Since 2000, Jerome Covington has worked as a professional web developer, for a diversity of employers ranging from non-profit environmental and arts organizations, to premium auction house Christie’s, to some of the most recognizable brands in publishing, including Time.com.

He has been working with creating engaging experiences for much of his life, whether creating unique web sites or composing original music. In all of his work he tries to draw on the parallels between all creative pursuits, and to maximize the lines of communication between team members as a first step to getting everyone to engage on designing and developing with the user in mind. He lives in New York City with his wife and son.

A few of the key points from our conversation:

* Jerome talks about the need to respect the different experiences of everyone on the team; valuing those unique experiences as an opportunity to become better in one’s own discipline.

* Jerome urges other developers to start thinking about User Experience issues and to learn from those who interview users for testing purposes.

* Quoting from Dan Saffer (@odannyboy) who tweeted the notion, “If it’s not designed for people, it’s not design”. In turn I note Jesse James Garrett comment that “Database Architects design for other machines. Information Architects design for other people.” Focusing on people will help all developers create a better experience, regardless of title or coding methodologies followed.

* Jerome is able to create the most efficient code when thinking about the broader context; with human usability at the forefront.

* Usability is not just the visual or interaction design. Usability is a much larger topic that keeps that bigger picture or context; necessary for a great product and service that others will engage with and enjoy.

* Jerome discusses his passion for the arts and how music and technology are becoming integrated in ways never before experienced.

* We all need to be doing a better job of listening not only to our users but also to colleagues to create a better solution from the first iteration.

In other news on the UX front…

I have developed, along with my business partner and trusted colleague Kristina Mausser from DigitalWord, hands-on, interactive workshops entitled Follow the UX Leader. Workshops offered include:

* Creating Web Content that Clicks! – Sept 21st lead by Kristina Mausser
* People before Pixels – Sept 22nd lead by yours truly
* Stop Searching. Start Finding – Oct 19th lead by yours truly

Thanks to our generous sponsors, attendees will walk away with a 3 month subscription to Loop11 online usability testing tool; draws for books from Rosenfeld Media and Morgan Kaufmann publishers will also be held during each workshop, along with a few other surprises for those who sign-up!

Congratulations to Daniel Szuc and organizers of the first ever UX Hong Kong conference taking place February 18th, 2011. Speakers will include:

* Steve Baty (Australia)
* Janna DeVylder (USA)
* Rachel Hinman (USA)
* Steve Portigal (USA)
* Gerry Gaffney (Australia)

The second annual UX Australia conference has announced speakers for this fantastic 3-day event “down under”. Congratulations to Steve Baty (@docbaty) and Donna Spencer (@maadonna) in organizing what I’m sure will be another incredible experience!

IDEA conference 2010 is being held in Philadelphia this year! Keep up to date with other information as it becomes available by following the conference on Twitter (@IDEAinfo) and bookmark the IDEA conference website.

I’ve had the pleasure and honor of sharing presentations and interviewing thought leaders from around the world in the disciplines of Information Architecture, Interaction Design, and User Experience for the past three years.

Most recently I published talks from the 11th Annual Information Architecture summit on Boxes and Arrows. At the end of the conference, just prior to the closing plenary, I brought together several attendees and presenters for a discussion about how ASIS&T can create an even greater experience for those attending the conference next year.

Disclaimer: I shared this talk with both Melissa Weaver at ASIS&T who is helping that organization understand how to leverage Social Media. In addition I provided a copy to Livia Labate who is heading up the conference next year, prior to publishing. I wanted to ensure they found the ideas of value to help improve the IA Summit next year in Denver, Colorado.

Like every show I produce, none of this conversation was scripted. Ideas shared were open and honest opinions and I’ve edited none of the discussion. Thank you to everyone who was kind enough to take time to share, including:

Jackson Fox
Søren Muus
Adam Connor
Brad Nunnally
Andy Budd
Melissa Weaver
Joan Vermette
Eduardo F. Ortiz

We drew others into the conversation who stopped by to see what we were all discussing, who also shared some insights including:

Christina Wodtke
Trevor Van Gorp
Chris Pallé

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with three extraordinary individuals who have been practicing Agile for the past several years.

The purpose of this conversation was to provide listeners with a plain language explanation of the Agile process and it’s implications for the future of software development and also the potential impact this will have on the User Experience discipline.

I decided to provide the unedited version of our conversation to model the kind of flow that is created when organizations are able to bring in open minded and passionate individuals to the Scrum and subsequent Sprints for each project.

Alla Zollers (@azollers) is a Senior Experience Designer at Mad*Pow. She specializes in creating holistic experiences that elegantly balance customer needs, business goals, and technical constraints.

