Context. Engagement. Wayfinding. Trust. These terms speak to the largest challenges on the web today. How we are communicating with others online is changing the way we interact with one another in the real world; making those key terms essential for the success of both business and government.

In an effort to help both private and public sectors communicate more effectively, I am holding workshops on User Experience Design, Information Architecture, and Writing for the Web, entitled Follow the UX Leader.

Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Optimal Workshop, I’ve been able to leverage their online card sorting tool Optimal Sort.

If you would like to share your insights, select any of the links below and try your hand at an open card sort!

How would you organize information for a Car Dealership?
How would you organize information for a Grocery Store?
How would you organize information for a Hardware Store?
How would you organize information for a Mobile Service Provider?

The more data I can collect for the Follow the UX Leader Workshops, the greater context I can provide participants about the importance of creating engaging experiences that speak to the needs of those for whom we are designing.

Thanks to the incredible generosity of Mad*Pow I had the opportunity to attend the third annual Interaction Design Conference and interview thought leaders and students from around the world!

Audio Podcasts from discussions described in this post are now available on Mad*Pow Podcast page.

My first discussion was an interview with Amy Cueva, Chief Experience Officer at Mad*Pow and Will Evans, Principal of Semantic Foundary. We talked about the many issues facing the American Health Care system and how technology and the sharing of data could aid in the recovery of patients.

Thanks to the efforts of my colleague and founder of The UX Workshop Chris Palle, we were able to record a video conversation on Research Design with a world renowned group of UX professionals I gathered on short notice; all of whom I’m honored to call friends.

From left to right in the photo above:

* Steve Baty Principal at Meld Studios in Sydney Australia;
* Eric Reiss Partner and Founder of FatDUX in Copenhagen Denmark;
* (yours truly),
* Daniel Szuc from Apogee Ltd in Hong Kong;
* Chris Avore UX Consultant and Principal for Erova LLC. in New York; and
* Indi Young who is one of the founders of Adaptive Path and author of Rosenfeld Media’s Mental Models.

This was a wonderful, unscripted dialogue that shared experiences and ideas from different cultures, projects, and conversations with both users and professionals alike.

The future, as the picture below would indicate as we stare into the sun, looks very bright for the design community. I wanted to focus on those who will be leading the way for our communities, regardless of title or process.

I was very fortunate to find four students attending the conference who took time to share their ideas and insights with me. In the photo above, from left to right:

* Anahi Bagu Msc Design for Interaction at Delft University of Technology.
* (yours truly)
* Vincent Steurs Masters in Interaction Design at Delft University of Technology.
* Katie McCurdy University of Michigan HCI grad student, user experience designer
* Laura Rodrian Interaction Designer and M.S.I. student studying Human Computer Interaction and Incentive Centered Design at the University of Michigan.

In an impressive demonstration of the brilliance that exists outside the speakers at any conference, these young designers shared ideas including:

* Designing to support the largest generation in North American history while simultaneously helping the Environment.
* Embracing the diversity of experiences outside traditional mediums to innovate like never before.
* Taking a leadership role to mentor high school students about what they are learning at college.
* Unimpressed by the “rock star” mentality of some and the hope that the biggest names in the design community will eventually reach out to students before they enter the field.

Then to wrap up the conference I had the pleasure of interviewing Greg Vassallo from Moment in New York City.

Greg gave an emotionally powerful talk entitled “10 Things I Learned About Being a Design Consultant While Living in the Hospital for a Year“.

In a true demonstration of courage, Greg shared the story of his newborn son Luca who was diagnosed with a rare form of Leukemia, AML. He went on to describe how these experiences impacted his life personally, and his subsequent outlook as a designer, professionally.

I’m thrilled to let the community know that Luca has recovered and is a healthy, active little man, enjoying life in the Big Apple!

Thank you again to Mad*Pow for allowing me the opportunity to share with others and to Morgan Kaufmann who has generously agreed to sponsor the podcasts.

I have had the pleasure of attending conferences to interview and learn from the most creative minds in the User Experience discipline from around the world. (This includes the sharing of such wisdom through the i.a. podcast, boxes and arrows, and most recently the new series over on Johnny Holland, Radio Johnny.)

Today I’m proud to announce the launch of a series of workshops I’ll be leading entitled, Follow the UX Leader; teaching the fundamentals of User Experience Design, Information Architecture, and Writing for the Web.

At Follow The UX Leader we believe in learning by doing. That’s why we’ve created a series of workshops on advanced web practices that throw out the PowerPoint paradigm and shift the learning back to the way it was when we were kids: hands on …lively …interactive …and fun! Follow The UX Leader isn’t just about learning from experts in the fields of user experience, interaction design, information architecture and writing for the web. It’s about learning from others, sharing experiences and ideas, and connecting “the old fashioned way” – face-to-face. Because what we learn offline – holds the greatest value in defining and achieving success online.

