I’ve received some great comments, questions, and kudos from my IA Summit and Big Design talks on Mobile Strategy, and I’ve heard from a good number of people that they’re using the presentation to make decisions about mobile strategy on their own (which is great!). I did put together a couple of quick worksheets that could help turn the presentation into a mini-workshop for anyone trying to make decisions about what to do in mobile.

The first is really just a follow-along worksheet, where you can take notes, and fill in the blanks:

Download PDF

The second is a sketch sheet, where you can start to vision out and do a little designing of your own. Sketch out a couple pages, and see if your interactions and flows make sense.

Download PDF

I added some things to remember while sketching:

• Simplify the design
• Design for touch – not mouse
• Note common mobile UI patterns
• Think about context – traveling vs. at home
• Design for speed – let them get to what they need quickly
• Rank functionality – you don’t need everything!
• Follow usage patterns – what are your users doing on mobile
• Remember location
• Don’t cram too much
• Note phone features – GPS, Camera, etc…

Hopefully this will help you or your company come to a decision on your mobile strategy.

I’m pretty much an RSS junkie. User Experience, mobile, technology, gaming – it all never stops. My passion for consuming news and feeds comes from my passion for what I do, and how it all relates with each other. Need a new icon for an iPhone app? I just starred that. What trends will shape the next five years? I’m sharing it right now. And I want to make finding these items easier for anyone who has a passion for these same topics…

I’ve been trying to keep up with everything everywhere (if only I could just download the internet ;-) for years, and luckily the tools have gotten better (have you seen the new reeder app for the iPad?- screen below), feeds better organized, and news – ever more abundant. Add to that the proliferation of twitter (etc..), and sharing these links has become a mainstream event in most people’s lives.

I’ve found that most people who do what I do have similar interests. They’re interested in what I’m reading, and I’m interested in what they’re reading. So I wanted to make that easier, not only for RSS junkies like myself, but for people who possibly leapfrogged directly to twitter, or have other reasons for not consuming news via readers, feeds, “top sites”, or something forced on them, like Google Buzz.

So here you go – if you’re on twitter and interested in the following topics, follow me, and I’ll share what I find (details on this below):

• http://twitter.com/jeremyfeeds (@jeremyfeeds)- this is the mothership, taking directly from my Google Reader shared feed, and posting here. Be prepared for some heavy tweeting.
• http://twitter.com/mobilefeeds (@mobilefeeds) – this is segmented specifically for those interested in mobile technology: iPhone, iPad, Android, mobile usage, statistics, etc…
• http://twitter.com/trendingtravel (@trendingtravel) – travel news: hotels, travel sites, itinerary tools, destination guides, etc…
• http://twitter.com/touchtrends (@touchtrends) – keeping up with touch and multi-touch news and trends.
• http://twitter.com/gamerposts (@gamerposts) – news around the video game industry, new games, deals, new technologies, etc…
• http://twitter.com/jeremylikes (@jeremylikes) – this is a collection of things I favorite, like, and star on twitter, flickr, and tumblr.

And of course if you’re already using google reader – go straight to the source – my Google Reader account: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jeremyj or read them at your leisure on my Google Profile page: http://www.google.com/profiles/jeremyj

While this may seem daunting (updating all these accounts) – it’s actually really simple. I’m using a great little online tool called dlvr.it. This lets me take my feed (that I’m creating anyways) and split it using keywords across these different twitter accounts – automatically! It’s not perfect – a post about travel could leak over to @gamerposts if the article for some reason mentions “airlines”, but in general it works pretty well.

dlvr.it also keeps stats, and tracks the click-throughs, which is interesting, and if accurate shows how many people are just out there on twitter searching keywords. In a months time @jeremyfeeds got 10k clicks on just 700 posts (which it tells me is an average of 15 clicks per post).

More and more people are turning to twitter to find new and interesting news posts online – and I only see that as a trend that will continue to grow as twitter gains more and more mainstream popularity.

