The afternoon sessions of dConstruct also contained a lot of interesting stuff which I won’t cover in complete detail, but I’ll touch on some stuff (read Jeremy’s observations).

George Oates and Denise Wilten

The main designer of Flickr and of Moo had a conversation about community management and design and the both sites. Not much notable stuff for anybody familiar with community management methods and the history of Flickr but interesting and pleasant enough to hear from the people directly involved nevertheless.

Matt Webb — The Experience Stack

Matt Webb had a widely disparate presentation with a lot of notes small and large about experience design. It is my solid conviction that Webb can present pretty much anything and make it interesting because he is not only a really good presenter but also incredibly knowledgeable and erudite. A pleasure to watch and pretty impossible to recount.

The most important thing I take away from Matt Webb’s talks is that I —and the rest of us— should read more books instead of the short attention span stuff we are involved with online.

His slides and more material are up and he himself is not completely happy with how it worked out. Somebody told me that Webb’s talk lacked coherence and an overarching story and I tried to convince them that that was the exact point of the alphabet format.

Final thoughts

A lot of stuff discussed on dConstruct was very interesting and familiar. It is good to meet like minded people and rehear the importance of the methodologies and the rationale behind them so that you too are able to explain, advocate and implement them in your own practice.

The concept of experience design may be a bit vague. Anybody who makes anything is in a way an experience designer but we don’t call them that. What do experience designers add to this? Is it possible to say stuff about experience design without referring to the iPod?

I think the idea does have merit and it is so hard to graps because it encompasses almost everything —it is radically multidisciplinary— and involves a greater than the sum of its parts outcome. Anybody knows it immediately when they get a great experience, but it is not very clear how to create one.

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.

It has been a while since we had some regular posts here on FourStarters. The main reasons being the holiday season, which obviously also affects us. Starting today I am planning to bring FourStarters back to speed with some interesting posts about startups, webapps, and any other software.

Next up we also plan to attend a few conferences in the next few weeks, starting with dConstruct and BarCampBrighton this week. Alper and Sjors start of by going to the dConstruct conference this week in Brighton (UK) after which they will join Melinda, Reinier and me at BarCampBrighton during the weekend.

We are hoping that Alper and Sjors are able to give us some live feedback from the dConstruct conference, including some nice photos. Highlights of the conference will be the workshops on Microformats, Experience Design, and more. I haven’t got word from Alper or Sjors yet on what workshops they were going to attend, but I guess it must be something interesting.

Although BarCampBrighton will be the first BarCamp in Brighton ever, it will definitely be a strange one with 5% of the attendees being Dutch. There were only 100 tickets available for this small and local BarCamp, so this way it is going to be an interesting experience for both us and the other people at the conference. At least with this amount of people it can’t be hard to have some live reports from the conferences.

We are hoping to see you all soon at any of the conferences.