In addition I have received generous sponsorships from world renowned leaders in the field of User Experience, including:

FatDUX (Denmark)
ClickTale Web Analytics (Israel)
Optimal Workshop (New Zealand)
Morgan Kauffman (USA)
Rosenfeld Media (USA)
MarsWorks (Canada)

Prizes will be given away at random to participants in each workshop from several of our sponsors. My heart felt thanks for their incredible generosity!

The first workshops on User Experience Design, People before Pixels, will be held May 11th and May 12th with only 20 seats per session, so sign up quickly to ensure your seat at the table!

I designed these workshops because I believe passionately that if we can learn to communicate more effectively within the varied teams that make up all organizations today, we can accomplish any goals we set for ourselves.

I look forward to the opportunity to provide you with the experiences and tools that will help your company achieve great success!

Eyes Wide Shut. The title of this twisted, dark film by Stanley Kurbrick is symbolic of the rapid transition that has been unfolding over the past few years. Our eyes are “wide shut” (we see it but are largely in denial) about the massive change that’s taking place every second of every day within business and government.

In short, both leaders and so-called “thought leaders” of the past and present are failing to realize the true power isn’t in your HR defined title, but in the capacity to create an environment where ideas can be born and grow over time.

Before the dot-com explosion we were better than we are today at communicating ideas with others in real-time. We had the patience, or perhaps without the tools we have at our disposal today, the expectation that creating great products and services involved trial and error and took time to evolve.

Even the ability to sit up and debate, sometimes passionately disagree, with colleagues and peers has been dwindled down to 140 characters on Twitter. A skill set that with every passing day is becoming absolutely critical to the success of both business and government.

Think I’m wrong? Fair enough. Check out this ad by HTC. My guess is after watching it you’re going to be able to relate to both the situations shown and the feelings of the actors within the commercial.

I know I’ve found myself in nearly every single one of these situations; demonstrating to me how tightly I’m bound not only to the technology but also the people with whom I’m connected.

It’s no longer about controlling the ideas or the conversation. Success will be achieved by those who see the value of differing opinions and work to communicate those experiences into everything they design.

I have, over the past few months started to think about what experiences can we learn from other professionals that draw parallels to our current work in the field of UX as it pertains to the web?

I began brainstorming: professional athletes, nurses, fire fighters, rock climbers, teachers, professors, religious leaders, etc. The list filled a giant whiteboard in the office. Sitting back I started to focus on one of the terms: construction. For some reason that one word sparked a memory from University.

The professor was teaching a class on Sociology and brought up a fascinating observation about the evolution of the architecture of homes in North America from the early 1900’s compared to today.

Take for example this ad run in 1911 by Sears Roebuck and Co. for a home in Chicago, Illinois. Click on the picture for a larger image

A few key differences from homes built today, similar observations were made by my classmates at the time, include:

* 12 foot walls from floor to ceiling; much higher than many model homes built today.
* Price. A model home in 1911 went for just under $1,250. A comparable home today would sell for at least $200 000.
* Sears is no longer in the business of selling homes; only the material objects to furnish and decorate the houses we purchase.

However, the professor noted that while all of those things were true, the most prominent feature of the home in the early 1900’s was the front porch.

Large front porch, 40 feet by 9 feet 6 inches, with massive Colonial columns; also large rear porch.

People spent many hours on their porch interacting with family and neighbors. If a mother of three needed to walk down to the grocery store for a few things there was no concern in asking a neighbor to keep an eye on the kids playing in the front yard.

When comparing the blueprints of a home built today with that of those constructed in 1911, there is a dramatic shift in the focus of the home from the porch to that of the garage. Click on the picture for a larger image.

Without taking the time to observe such changes we never think twice about their impact on our interactions and relationships with other people; yet the change is logical. In North America we depend on our vehicles to get us to work, take the kids to soccer (football) practice, and attend social functions.

In other instances, the car is a status symbol and presumes professional success, or the values an individual holds highest such as the importance of family (mini-van), speed (sports car), recreation (SUV), and the like.

If we leave for work in the morning by getting into our cars, pushing a button to open the garage door and come home following the same process to enter the garage – what are the social implications? We don’t have a need to interact with our neighbors; nor rely on them for assistance. In many ways this has drawn a greater divide in the communities where we live, play, and work.

By the same token, how are the advent of tools like Twitter, and Facebook changing the way we learn and share experiences? How will technology shape the lives of future generations growing up in a world that will never know what it’s like to not have access to any form of information by simply tapping the screen of their favorite mobile device?

