Last week I gave my Gamification 101 presentation to the local Refresh Dallas meeting. This was the second meeting since bringing Refresh back, and I was glad to see around 40+ Designers, developers, and other creative types attend.

Here was the description for the talk:

Gaming is at a tipping point, never before have games effected our day-to-day lives in such a substantial way. From entertaining yourself on the subway with Angry Birds, to solving the world’s greatest problems – gaming is quickly becoming a mainstream way to explore, communicate, connect, and work. See how these trends are effecting e-commerce, entertainment, and even non-profit organizations.

Jeremy will be presenting the latest trends and news around Gamification – updated from his Big Design presentation earlier this year.

Here’s my presentation:

or view on speakerdeck to download PDF.

And here are some photos from the event:

See all photos of last weeks Refresh Dallas meeting.

When talking about Gamification in regards to UX/UI Design there are two sides: the surface UI view of Gamification – where you add elements to your project to make them more game like, but without the underlying understanding of “why” an element may or may not work. Then there is the very deep psychology understanding of what makes us tick. Why we do what we do, and how to effect us to do something different. You can do one without the other, but you’ll end up with something that fades quickly.

Ready to dive in to the world of Gamification? Stop by Refresh Dallas for some good conversation!

Refresh Dallas

Thursday October 13, 2011
7:00PM to 9:00PM

Improving Enterprises
16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100
Addison, Texas 75001

Hope to see you there!

The word this week from the Wall Street Journal (of all places) that Amazon.com is redesigning – for the tablet age. And while there may be some truth to that, I think it’s funny how modern, clean design – automatically equals designing for a tablet. Design trends are always informed by the dominate devices in its time, and mobile is where our trends for today are starting. And since I’m now in the e-commerce space, I’m obviously interested, and took the new design for a test drive.

Amazon did the right thing, unlike Target – that shot out recently with a BIG BANG – so big there are instructions all over the site on how to use the site (nice design BTW) – amazon is modernizing in pieces, a little at a time. Here’s what’s new:

All your buy options are now in one single location.

Overall – it’s a very minor redesign, and they’ve gone in the right direction – modernize what they can, when they can, keep moving forwards towards a new, updated, clean design. While not as sexy as target’s big band redesign, you also won’t need an instruction manual.

If I remember correctly, Refresh started in 2005 by @eris while working at Bright Corner. Eris and Garrett (who is speaking this Thursday) spearheaded the idea along with help from Jeff Adams. 2005, six years ago. That’s a long time in web years.

Thanks to google groups, the ideation is recorded, from @eris:

First of all, wow!  I was completely not expecting that many people to
show up and for the discussion to go so well.  Thank you all so much
for being interested in this and participating.  We’ve got a lot of
work to do, but I fully believe that we can do it. Here are the notes that I took, if anyone has ideas to add or points to discuss, please do!

Community goals: To refresh the digital design community and in doing so, highlight the collective badassness in Dallas.  To give back to the city and to essentially refresh the creative, technical and professional aspects of what it means to be a designer in the Dallas area.

Monthly meetings: 30 minute presentation/primer on a particular topic followed by an hour roundtable discussion relating to that topic.  Presenter responsible for putting their notes on the website, roundtable discussion posted via podcasting. Pending the monthly schedules for other groups in Dallas, we could do every second Thursday of the month.

And what started in Dallas, quickly grew worldwide over the years.

Poking around the google groups archive, I found a old suggested mock-up I created back in 2005:

Jeremy's Refresh Dallas Design

But even without a fully formed website ;-) it grew:

Photos from the 11/2005 meeting:

9/2006 meeting:

11/2006 meeting:

I spoke at the 10/2007 meeting on Mobile Design:

And streamed a meeting from home in 2008 (baby duty):

And here’s one from 2009 with @digitalcandy

In the end, it’s really great to have something that started here locally last this long. How many ideas turn into something that grows for 6+ years, travels all over the world, and still has people wanting to be part of it? Not many.

So if you’re in the Dallas area this week, check us out:

Thursday September 8, 2011
7:00PM to 9:00PM

Improving Enterprises
16633 Dallas Parkway, Suite 100
Addison, Texas 75001
http://www.refreshdallas.com/

A behind the scenes look at Big Design 2010. I was lucky enough to have a part in helping with Big Design in both 2009 and 2010, and look out for 2011!

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!

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!