I hope by doing this, I can help people find out more information on what they’re passionate about, and in turn, will eventually share their own findings.

Feel free to also follow my personal account @jeremyjohnson, or my less serious @raisingrobots as well. See you online!

The signage was bigger and better thanks to fastsigns being a sponsor this year.

It’s really amazing the great talent we have in the area, and this year we augmented with some great out-of-towners like: Jared Spool, Bill Scott, Chris Bernard, and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Stephen Anderson had us supplied with a mini-set of Mental Notes cards.

Many of the slide decks were out on Note & Point from the presentations at Big Design: Kelsey Ruger, Travis Issacs, and Joe Dyer. And a couple more presentations on the Big Design SlideShare group.

But what about the parties you ask? Yes we have those as well.

What does success look like for Big Design? A great group of people – wanting to connect, share and explore new topics.

Looking for more info about Big Design and how it went? Check out the #bigd10 hashtag, and some of the blog posts and photos that followed the conference:

My photos on Flickr

@michaelcummings flickr set

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-day-1-secret-entrance.html

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-conference-my-timeline.html

http://worldofdevign.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/putting-on-my-bigd10-yellow-hat/

http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/1797

http://derans.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-design-conference-2010-recap.html

http://www.madmacgirl.com/2010/05/30/brief-reflections-on-the-bigdesign-conference/

http://baxie404.com/2010/05/big-d-conference-day-1/

First, I went over the general trends and numbers of what’s going on in the mobile space – nothing in my opinion moves faster, or changes more frequently. It hard to keep-up, and new stats come out everyday.

To start here’s my presentation (hosted on SlideShare), you can download the PDF here, or listen to the podcast.

The first step (after learning a bit about mobile in general) is determining what type of mobile project you have:

• Mobile First
• Content
• Application or ecommerce
• Entertainment

Each of these have specific properties that will help inform your strategy. As an example, if you’re creating a Mobile First product – you’re going to need to target multiple devices, starting with one of the dominate mobile OSes: iPhone or Android. You’re going to most likely go native, as your project being mobile specific will need access to many of the phones core functionality. That, vs a content site with a well established .com – who would want to go with something like a mobile formatted website as a companion to the desktop site.

The second step is to get into the design process, which has lots of factors:

• What parts of your existing site need to go mobile? (if you have an existing site…)
• Who are your mobile users?
• What devices are they using?
• How do you design for mobile?
• What devices do you need to focus on?
• What technologies do you use?

I try to answer all these, and almost like a decision tree, you usually come out with a solid plan to move forward.

At the end of the presentation I go over a number of upcoming trends surrounding mobile. I’f you’re looking to keep up with mobile trends, I’ve created a twitter account that posts all the mobile related articles I’m currently reading: @mobilefeeds

Luke W. (www.lukew.com) attended my talk, and posted a recap - IA Summit: The Mobile Question – and boxesandarrows just posted the podcasts, you can download my presentation’s podcast here.

My slides make a bit more sense with me talking to them ;-) so I’d like to see everyone in the Dallas, TX area come see me at Big (D)esign on Saturday, May 29th – and if you’re getting ready for a mobile project, see me at the conference for some one-on-one.

Not that I knew it at the time, but going into User Experience turned out to be a great career move. I’ve always thought there would be job security with the number of new technologies and devices that will need designing – think of everything that will have a “screen” in the future. Who’s designing for these screens? Who’s creating the interactions, workflows, graphics? That would be us!

I often use an example of an interactive cereal box. What other aisle in the grocery store tries to communicate with you more! Let’s mix up a couple new technologies – like e-paper, RFID, and wireless power – and you have a talking, interactive cereal box. “Thanks for choosing Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes, did you know we’re the #1 cereal for vitamin A?”, “Touch here to learn more”. We’re all set for years!

