Yesterday the irregular Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hours (organized by the inimitable Peter) event was hosted by Philips Design.

The UX Cocktail Hours are a networking event for the IA and IxD crowds frequented by tremendously nice and knowledgeable people. As an aspiring experience professional it’s great to get to know them and pick their brain.

Every session is hosted by a company who get the chance to present their experience practice and various things are presented. I must say I pretty much always take home something which I use or refer to later on (it’s nice like that).
Philips showed a lot of stuff about how the go about designing experiences and we got to see the process how they developed a competing MP3 player to the iPod which was pretty interesting (not to mention revealing).

The next session is at TomTom and as I have a more than passing interest in transit data, I think that could be very interesting indeed.

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.

I just had a look at Simon Willison’s talk at Google about the implications of OpenID. Basically he covered a short FAQ list, answering some of the most common questions about OpenID. During the talk it was interesting to see how often he had to refer to the notion that OpenID doesn’t try to solve every problem, but that there is enough opportunity to build on OpenID to try and solve any other issues. This got me thinking about the problem of localization and how we could solve/aid this with OpenID

As a Dutch person I am very interested in localization as I would like to use a lot of service with my Dutch friends and family (mother). I would like to motivate many of my less tech-savvy Dutch friends to use things like Twitter, Jaiku and Flickr instead of local copycat versions. In many non-English speaking countries these services get copied, for example Zezz.nl which is a Twitter/Jaiku clone build by Alper for the Dutch market.

The problem with this copycat-approach is that you get localized silos of separated networks, with some people like me having to sign up to a localized version and an English version in order to be able to share with everyone I know. A good example is that I currently had to sign up for Facebook AND Hyves for social networking, as Hyves is far more popular in The Netherlands than Facebook. To make things worse: would I ever move to Brazil then I would also have to sign up for Google’s Orkut which is far more popular there!

So why not localize? First of all localization is a tedious job and secondly it is easily done wrong. To understand what goes wrong quite often, you should realize that in the English language we use the same terms over and over again on different sites for the same concepts. We use “save” for saving a file, “delete” for deleting it, and so we use other standard terms for other concepts. Calling the delete action “purge” and the save action “store” would still be understandable but defy expectations and possibly create confusion. This is exactly what happens in most localizations of systems, as there is no standardization of the terms used across sites.

So in comes OpenID, which when I log in to multiple sites already identifies me to every site, and is able to provide personal info using SRE. So why not extend this concept or create a new system that can enable an OpenID consumer to request what my localization should be, an possibly request translations directly from the OpenID provider. Obviously this should at first only work for basic terms like “Save”, “Delete”, “Open”, as full sentences might be a bit far fetched (for now).

I actually don’t think this is a problem though, as most people in foreign languages have some experience with the English language, but are just scared by a 100% English system. If for example Flickr would only localize their menu, I would expect that the user experience for many new Dutch Flickr users would become way easier. Funny enough Zooomr already has a localized version that is semi-translated.

Clearly it is not OpenID’s task to solve the problem of localization, but as Simon Willison stated: there is a lot of potential to build upon the OpenID idea. Combining this with the idea that OpenID providers will have to differentiate themselves by the services they offer leads me to conclude that they are all thinking of new techniques to implement.

An accessible OpenID interface to the localized verbs and nouns of the user would come in very handy here, especially for small sites that don’t want to do any localization. Making these libraries of terms user-generated would even make it a less tedious job and actually just a technical job. Does anyone know if this idea has been coined before?

A while back I read a post by Boris about how OpenID is not really easy to use (yet). He is completely right, and if Boris can’t use it, our moms definitely do not stand a chance.

I had a conversation about this with Ted Rheingold of Dogster, who was thinking of implementing OpenID for their users so people could user their Dogster logins to log in to affiliate third party sites.

A very important issue for him is that a lot of his users are not geeks and do not really want to get into the technological side of things. In most cases people will not be familiar yet with OpenID and you want to shield them from the complexities while still offering the benefits.

Do I have a OpenID?

When confronted with an OpenID login box, this is the first question that people —like Boris— are confronted with. What is this OpenID thing and do I have one or where do I get one?

Luckily more and more sites are offering hosted OpenID identities to their users. Wordpress.com does this for their blog owners and LiveJournal does this as well. Most people will probably prefer to use one of these hosted solutions offered by a third party site instead of hosting their OpenID themselves.

This way identities will be created until most people will have multiple OpenIDs. That still does not solve the problem of knowing that you have an OpenID and knowing what it is. I will propose a solution to this problem just after the next point.

URLs for what?

The whole concept that you use an URL to login —though I think it is quite elegant— will be difficult to explain to users, who already have trouble telling their login names and e-mail addresses apart. Adding another entity that you can use to login at sites, will only add to the confusion.

Signing in with e-mail addresses is firmly settled but it did take some time to get there. We may get to the same level with OpenID (and hopefully replace e-mail based logins altogether) some day but that is too distant currently. URLs are generally perceived as user unfriendly and normal users should not have to deal with them too much (yet).

