidden behind cheerleading) of reengineering.

Process is about following a set of steps to get to a specific end state. In order to learn how to do anything we begin by engaging other subject matter experts (books, blogs, conference presentations, podcasts, tweets, lectures, etc) and learn from their years of experience.

After we’ve tapped into everything they have to offer, what’s next? Many professionals lock themselves into a process they understand and subsequently turn away from other disciplines from which they could learn.

The only way to truly think outside the box, is to step away from what you think you know to be the best process and learn about how others approach problems, and in turn, create solutions.

As Eric noted at this year’s IA Summit, ROI: Speaking the Language of Business, the greatest leaders in politics, religion, and science all have one thing in common: they were/are brilliant communicators. Gandhi, Mother Theresa, J.F.K., Obama, and Einstein all had/have the capacity to communicate complex ideas to anyone in a context they understand.

My recommendation to the UX community is to stop debating about a specific process to a specific problem and begin to focus on the clients for whom we are helping. Provide them with greater context to the solutions we offer by providing solutions based on their mental model – not yours.

Quoting again from the Social Life of Information:

…is the current approach to technology design leading in the right direction, or may it again be focusing too tightly on an idealized view of information and how it – and individuals – work?

I’ve come across some great posts related to Information Architecture and User Experience via Twitter using Twilert. This tool lets you type in key words such as “Information Architecture”, “Interaction Design” and receive daily emails from those who used these keywords in their tweets.

Clients and colleagues who know me know that I love to use whiteboards and paper to draw out ideas and explain concepts to people. I find this non-technical approach helps people better understand potentially complex ideas and also allows everyone to participate in the decision making process.

This morning I came across this video (via @imnotadoctor) courtesy of CEO at SEOmoz Rand Fishkin who produces the video series “Whiteboard Friday”.

In this episode Rand has Dr. Pete Meyers on the show sharing ideas about improving the findability of products and services for massive e-commerce sites containing hundreds of thousands of products and services, including:

* Flat Architecture
* Mimicking “flatness” with XML site maps
* Building product prioritized pages at the top of the navigation structure
* Building deep external links
* Social usage cues

Thank you for sharing gentlemen and I look forward to reviewing past shows and future episodes!

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.