One of my first jobs was at an Ad Agency that had been around since the 1970′s and at one time had 70+ people working for it. WIth production conveniences, like desktop publishing, digital photography, etc… the number of people needed had been cut over the years. You didn’t need someone to run to the photo studio to check out the day’s photo shoot. You didn’t need multiple people hand setting an ad, etc…

I wonder if these jobs are now starting to come back. Not the same jobs obviously, but the number of jobs in the Design space. Where everything is getting an interface of some kind. Phones are more advanced, kiosks are more prevalent, having a screen is cheaper than having actual hardware buttons in some cases, and with that there is more work today for User Experience professionals then there has been in a long time.

UPA just released the 2009 salary survey – and the average salary of a UX professional is $85k, and it’s steadily climbing. These are people doing things like user research, heuristic reviews, interaction design, creating prototypes, usability testing, etc… There are many things that go into today’s interfaces. It’s not just a developer adding some fields and buttons on a screen anymore. People are taking User Experience seriously – and that means following the processes, doing the leg work, and going further than we’ve gone in the past.

Speaking of jobs ;-) – the company I work for currently has nine open UX related positions right now. And that says a lot, they’ve been very conservative about hiring in this economic climate, but they understand the need for User Experience across our organization.

If you’re interesting in working with me, or at the $largecompany I work for – let me know, here’s what they currently have posted:

User Experience Designer / Information Architect
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071X
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130840

User Experience Developer / Front-End Developer
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 0071Z
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130841

Web Design Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072M
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131240

Principal GUI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Sep 2, 2009-Job Number 0072I
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=131180

Application Designer (User Experience)- Team Lead
US-TX-Dallas Ft Worth – Southlake
Job Posting:Aug 28, 2009-Job Number 006VD
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=127080

Senior IA
United Kingdom
Job Posting:Sep 1, 2009-Job Number 0071F
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130560

Senior UI Developer
United States
Job Posting:Aug 25, 2009-Job Number 0071Q
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=130740

Web Design Senior – Senior
GB-England-London
Job Posting:Aug 24, 2009-Job Number 006P6
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=123120

Web Developer
US-MD-Bethesda
Job Posting:Aug 5, 2009-Job Number 006J1
https://sabre.taleo.net/careersection/2/jobdetail.ftl?lang=en&job=119000

And if my company isn’t for you, check out my older post on “Hiring on the Fringe” where you can find a list of sites that post UX type jobs.

(Above infographic by: http://www.good.is/)

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

Big (D)esign has come and gone. I was fortunate to be part of the planning team that put this successful (yes, I can now call it that now ;-) conference. Over the past months, I was able to see behind the scenes of the conference: event planning, sponsorship, contacting speakers, scheduling, logistics – and got to play a part in many of these activities. It was great to see people from UPA, Dallas Refresh, and IxDA (among others) come together to put this together – that and the 500+ people who ended up attending!

In the past Dallas had been home to a couple of User Experience conference, we’ve had Wemaster Jam, Design Thinking, and Forrester had a Customer Experience Forum here last year. But none of these were happening in 2009. While Dallas may not have any UX focused conferences, we have an abundance of local clubs. I really mean abundance… Depending on what you’re interested in, you could literally go to a meeting about every night.

Dallas Refresh, UPA, IxDA, DSVC, AIGA, Adobe, Microsoft, Java, Ruby, Facebook Dev Garage, Mobile Monday, iPhone Dev, Social Media Club, the list could go on and on. That’s not counting special community events, like DevHouse, HackDay, BarCamp, etc…

Dallas really does have a really good, supportive community of Designers, Developers, Usability Professionals, and many others in User Experience related fields.

If you missed Big (D)esign, here’s a quick video I put together to learn a little more:

Big (D)esign 2009 from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

And of course we had an afterparty ;-)

Big (D)esign After Party from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

If you want even more! Here are some photo galleries on Flickr:

• My photos
• T. Scott’s sketching
• Carissa’s photos

I hope if you’re in the Dallas area, that you join in and become part of the community, join a club, attend a meeting, volunteer, share your knowledge, and continue to watch our community grow!

