Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Livia Labate

Livia Labate — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 21:35:57 GMT

That was great Erin, I had been going through my plans latelly and one thing I found really useful was going through old plans (mine were from four years ago) and identifying changes and why they happened. It really helps understanding and shapping up your future.

Livia Labate — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 00:24:52 GMT

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

I was walking home from work today and called someone on my mobile; I looked around and counted 12 other people doing the same. I was having a conversation about my childhood and it occured to me that the thought of people walking around talking wirelessly to people who were not physicaly present sounded pretty absurd back then.

People are adaptive, specialy when the value of the activity enabled by a new technology is beneficial or perceived as such. Technology itself is disruptive; it imposes a behavioral change (you did things X way, now you need to do it Y way). It imposes a number of new ways/means/tactics that we’re willing to put up with so we can take advantage of what it delivers.

The amount of annoyance one is willing to put up with to adopt a new technology to perform the same activity with marginal benefit is what we call a tool’s ‘learning curve’. That’s where the power of everyware lies (or at least one of it’s many advantages). It brings to front all that potential (enabled by new technology), but behind the familiar facade of the environment you already live in and are familiar with. There is no perceived ‘acceptable’ nuisances to endure in order to harvest the benefits of the new technology. It feels natural. It allows for a (simingly) slow/gradual (and yet quite immediate) transition into an unfamiliar activity.

I wasn’t used to walking around on the street and talking into a hands-free bluetooth device until six weeks ago. I didn’t have a mobile until last year. I don’t even think about it now, it’s just “there”. That’s a damn fast adoption to a new technology in my mind – and most people wouldn’t even consider this particular example “everyware” – you can only wonder how powerful real everyware adoption can be.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:35 GMT

quoting the article: “Other competitive analyses have focused more on usability and interaction design, with visual design also factoring in strongly. These analyses tend to be for web applications, which often have the most to gain from exploring how competitors approached a design problem or a user task/process. In some cases, the analysis could become quite narrow if the goal was to isolate a specific user task and optimize the process for that task.”

A large challenge in doing competitive analysis for content delivery sites is making a distinction between the criteria/heuristics to evaluate content and information organization, versus criteria/tasks to evaluate tasks/processes. Oftentimes large content-delivery sites have a number of built-in ‘features’ that are supportive of the main content (i.e.: the ability to set preferences or personalize a textual news site versus the textual news content itself).

Attempting to evaluate content and functionality under the same criteria or using similar heuristics can be drive you nuts. It also may force you to compromise on the specificity of the criteria/heuristic, which defeats the purpose of an evaluation of this sort, which is analysis, not synthesis.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:52:46 GMT

The Summit rocked! Audio of some of the sessions I attended will be posted shortly.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:18 GMT

There was a great article on Harvard Business Review last year (I think) about the misuse of metaphors in business, specifically when attempting to illustrate new business opportunities by employing metaphors from one domain to another. It spoke to what is really translatable across domains and what is not, and how metaphors can hide the problem and take people down a path that doesn’t make sense. It also spoke about the benefits of mataphors, but the emphasys was on the perrils of the wrong metaphors. I can’t find the article now, but if you’re interested in the topic, look for it at HBR.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:18 GMT

“Clarity can only be a virtue”... Thought I often assume it goes without saying, it does not. This little assumption seems to be fading further and further away from our collective designer minds. With the shared awe of game design across our industry as a source of inspiration (for design in various domains), clarity can often come second to the “interestingly obscure” and “excitingly complex”. For a fresh dose of the virtue of clarity, read Scott McCloud’s latest ‘Making Comics’. It’s a great segway from reading Christina’s parallel between writing and design, because it talks about comics as a communication tool combining words AND images (with the purpose of being clear), not that different from most of our design endeavours.

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:19 GMT

Super!

Livia Labate — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:24 GMT

Seeing that the mission statement helped so much to get through the bumpy re-design road, and that that there are clear plans for the future (wanting to make it self-sustaining), are you taking it to the next level and writing a business plan?