Alla has worked in completely agile environments for the past 2 years, creating designs that are iterative and always feasible to implement.

Ryan Norris (@ryannorris) is a technical architect at Medullan, a provider of business and technology services based out of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Medullan delivers best-in-class technology solutions for the health care and life sciences industries by engaging with clients to deliver product and market strategies that accelerate time to market, as well as vendor-neutral, Agile software solutions for enterprise needs for organizations large and small. Ryan also maintains a personal blog about agile software delivery and technology.

Zachary Spencer (@zspencer) has been practicing agile development for the past two years.

He has done everything from working as a developer in an agile environment to full blown agile transformations. He enjoys writing about his experiences on his blog.

Agile Resources
Agile Manifesto
Succeeding with Agile by Mike Chohn
Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug
Bridging the Communication Gap – Specification by Example and Agile Acceptance Testing by Gojko Adzic
The Art of Agile Software Development by James Shore
Money Ball by Michael Lewis

Many thanks to my most recent sponsor, the Information Architecture Institute, for promoting my upcoming workshops on User Experience Design, Information Architecture, and Writing for the Web.

Thank you again to Chris Baum and Christina Wodtke of Boxes and Arrows for providing me with the opportunity to share presentations through the Boxes and Arrows Podcast at the 11th Annual IA Summit in Phoenix. I’m hoping to have these posted within a week or two of the Summit wrapping up on April 11th.

Today I had the pleasure of talking with the Chief Experience Officer and Healthcare Principal at Mad*Pow, Amy Cueva.

Amy partners with clients like the New England Journal of Medicine, Google, Aetna, Fidelity, and Monster to create strong multi-channel experience strategies, intuitive digital experiences, and streamlined processes.

We discuss the many different ways social technologies can conceivably simplify communication flows, enhance access, increase information sharing, and augment timely collaboration, resulting in faster, more informed decisions, improving clinical outcomes.

You can download slides from Amy’s recent presentation to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Social Media and Patient-Centric Design: Facilitating Provider / Patient Relationships.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) are meant to provide primary care physicians with the ability to share comprehensive patient files, across hospitals and patient-teams, so that they can make better care decisions. There is enormous potential for integration of social networking technologies to enrich the EMR experience.

A few examples of Social networking for EMRs include:

* 2 doctors in different locations could treat the same patient or obtain opinions on treatment. They could both access the patient’s EMR, and deliberate possible diagnoses and treatment options.
* Doctor-to-doctor, and doctor-to-nurse communication could occur LIVE via Online chat, Voice (VOIP/Skype), Video (Webcam/Skype Video), Telephone.
* Communication could also occur asynchronously via Text message (Twitter/Yammer), Email, Voice (Voicemail/Voicethread), Video (Voicethread/Webcam).
* Doctors could digitally mark-up files in the EMR such as X-Rays to communicate visual thinking to their peers.
* The care team and the patient would benefit from the interaction but there is also downstream value in having the discussion and relevant subject matter parsed and elevated up to the larger community.

User experience design in the health care space is of keen importance. As designers we have the capability to expedite the diagnostic process, resulting in both proactive and preventative measures for treatment that is more comfortable and effective. We can reduce errors, reduce costs, and essentially improve outcomes for all involved.

President Obama’s stimulus package (ARRA) includes 19 billion dollars which has been earmarked for health care research, technology and improvements. In the next few years there will be a great deal of activity and change in this space. We have the ability to shape that change in a positive direction via the patient-centric design approach that comes naturally to us. We also have the opportunity to share assets and patterns and build the standards that will positively affect learnability, adoption and momentum.

The current medical system is in dire straights. We need to start looking at tools that are in place today without putting on blinders to both the current and future potential risks and barriers to success. A few of these include, the following:

* Doctors are outnumbered: There are many more patients than doctors.
* Frequency & access: How often do you have access to a doctor vs. access to a computer, phone or mobile device?
* The information is out there: In our minds, in websites and DBs. Tech and SM frees the info, makes it searchable/shareable.
* We have the tools: Healthcare is behind.
* People care: They are motivated, there is a strong sense of community, karma, give and take.
* It is already happening: The Pew Internet and American Life Project Survey says 61% of Americans go online for health information, with a majority turning to user-generated content.

Thank you to all of my listeners for another year of helping to provide greater context to the content we all share! Many new projects underway for 2010, two of which I’ll be sharing early in January!

Happy holidays and best wishes for a great New Year to friends, family, and colleagues around the world…Cheers!

Transcript for this Podcast

I had the pleasure of talking with Brad Nunnally about the importance of failure to innovate; moving teams and individuals to new ideas and future successes.

I first met Brad at this year’s IDEA conference in Toronto. You can read his brilliant overview of the two day event over on Johnny Holland.