I personally think prototyping is the way to go when creating a new software product (or any product really). You get to “blueprint” out how something is going to work, how the pieces fit together, and how it will really work once launched. I think most people are sold on the concept, so it’s a matter of how to build this close-to-real product that you can test with your user base. Do you use paper? Mock-ups? Tools like iRise and Axure, or get real and build a non-functioning ready to reuse front-end?

The first step is defining what you’re going to use this prototype for. Is it to drum out business requirements? Demo to clients before they write the big check? Or get something as close as possible to the real thing, so you can start the User Centered Design process and test your ideas on actual people that will be using your product.

Obviously I enjoy prototyping for the latter, getting real feedback that our team’s ideas were dead on, or widely off-base (never!). To do this, you really want to build the prototype in the technology you’re going to create the finished product in (usually HTML or Flex for web based software). This solves two problems: one, this truly is as close to the real thing as you can get. By using the actual UI technology you’ll be creating the final product in, you’ll know what can and can’t be done, users will get a real feeling for the responsiveness, animations, and interactions. It’s real, sans the months of backend development needed to power this prototype. And two, you can pass this finished front-end code off to the development team, taking pressure off backend developers who may not be well versed in front-end development.

Microsoft when working on Office 2007 did this very thing:

“if you’re trying to build a prototype that you want use as a blueprint, it should exist in the same medium as the final product.”

In the past when I’ve run prototyping projects, the teams usually consist of just one designer/IA, one developer, and a small amount of a backend developers time (to get some fake system data up and running). Depending on the maturity of your front-end development group, you may have sets of UI widgets and code ready to go, this will help speed up the overall process.

Dave Cronin from Cooper recently wrote an article titled “Industry trends in prototyping” – which I agree with about everything in the article – he lists out four reasons for creating prototypes: prototypes make your designs better, help facilitate communication, enable user input and usability assessment, and help assess technical feasibility and reduce development time. He’s also a fan of creating “real” prototypes where it makes sense.

I love this comment from Philip Fierlinger:

Prototypes, on the other hand, let people feel the flow and experience the relationships. Building prototypes allows architects and interaction designers to quickly identify broken pathways and iterate quickly to find better flows – by feeling the experience, rather than thinking about it in the abstract. Developers, designers and clients also get a much more tangible sense of what the end product will be.

Again, I can’t stress enough how a “real” prototype will give you the best feedback for the effort. We’ve also used these prototypes to help sell ideas to business groups. Imagine trying to sell an idea for a mobile app by letting your VP access it directly on their phone. This will beat out any PowerPoint presentation.

Garrett wrote on this topic years ago, and the technology is now easier to use than ever before. There are frameworks, open source systems, and reusable icon sets ready to be molded into your own prototype.

Using wireframes or paper for low-fedility prototyping is not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe your just testing internally, or you’re limited with your technology skills. There are discussions about what fidelity wireframes should be (both form and function). There are many tools at your disposal for creating wireframes and prototypes, and they’ve really just recently gotten easy to use. No longer are you stuck with Visio – here’s a list of some tools, ranging from very expensive to free with varying sets of features:

• Axure
• Pencil Project
• Balsamiq Mockups
• Adobe Flash Catalyst
• iRise
• OmniGraffle
• Lovely Charts
• Rapidrabb.it
• iplotz.com
• Prototype Composer
• fluidIA
• WireframeSketcher
• MockupScreens

Boxes and Arrows has an article from 2006 written by Scott McDowell, that goes over some of these options, but what’s really interesting are the comments below the article where designers talk from real world experience. And Russell Wilson from Dexo Design compares 16 prototyping tools (2008) and again, the comments are interesting.

I tend to use wireframes to quickly get across ideas and interactions. Something that could possibly be thrown away, or will be changed a number of times. Once the idea seems to stick, I move to high fidelity mock-ups, sometimes merging the mock-ups together in a slide-by-slide presentation showing the page flow with faked interactions.

