Chopsticker

Big news! In mid-September, KW will play host to an awesome 2-day deep dive into user experience design called Fluxible 2012. Working with my friend Mark Connolly, we’ve been lining up a roster of top UX practitioners from around the world. The event format will include a variety of presentations, hands-on workshops, displays and demos, local tours, and activities in which you’ll get to meet and talk shop with your fellow UX aficionados.

Volunteer info session this Thursday

As they say, it takes a village to raise a conference. So we’re looking for people to help in lots of ways such as marketing, venue preparation, food, speaker relations, party planning, and so on.

Think you might like to get involved? Come on out to an info session this Thursday. We’ll describe the conference plans in more detail, talk about the many ways in which you might get involved, and answer lots of questions.

Thursday, March 1
5:30 pm
Bauer Kitchen special event room
Located in the Bauer Marketplace at King & Allen streets in Waterloo

Have you ever marvelled at the difficulty of getting everyone aligned behind the same vision of a product? Marketing and technology often seem especially at odds, with design caught in the middle trying to make sense of it all. Well, there’s a simple way to hugely alleviate these issues, and it’s got a name that has come under fire in recent years: BRAND.

Yes, brand. And hold on, marketers, before you get all high ‘n mighty on everyone; we know brand was originally your idea. Please realize we’re not talking about logos anymore. We’re talking about experiences.

Brand exists only in the mind of a customer. And we cannot design experiences, at least not directly. But there’s good news still: we CAN design the setting in which experiences take place, which CAN influence the meaning that people assign those experiences in their minds. Our choices as product designers (and developers) can have a huge effect on the outcome.

My thesis here is simple: make brand a product requirement.

Express your brand in terms of the emotions you want to evoke in people and the meanings you want them to ascribe. Then make those expressions concrete targets the product is required to hit. From my experience, this approach is remarkable for its ability to get everyone aligned, regardless of their position in an organization. It’s like magic!

Last weekend, I took the students of Wilfred Laurier University on a deep dive into these concepts at the Laurier Marketing Association’s annual conference. It seemed appropriate, given the conference theme of “The Future of Branding: A Forum for Technology in Marketing”. Flip through my slides below, or click through to Slideshare to view the speaker notes as well.

What do you think: is the concept of brand dead, or is it stronger than ever?

Seriously, how else to wrap up 2010 than with a Top 10 list of Top 10 lists? As my friend and mentor Dave Goodwin likes to say, everything eventually goes meta.

1. The Top Ten Innovation Myths in the U.S. by Scott Berkun

1. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter
2. Gutenberg changed the world on purpose
3. Just build a better mousetrap
4. The greatest thing since sliced bread
5. The Post-It Note was invented by accident
6. Apple invented everything
7. Ebay was started in a garage, for a Pez-Dispenser
8. Henry Ford invented the assembly line
9. Newton was hit by an apple and discovered gravity
10. Edison invented the light bulb

2. Mashable’s Top 10 resources for design inspiration

1. FFFFOUND!
2. Balance Network
3. deviantART
4. Smashing Magazine
5. Abduzeedo
6. NOTCOT.ORG
7. LogoPond
8. Best Web Gallery
9. Kuler
10. Flickr

3. 10 UX (User Experience) Blogs to Watch in 2010 by Whitney Hess

1. 52 Weeks of UX
2. Bobulate
3. Johnny Holland
4. Pure Caffeine
5. UI&us
6. UX Booth
7. Usability Post
8. Uselog.com
9. Winning Content
10. Wireframes Magazine

4. 10 of the best TED Talks by Smashing Lists

1. Ken Robinson: Schools Kill Creativity
2. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry: Sixth Sense
3. Jill Bolte Taylor: Stroke of Insight
4. Mark Roth: Suspended Animation is Within Our Grasp
5. Elizabeth Gilbert: Nurturing Creativity
6. Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth
7. Richard Dawkins: Our “Queer” Universe
8. Arthur Benjamin: Mathemagic
9. Malcolm Gladwell: Spaghetti Sauce
10. Stephen Wolfram: Computing a Theory of Everything