Part of the inspiration for his three part article on failure came from this video by Scott Berkun.

In Part One Brad discusses the importance of Retrospectives and Documenting Warning Signs to learn from past mistakes.

In Part Two he covers the opposing yet equally important issues of Assigning Blame and Highlighting the Success of others.

In Part Three Brad discusses why it’s so important to Embrace Failure and to also keep an Open Mind realizing that everyone makes mistakes.

In our conversation, Brad and I note quotes from other UX professionals around the world. Their feedback can be found on the Wiki I created for this podcast.

Many thanks to Eric Reiss, Jan Jursa, and Valeska O’Leary for sharing their insights on the Wiki and to Daniel Szuc and Christian Crumlish who dropped me an email with their thoughts.

I’d like to encourage others within and outside of the UX industries to build on the questions provided on the Wiki.

I think you’ll find those who have garnered the most success in their industry are the ones who have failed more often than not. They are the ones who have had the courage to keep pursuing ideas, evolving them over time to learn from mistakes and create an even greater product or service than originally imagined.

At events like the IA Summit and the Interaction Design conference, I think we should be discussing the topic of failure and not just with / amongst presenters but as a common conversational thread with all attendees.

As a suggestion I believe conference organizers should provide a space where people can write, sketch, and share past failures and lessons learned. I saw this idea when I attended the first annual VizThink conference.

In addition to most workshops providing attendees the opportunity to share via sketching (see image below), large whiteboards were set up in the pre-conference area allowing others to draw out ideas which, in turn, encouraged discussion amongst participants about the illustrations.

Most recently, at the first annual UX Australia conference, Oliver Weidlich discussed several examples of interface failure.

To hear his 10 minute talk about this presentation make your way over to the UX Australia Media page. You can also subscribe to all the shows through their iTunes subscription.

Transcript for this Podcast

On today’s show I chat with Content Strategist and Partner at FatDUX in Copenhagen, Denmark Eric Reiss about leadership in the age of information.

Eric points out that leadership isn’t about creating a buzz it’s about creating results. In essence a leader is someone you can trust to make a good decision on your behalf.

Younger people can do the job in many cases but they lack the experience to help them avoid pitfalls common to anyone starting out. Our experience in life determines our perspective and that perspective in turn shapes our unique reality.

This is a fundamental reason why we have a difficult time communicating effectively; we value different ideas based on experiences that shape what is important to us as individuals versus that which can be left undiscovered.

Eric discusses the work of Eli Whitney and the way in which he changed how we work during the Industrial revolution through the development of interchangeable parts. This in turn lead to the creation of products that forever changed the workplace from one of artisan to that of an employee in a factory.

In turn this lead to the advent of the corporate culture and to this day businesses discuss how to best motivate employees. We still talk about the “carrot” and “stick”. Prior to the industrial revolution there was just the “stick”. You had to do what you were told. Then with the creation of factories and different managerial styles, the “carrot” or rewards to motivate people came into play.

Eric argues that there needs to be a third element to the “carrot” and the “stick” – not quite sure what that might be but we need to start debating and thinking more about that element.

“If I haven’t experienced it, it can’t be true.” A mantra that many have, and yet holding fast to such a thought process prevents us from gaining new experiences and by extension improve our capacity to lead others.

The video below was a framework I shared with good friend and colleague in Philadelphia Michael Carvin @mcarvin about how to move the conversation away from the usual debates that force projects to compromise and lead your team back to a focus on those for whom you are designing.

Seek First to Understand from Jeff Parks on Vimeo.

User Experience has much more to do than the web! “Back in the day” Eric was the Assistant Director of plays at the Royal Theater. In one particular play the scene took place in Italy in an authentic old world Italian kitchen; yet no one could get into the scene, it just wasn’t working. Eric suggested they fry up some onion and garlic stimulating the olfactory senses of what it would smell like in a real Italian kitchen allowing both the actors, and during the live performance the audience, to feel as if they were literally in the old country. (Plus snack sales went through the roof!)

I suggest that the IAI and IxDA board members should find ways to interact with their members through video and engage with their members in a more human way.

Eric is helping to build EuroIA 2009 this year being held in Copenhagen Denmark at the Scandic Hotel. Speakers are flying in from 14 different countries; an event that is shaping up to be an incredible opportunity to learn from those both within and outside the Information Architecture discipline.

Transcript for this Podcast

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.

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!

Thank you ClickTale for your continued sponsorship of the i.a. podcast! Finally a web analytics tool that provides context to data including the ability to watch movies of visitor behavior, as well as Scrolling Heat Maps, Form Analytics and many more features to help your organization make intelligent decisions to improve the User Experience of your site.