GUUUI posted some links to videos showing lo-fidelity prototypes in action. Again, this can work to help guide overall concepts, but to get true feedback – you really need to have a higher level of fidelity.

If you’re in a good situation where you’re ahead of the product timeline, prototyping is your next step. Just like how a architect moves to a model, build out your prototype and test, iterate, improve, and in the end launch a successful product!

(additions)
Great post over at Adaptive Path: Rapid Prototyping Tools

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

In the below presentation I try to run the gamut of what’s new in User Experience, and Interaction Design – scouting ahead for what’s changing the landscape. As someone who is passionate about these topics, I love discovering new interaction patterns, and better ways to do something that was thought adequate before. And by consuming all these new patterns, you can blend them into current projects, and even synthesize something new.

What’s going on in Game Design? What are some of the newest UI trends? How is information design contributing to the interaction design practice? How are we bringing the real world into applications? These are just some of the questions I explore below:

Download PDF

At the end of the presentation I featured the recently revealed Adaptive Path Aurora concept “browser”. I was actually mostly done with this presentation when Aurora was revealed, and thought it was the perfect closing to my presentation. Why? Because it is the product of many of these emerging patterns we see in other areas of product and interaction design. You could say the design is somewhat reminiscent of the Sugar UI in the OLPC computer, or that having things fade away into the distance is bringing the real world into the experience. The way you can quickly type in a search, or the contextual menu that pops-up to reveal more actions. These are all things we’ve seen before, just not together in this new and innovative idea.

While you could of lived in a cave for the past couple of years and had the same ideas, I theorize that by observing these trends you are “building on the shoulders of giants” and can better combine, iterate, test, and innovate.

I did want to mention a combination I’ve had in my head for awhile :-) on page 30 I have a shot of the Prius fuel consumption screen. I think by using game design and comparing this to other drivers (not just Prius, but all cars) people would instinctively want to “win” by having the best gas mileage. If we could get a mandate for all car companies to include a version of this, with a way to transmit “scores” to a central database, I think we could be off foreign oil in no time! The elevator pitch would be “It’s like Nike+ for fuel consumption” ;-)

via: http://flickr.com/photos/88262773@N00/2525850407

Last, things change fast. Since presenting this we’ve seen new patterns in Google’s Chrome browser, and Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Remember to keep up, stay informed, and absorb as much as you can.

Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc… and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year my co-presenter was Dustin Askins of Travelocity, and we gave the presentation internally to our UX groups, and just this week at the Dallas UPA Chapter.

Why SXSWi? I think it’s really good for getting a pulse of what’s going on in the User Experience field. You get to meet with a wide verity of people from different practices, and hear from some of the top web professionals. An while there are many great conferences (like UIE, IA Summit, UX Week, etc…) SXSWi is consistent on it’s wide ranging topics (great for “T-Shaped” People).

When looking at trends across technology, marketing, UX, and business you start to see patterns of what the leaders in their respective groups are expecting for 2008 and beyond. Things I keep seeing rise to the top: Mobile, Open Platforms, Data Control, Mixing Virtual and Reality, Semantic Web, Interoperability, and Location Based tools (see slide 33). None of these are unexpected, I sure we’d all agree these are hot items that will effect multiple areas.

I’ve never posted these presentations before, so I have 2005, 2006, and 2007 to post along with 2008. So if you’re new to the web and User Experience, now is your chance to catch up on a couple years worth of knowledge.

So say hello to 2008:

| View | Upload your own

2007 On SlideShare

2006 On SlideShare

2005 On SlideShare

I also have most of this presentation in a podcast (I think my recorder battery went dead…), so listen in. Hopefully I will continue to keep this trend of my own, it’s always interesting to look back…

[EDIT 05/12/08]
Here’s some video from our UPA talk:

Me & Dustin speaking @ Dallas UPA from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.