On that note, what kind of immediate help is needed? I’ve been reading B&A from day one and have wanted to collaborate, but I know writing and helping editorial is not how I’ll do that. What else do you need? Or better, what do you need the most?

Livia Labate — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 05:49:33 GMT

Jeff, Chris, I would love to hear your thoughts on how UX professionals can help support/handle bad product managers and how product managers can help support/handle bad UX professionals… :)

Livia Labate — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 19:15:44 GMT

I ran my own business for 4 years and I never took a loan – every person I talked to thought that was weird and I had no idea what I was doing “since I was a web designer”. When I decided to move on I didn’t have a single penny of debt in my name. As much as I pride myself in that, I wonder if that’s a designer trend and if that prevents us from being more agressive, and therefore successful, entrepreneurs.

Also, lots of designers are designers of things (products, interfaces, etc) – moving on to designing a business is a different frame of mind, and what the differences is between these two different frames of mind is not clear. I think the biggest misconception/challenge is having an unclear distinction between product development and business development. You can spend the whole day running the business and not develop a single product (that’s operations) – I think many designers struggle with doing biz dev/operations and prod dev at the same time. Maybe it’s because as service providers we are too used to “project” as the unit of reference? I don’t know…

Livia Labate — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 17:53:19 GMT

Good answer Jeff – by ‘bad’ PM I mean PMs that aren’t fullfilling their responsibilities or are trying to butt in on UX professionals responsibilities. And though I expect some of that from the inexperienced PM, that’s really not acceptable from the person hired to a PM job and has been in the position for 5 years. :) You would expect these types of people to just go away by sheer force of selective evolution (product is not yileding expected results, bye bye product manager), but that doesn’t necessarily happen (in an organization that is not well grownded in value metrics, a bad product manager could hide for years!)

Ultimately, the product manager has final say on things, and UX professionals need to respect and expect that. So, the issue is not them being difficult or a communication problem. My question is about a PM doing a poor PM job. While a product manager can fire the UX professional (because of the nature of the relationship: client/service provider), the UX professional shouldn’t have to fire the product manager (either directly – firing them as a client, or indirectly – having them fired by reporting on their behavior to the organization). You can certainly get a product manager fired, but I’m interested in how we can fix the problem. The question is really, gow can we HELP, instead of how can we GET RID of them?

What you mentioned in “Challenges and forces working against you” in the article, is geared towards the product managers – my question is, how can we (UX professionals) help them when they are not cutting it in those areas? Maybe I’m a romantic thinking I can do that, but as a general rule I try to reinforce positive behavior and provide feedback on negative behavior.

I want to hear what your thoughts are, from the product manager perspective, on what a UX professional can do to help when a product managers wants to be an artist and shouldn’t, when they want to get their hands dirty and shouldn’t, when they are going for perfection or the impractical theoretical ideal and shouldn’t, or make recommendations and muscling them through because of their authority and shouldn’t, when they should evangelize the product, but don’t, when they should provide input on strategies for other products within the organization but don’t, when they should focus product strategy on customer and end user needs, but don’t, when they should help ensure user focus throughout entire product, not just the design, but don’t, AND when they should balance the various forces (sales, Marketing/branding objectives, technology strategy, portfolio management, budget management, market trends, competition, business model effects and revenue considerations) and don’t do a good job!.

Too much? ;)

And maybe something that may help frame this conversation, is that I’m interested in a scenario where the UX professionals don’t report to the product manager, so it’s not a problem of managing your boss, but more about managing your client.

Livia Labate — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 17:03:05 GMT

I’d like to see this addressed in an article if it was framed as “what cues, visual or otherwise, trigger those cognitive processes”.

Livia Labate — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:34:29 GMT

I’m thinking this is all old hat – thought it would be nice to have it in an article format for those who are not familiar, but really, the meat of the problem these days is beyond the page. I’d like to see that type of discussion/guidance on SEO when you are not dealing with easy to manage things like HTML pages. Point 5 above is a really innapropriate advice since more and more the industry is making use of more dynamic methods and is getting positive results out that.

Livia Labate — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 20:40:23 GMT

Relevant to the topic at hand: http://www.uie.com/articles/assessing_ux_teams/