Idea 2009 Social and Experience Design is coming to Toronto – first time north of the border speakers include Leisa Reichelt, Christina Wodtke, Luke Wrobluski, Christian Crumlish, Nathan Curtis and many more.

You can hear presentations from last year where Idea was in Chicago over on boxes and arrows podcast.

Registration for UX Australia is up and running! Steve and Danielle Baty, Donna Spencer, and Andrew Boyd have put together an incredible line up of speakers including: Daniel Szuc a past guest on the i.a. podcast where we talked about UX in China, Gerry Gaffney from the User Experience Podcast, Will Evans, Alex Wright Director of UX and Product Research at the NY Times and author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages and many many more.

A big thanks to Johnny Holland for inviting to me to share ideas on that great webzine! My first article is due to publish early next week and includes a video of sharing a framework about how we can move our conversations in the UX communities back to the people for whom we are designing, rather than getting hung up on definitions and titles.

Interaction ‘10 is ramping up with that conference coming in February 2010 to Savannah, Georgia. I’m looking forward to future conversations with Jennifer Bove and Bill DeRouchey about what they are working hard at creating. Shaping up to be the best IxDA conference to date!

UXPanama is coming up as well! Jorge Arango, current President of the IAI is putting together the UX conference in Panama. You can check out videos up on YouTube put together in part by BootStudio Jorge’s UX design group in Panama.

On today’s show I chat with Chris Pallé about The UX Workshop. We talk about our work and the generous support of various communities of practice and individuals who have supported our efforts to date. This is a light-hearted discussion about how we got started, where we’re at now, and our genuine desire to engage the global UX community in conversations and sharing ideas.

We genuinely want the community to help us build The UX Workshop and look forward to helping people around the world move from theory to understanding by sharing experiences.

While attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis, TN I had the pleasure of gathering some of the leading minds in the fields of IA, UX, and IxD to talk about the subject of Ubiquitous Computing and related ideas.

Be sure to check out the work and initiatives being taken on by of all my guests for today’s podcast; remarkable work gentlemen!

Steve Baty is working hard to put together a tremendous line up of presenters for the upcoming conference, UX Australia. Steve also formed the UX Book Club; is a contributing author at Johnny Holland Magazine; and is the Principal at Meld in Sydney, Australia.

Will Evans runs Semantic Foundry in Washington D.C. and is currently part of the group helping to promote and put together the IDEA conference being held in Toronto this September. Looking forward to helping you with Idea and Interactions ‘10 in February, Will.

Joe Lamantia is speaking at the upcoming Enterprise Search Summit in NYC in May. Joe is also writing a column on designing for ubiquitous computing for the magazine UXmatters.com and he’ll publish another one in May.

(I actually had the pleasure of interviewing Joe on a two part series on Ethics and the Web in June of last year.)

Matthew Milan and Jon Tirmandi run Normative Design out of Toronto. Matt gave a great talk at the IA Summit entitled, Leading with Insight

Joe Sokohl is the User Experience Lead at PracticeWorks. Joe gave a great presentation at the IA Summit entitled, A Real Nowhere Man: Managing Remote Teams Remotely. Joe is currently in Shanghai on business; hope the journey has been a great success, Joe!

Todd Zaki Warfel is the founder and President at Messagefirst. Todd is speaking at several events around the world, including:

July 1st and 2nd Université du SI Paris, France Geeks and Bosses
July 14th UPenn Philadelphia, PA. Higher Education Web Symposium
August 24-28 Agile2009 Chicago, IL. UX Design Studio Experience
October 8-11 UX Challenge Longyearbyen, Norway. UX Challenge

Many thanks to all for taking time out at the Summit to share your ideas and insights. I hope to be able to have more discussions like this one with others within and outside of the IA / UX / IxD / Design disciplines later this year.

Thanks to Chris Greenfield who spoke the Ottawa Social Media Breakfast. I first met Chris at the VizThink conference last year.

Chris gave a great presentation that spoke the truth regarding social media, called “Social Media Bullshit”. In essence he spoke out about how all social mediums are simply a means of connecting people with one another.

The value of such tools is the ability to bring people together to share ideas. If you’re a New Media Douchebag, you’re not contributing to the conversation – you’re impeding it!

Special thanks to the volunteers for their time and energies in helping to capture the audio from the 2009 IA Summit for the Boxes and Arrows Podcast.

We ran into many technical issues at the Summit this year, including most rooms that were not mic’d for questions. As a result I had to remove the questions b/c without that audio, the answers provided no context.

Thanks to Gene Smith and nForm out in Edmonton for chatting with me about doing some video for their upcoming Web Strategy Summit. Although this time can’t work, I look forward to helping share experiences in the form of audio and video at future events.