dConstruct, Barcamp and Brighton

Here’s a wrap up of our recent trip down to Brighton to attend the dConstruct conference, as well as the Barcamp unconference. All the photos can be found here.

  • Morning session at dConstruct: Jared Spool kicked off with a general session on Experience Design, mostly citing case studies where good design has led to market success (Apple, Palm, Netflix). He also described the vast array of skills an Experience Designer ought to be accomplished in. Deep breath: Copy writing, Information Architecture, Usability Practices, Visual Design, Interaction Design Editing, Technology, Business Knowledge, ROI, Domain Knowledge, Social Networks, Ethnography, Marketing, Use Cases and Analytics. It’s no wonder that truly great web or product experiences are few and far between.
  • Peter Merholz gave an interesting talk on the need for Experience Vision, the statement of intent given by a leader to guide his enterprise in the right direction. There was one tangential story he reeled out which I found interesting, which illustrates how people treat computers like people; a study in Stanford involved people running a test on a computer, and then evaluating the experience on a computer afterwards. Those who gave feedback using the same machine that the test was run on were more polite than the others, not wishing to offend the computer!
  • Leisa Reichardt gave a talk about project management. Essentially, her point was that most Agile methodologies lack sufficient direction when it comes to traditional User Centred Design processes. Can’t argue with that.
  • Afternoon session at dConstruct: Cameron Moll (currently the Interaction Design Manager for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, of all places!) had the graveyard shift, and he did his best to make his session as interesting as possible to keep everyone awake. One interesting comment was that, sometimes, design solutions can present themselves simply when the problem is described in the right way. Other than that, it was mostly a series of engaging anecdotes.
  • George Oates (Principle Designer at Flickr) & Denise Wilton (founder of b3ta, now working at moo) had a chat on the sofa about the growth of their web sites. The growth of b3ta was particularly interesting, given the techy audience; to get it started they experimented with what’s now known as viral marketing…back then it was called ‘just mucking around’. This helped gather the momentum required to grow the community. Scruffy design made developers feel like they belonged.
  • Matt Webb (founding partner of Schulze and Webb) presented an A-Z about ‘The Experience Stack’. Among other things, he touched on gameplay, where different games start in different ways (in at the deep end, tutorial, hand holding, etc.) each illiciting a different emotional response. The same lessons apply to web design. He also introduced us to the following wonderful quote; “Design is the conscious and intuitive effort to impose meaningful order” – Victor Papanek.
  • But the really nice surprise came at the end of the day. Tom Coates, who works in the Tech Development Group at Yahoo!, gave an informative and very entertaining talk on “Designing for a Web of Data”. He urged us to think of our products not just as mere web sites. They can run everywhere the network reaches. Every service or piece of data we add to the environment has the potential to make everything else more powerful. 90% of activity on Twitter is from APIs. Take Flickr, the photos are on Moo cards, digital photo frames, desktop widgets, etc. Networked physical devices such as Nabaztag and the Ambient Orb also got a mention as did Wattson. All very thought provoking. The biggest laugh, though, was for his description of Twitter: “Twitter is a way of accessing error messages on the web“.
  • Notes from Barcamp Day One: It’s already head and shoulders above the dConstruct experience – ironic seeing as it’s free of charge. It’s far less pretentious, much more relaxed, and everyone’s really friendly. The sessions have been more interesting and valuable too (I’m not counting Tom Coates’ excellent presentation yesterday btw). Topics so far have included how to set up an ethical business, a possible future of mashups and how to do card tricks (this guy taught us how to do his trick!).
  • Anyone can choose whatever topic they like to talk about here. We started the day by going through the whole (small, hot) room of 100+ people, where everyone stated their intended topic. Everyone was really passionate about their specialist subject and looking forward to sharing their love with everyone else. This is what I love about this business; everyone’s here in their spare time, and we all do our hobby for a living. We’re a lucky bunch.
  • I did my session on ‘Open Source meets $$$’, where I tried to explain what we’re doing at Osmosoft and asked Open Source developers how they’d like us to engage with them. The feedback was very encouraging, and several people stuck around afterwards to shoot the breeze.
  • Stayed up until 2am on Saturday night playing Werewolf before throwing in the towel and retreating to our hotel rooms.
  • Some cool sessions on Sunday included a demo of how TiddlyWiki can be used to make coding easier; a session by the Flickr guys about their RSS services; a talk about micropayments, and then a talk about Facebook apps. All good.

I’ve managed to track down the entertaining, auto-rebellious Barcamp Manifesto:

“We the geeks hereby declare that we have the means to do it ourselves, so from this point forward we are not employee 95362 or 43671. We are talented and sought after individuals who can and will find the means to break free of your cubicles and ivory towers. We don’t give a dame if you have the attention of 10 billion sticky eyeballs. We don’t give a shit about sticky eyeballs. We give a shit about people. We are independent, empowered, and en-fucking-gaged.”