If something as simple as moving the focus of the architecture of homes from the front porch to the garage can impact our experiences with others, how will this lack of interaction with people in the real world impact our ability to effectively communicate on the web?

There has been a lot of discussion over the past few years about the value of Eyetracking. For those unfamiliar with the theory behind this technology, UXmatters author Jim Ross provides an overview of the process:

Eyetracking detects where a person’s fovea fixate and the movements in between fixations. The fovea is a small spot on the retina that is responsible for our fine, detailed vision. Outside the fovea, visual acuity decreases greatly. Our eyes constantly move in rapid bursts called saccades, with brief stops called fixations, during which we take in visual information through our fovea. We use our parafovea—the area just outside the fovea—and peripheral vision to determine where to fixate next.

Several thought leaders in the field of User Experience (UX) have shared findings and methodologies about Eyetracking in the past few years.

Most recently Kara Pernice and Jakob Nielsen shared their experiences and recommendations in the white paper, Eyetracking Methodology.

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Director of Product Design at Yahoo! and author of Rosenfeld Media’s Web Form Design – Filling the Blanks makes several references to the value Eyetracking and Heat Maps in creating more useful online forms.

However there have been a couple of key issues facing organizations wanting to incorporate Eyetracking as part of their User Experience process. The first being the technology itself, and the second being financial.

As Robert Stevens from Think Eyetracking noted in a recent blog post, the technology in and of itself can be a distraction to those engaging in Eyetracking sessions:

…users are often enamoured by the eye tracking technology and the results it produces. This takes the focus away from the user’s experience of the website and focuses it on the eye tracking technology.

The other issue is the sheer cost of both purchasing the technology and running the sessions. Testing even a small group of users can cost thousands of dollars, which in the current global economy, is simply unrealistic for most organizations. (Unless of course you have a budget like Google who use Eyetracking extensively.)

Dr. Tal Schwartz and his team at ClickTale Web Analytics have created an ingenious solution that resolves these barriers, providing greater insight and context into visitor behavior:

Independent research shows that there is an 84% to 88% correlation between mouse and eye movements*, allowing us to create high-precision heatmaps based on just the users’ mouse movements. In addition, our heatmaps don’t require the subjects to wear a special headset or use special equipment. Indeed, most visitors aren’t even aware they’re being recorded, allowing for a completely transparent and anonymous usability testing process.

It is this kind of innovation and creative thinking that makes ClickTale, in my professional opinion, the best web analytics solution on the market today.

Many web analytic tools overwhelm people with statistics that at best provide glimpses into possible changes, or at worst, steer organizations in the wrong direction based on assumptions of what the raw data actually means.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, this solution could well be worth thousands of dollars to organizations, regardless of company size and/or budget.

.

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.

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.

I’ve been using Twilert to find others tweeting about Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

This morning one of the tweets was from Katrina Costedio (@katrinacostedio) who shared these two videos on the related topics of “Information” and “Architecture”.

Information is what allows us to confidentally make a selection from a set of given or implied alternatives…Information has no form. In fact we as humans spend our lives giving form to information.

Information from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

When people use the word architecture most times they are really referring to a building’s architecture. But the word architecture in its purest sense has a much broader connotation…

Architecture from MAYAnMAYA on Vimeo.

Communicating clearly on the web is incredibly complex. The ability to understand how to architect data into useful information starts by understanding the people using your products and services.

Help those visiting your site find everything they need by removing the corporate vocabulary, acronyms, and other nonsensical terms. If you still feel the need to talk “in corporate code” be sure to keep that “stuff” on your Intranet where it has a better chance of being understood.

In his article for Interactions Magazine, Taking a Broader View of the Human Experience Experientia’s Mark Vanderbeeken notes that experience design is a human centric process and…

[s]ince we are living in a time of rapid change, our task as professionals is not just to understand the current context or anticipate future possibilities, but to help create a future world that is socially, economically, spiritually, and environmentally sustainable.

Sir Tim Burners-Lee shares a similar vision for the the World Wide Web; what he describes as Linked Data.

I liken Linked Data to that of Chaos Theory. When we study what appears to be randomness in any system or structure, patterns begin to emerge.

The beauty of this vision for the web is that it has the potential to solve long standing health issues, break down social and economic barriers, replace myths with fact, and ultimately allow us to make wise choices about our own lives and those we care about.

As Mr. Vanderbeeken points out in his Interactions Magazine article above, we’re all ultimately accountable for our future, and that of our children. If Linked Data comes to fruition, that larger than life responsibility will fall on us all regardless of your title, income, or location in the world.

Linked data is huge…there [is] data in every aspect of our lives. It’s not just about the number of places where data comes, it’s about connecting it together.