Maybe i-names will be a solution to this sometime, but I don’t see it becoming mainstream any time soon.

Solve away the URLs

Taking both previous points together: most people will use a hosted OpenID solution and people do not want to type URLs, we can just abstract away the URLs completely.

When logging into an OpenID consuming site, that site can provide a selector with a couple of well known sites providing OpenIDs. This list of OpenID providers should be attuned to the target audience so they are familiar with these sites. With a fairly small list of providers, you can probably cover a large part of your user base.

I have made an example login box that works this way. It gives users the choice between several well known sites or the possibility to fill in your own OpenID. This is just a mockup which you can adjust in any way you like. You could expand the different login options or present them anyway you like. A site which already takes such an approach is the site for the band Rooney. You could also display the generated OpenID to the user at some point to get them accustomed to the OpenID they will be using.

Using that selector and a textbox users can pick a site they have an account on and fill in their username. The consuming site can then construct an OpenID URL from the given username and use that to log the user on. So taking my Wordpress.com username illustir it would construct my OpenID http://illustir.wordpress.com/ automatically (see the example).

What site are you taking me to?

The step where you leave the site you are logging into for another site can be a bit distressing for users. The approach that sites such as Wordpress.com take by having their own identity provider which looks and feels familiar dampens this transition a lot.

Large sites using OpenID should generally have their own provider so that they can control and attune the experience for logging users in.

Dogster’s use for OpenID

Suppose Dogster wanted their users to be able to log into third party sites using ther Dogster login credentials. This seems like it is exactly the kind of problem that OpenID is meant to solve. Especially in the case where the login is more a dependent syndication —a third party site affiliating with a bigger site— than that it is a general login (though nothing stops it from working that way as well).

So in the Dogster case they should start their own OpenID provider and OpenID enable all their accounts which are both relatively easy steps. Then, third party sites could use a Dogster login to log onto their site by simply becoming an OpenID consumer and by constructing the correct OpenID from the Dogster login.
The only problem with the Dogster case is that they use e-mail addresses as usernames and you would have to construct an URL with the e-mail in it. You probably would not want to spread e-mail addresses in that fashion.

This approach can be taken by any big site which wants to enable its users logging in elsewhere with the same credentials.

Update: I updated the example to be more clear and more educational about the actual OpenID that is being constructed.
Besides that a lot of people are missing the point. I am completely in favor of browser integration rich identity homepages and everything. Go out and build them already, but should/could/would are not going to help us right here right now. Given Livejournal+Wordpress+AOL almost everybody already has an OpenID but most of them do not know it yet. This —admittedly trivial example— is meant to fix that.

I was looking at the excellent Ratatouille (Pixar’s upcoming movie) video podcasts recently and a thought struck me:

Pixar always makes their product live looong before the product is finished. The amount of video material that doesn’t even make it in the DVD extras, let alone the movie itself, is astounding. For example, on one of the podcasts, Pixar’s own cook explains how he cooked up a bunch of dishes to allow the artists to draw tasty looking food. Then somewhere in that segment, a fragment of a little video with the main character (Remy the Rat) commenting on the how yummy each animated item looks, with no background and a couple of rendering artifacts flashes by.

That scene was written, voice-acted, animated, and partly rendered JUST to get a feel for the characters, the tone of the movie, and to make sure everyone in the entire company has an real relationship to the work they are doing.

For those of you in IT - there’s a lesson to be learned here: Make your software does SOMETHING as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter if half the material is patchwork mockup. Once it’s a real application you can actually start or go to and see it in action, even if most of the results are just simple scripting - in other words, once it starts to ‘live’, you have a marketing message, motivation, a sudden sense of priorities, and most of all an unqualifiable feeling about the thing you’re making.

NB: All Transactions are based on Trust will continue tomorrow.

This weekend I got a Sony Vaio which came with a pre-installed version of Windows Vista Home Edition. Windows Media Center is part of it, so I took it for a spin. I’m not a big fan of Windows Vista, but I must admit: the Media Center interface is not bad at all. Recording your favorite TV show and showing off your holiday pictures is quite easy.

However, people don’t buy a Media Center to enjoy the interface. According to Microsoft, people buy such equipment because they want an enhanced entertainment experience. A friend of mine who actually owns a Media Center agreed with that.

Yet this very same friend has spend days - if not weeks - installing and maintaining his Media Center. Over the last months he had issues with its sound card, hard disk, network connections and so on (it’s not even home made - it’s a proper Acer Media Center). As if this is not inconvenient enough already, he also has to deal with a buzzing machine in his living room whenever he wishes to watch TV, play music or see holiday pictures. All together that’s not exactly my idea of an enhanced entertainment experience.

Even if it would work flawlessly, I still don’t get it. The simple fact that I have to turn on a Media Center - which takes forever, a receiver and a TV to just listen to music doesn’t appeal to me at all. Considering that a decent Media Center setup will set you back several thousands of Euro’s, I’m wondering: what’s Windows Media Center’s right to exist?