5. Fred Wilson’s 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps from Think Vitamin

1. Speed
2. Instant utility
3. Software is media
4. Less is more
5. Make it programmable
6. Make it personal
7. RESTful
8. Discoverability
9. Clean
10. Playful

6. My Top 10 Design Resources by Mr. Joe Payton

1. Think Vitamin
2. Noupe
3. Nettuts+
4. Boagworld
5. Abduzeedo
6. A List Apart
7. Six Revisions
8. Creattica
9. UX Booth
10. Smashing Magazine

7. Chris Spooner’s 10 Usability Crimes You Really Shouldn’t Commit

1. Form labels that aren’t associated to form input fields
2. A logo that doesn’t link to the homepage
3. Not specifying a visited link state
4. Not indicating an active form field
5. An image without an alt description
6. A background image without a background color
7. Using long boring passages of content
8. Underlining stuff that isn’t a link
9. Telling people to click here
10. Using justified text

8. Gizmag’s Top 10 things you CAN’T have for Christmas 2010

1. Seabreacher X
2. “Mercedes-Benz Style” helicopter
3. The Kid’s Walker exoskeleton
4. The most exclusive motorcycle on the planet
5. LEICA M9 ‘Titanium’ digital camera
6. Top of the line television
7. Domespace rotating wooden house
8. A balcony for your private jet
9. See-thru speakers
10. A quiet getaway… in a “flying” submarine

9. The 10 weirdest questions asked during job interviews from Wired UK

1. “How many tennis balls are in this room and why?”
2. “You are in a room with three switches, which correspond to three bulbs in another room… How do you find out which bulb corresponds to which switch?”
3. “Are your parents disappointed with your career aspirations?”
4. “If I put you in a sealed room with a phone that had no dial tone, how would you fix it?”
5. “If you were a brick in a wall, which brick would you be and why?”
6. “How would you move Mount Fuji?”
7. “Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between two words in a document… take a few hours to develop a working example…”
8. “Given a dictionary of words, how do you calculate the anagrams for a new word?”
9. “How many hair salons are there in Japan?”
10. “Say you are dead — what do you think your eulogy would say about you?”

10. Fast Company’s Top 10 most innovative design companies

1. BMW Group Designworks-USA
2. Ideo
3. Rockwell Group
4. Pentagram
5. Ammunition
6. Fuseproject
7. Frog Design
8. Potion
9. Attik
10. WET Design

Finally, be sure to check out Top 10 design-related Top 10 lists from 2010. Because everything goes meta.

Need to break through the clutter and really grab someone’s attention? Sometimes subtle tweaks in context are all it takes.

Context incongruity at the gas pump. Feeling thirsty yet?

On a related note, if you need Coke in bulk, I guess the Amco Station in Kitchener is a good bet.

Download the MP3 (35:08 duration)

“I’ve taken my Segway 108 mph without a helmet.”

And with that statement, The Woz had his audience hooked. Not that he needed a hook, mind you, as over 700 people packed into a ballroom in Waterloo to hear him speak: that’s about, oh, 670 more than the original plan had assumed, according to Iain Klugman of Communitech.

User experience, design, and usability emerged as strong themes in Steve’s talk. I especially enjoyed hearing him give credit to Jef Raskin with first instilling these values at Apple, which you’ll find at around 21:20 in the recording:

One of the things Apple is good at is keeping things simple because we got a reputation in the early days for being oriented towards simplicity and ease of use. Largely came from one guy that came and joined Steve [Jobs] and I in the early days, and Jef Raskin was his name…. He said you should always take the effort to put the design effort into your product to make it work easy and well… I took that in my head to mean, the human is more important than the technology.

Many thanks to Communitech for organizing the event! And thanks to RIM also, for buying breakfast for such a huge crowd. Word on the street is this was the largest-ever turnout for a Techworking Breakfast.

Note: I recorded the above MP3 with my iPhone’s Voice Memos application, not sure what to expect in terms of quality. To my delight, it turned out reasonably well, given the simple technical setup: it sat on a chair next to me.