I’m over at Brighton already soon to be joined by Reinier and Cristiano to cover this weekend’s events over here. dconstruct looks to be a great event. The program is filled with interesting speakers and the venue is packed.

What I am doing currently is a cross between web development and interaction design which is going towards experience desing. Most of the principles and examples are ones which are very familiar and which I am already trying to apply in daily practice. It is nice to have them retold by practical luminaries to fix these principles and strengthen the arguments to be able to advocate experience based design.

Here are some notes for the morning’s talks. The edits are quite rough, but I don’t have the time or opportunity right now to do proper writing.

Jared Spool - “The dawn of the Age of Experience”

Jared Spool started off by giving us some examples of succesful experience design such as Apple and Netflix. He told us the same success stories we have heard countless times before. It would have been more interesting if he had told us what we need to do to get to the same level, but of course he does not have the ready answers for that question.

One interesting observation is that these successes are getting the attention of board rooms all over the place. Board attention promises a lot of opportunities but experience design gone bad can also result in some catastrophic failures.

He then talked about how succesful experience design can be done by either research of the users and the target audience or by really thinking stuff through. There are good things to be said for either approach.

He finally said that succesful experience design is invisible and it integrates the user and the business and is incredibly multidisciplinary.

A nice talk about the importance of experience design with a lot of examples but not with that many concrete strategies to actually create a good experience. The essence of the field contains within it some elusiveness.

Peter Merholz - “Experience Strategies”

Then Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path started talking about how the Experience is your product for all your users care about it. No user cares about the technical details or the internals, you need to provide your users with a good experience.

There are technological innovations that make it possible to completely change the way products are made and stuff works and it revolutionizes the experience instead of playing the more features game. Talked about TiVo, the Kodak camera and the Wii.

He talk about the importance of focusing on products with great experiences. That you need an experience vision to sail for which will serve as a guideline for everything that you do.

Products are people too (The title of Matt Webb’s presentation on Reboot9 this year.) and the same things that make us like people also make us like products.

Leisa Reichelt - “Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good”

Leisa Reichelt talked a lot about how the waterfall model that is still quite pervasive throughout the software industry is bad and how a more iterative model dubbed the ‘Washing Machine’ is better attuned towards how people work.

I learnt the waterfall model for software development and project management at university. I think there now are some elective courses on agile methodologies but as we already commented in the post “The IT world moves too fast for universities”, they take some time to catch up.

Waterfalls are bad because they assume that you know what you’re doing when you start, assume that design is a discrete process step that stops at a certain point in time to be implemented and it assumes that it is a single discipline contained in a single phase. This is inherently not how people and designers function in large and complex projects.

She then talked about using agile methodologies and combining them with User Centric Design. This is still quite experimental and open and there is a lot of trying out and mixing and matching to do to find a combined methodology that works.

That’s all for now: I’ll write a wrap up of the conference at the end of the day or maybe tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 15:59 and is filed under dConstruct, dConstruct07, design, event, event, experience, usability.