So it’s that time of year again…New Years Resolutions!
I’ve always been a big fan of setting and tracking goals. It’s gotten me to run marathons, finish grad school, and complete other daunting tasks. I suggest others to set realistic goals by using the SMART Goal Setting method, it really works.

This year I have 12 resolutions! Yep, it’s a lot. Surely full of unpredictable blows, as well as the following tasks I plan to accomplish. Because some goals are complex, I decided to dissect them into clear paths. This will help to achieve them, as well as aid in tracking my progress. Also, I’ve been missing work and itching to do some diagram sketching! Enjoy, hope it inspires you with your own goals!

Here’s my 12 resolutions for 2009, in no particular order….
You can view also view them here in the Flickr Set

(1) Buy a House in SF   &   (2) Get a Dog
- workflows

(3) Compete in 1st triathlon
- workflow

(4) Run 3rd Marathon
- workflow

(5) Drink 8 glasses of water a day
-12 hr clock

(6) Maintain weight +/- 5 pds
- visual scale

(7) Help 3 people with their health/fitness related goals
- Hyperbolic Tree

(8) Turn 30!
hoping this one is relatively easy.
-Calendar date

(9) Resurrect 3 lost/broken friendships
-Life Cycle Diagram

…and a couple extra without diagrams!

(10) Regularly track finances/investments through Mint.
(Accounts set up, but need to add investments & set budgets)

11) Take a writing and/or public speaking class

12) Blog at least once ever 2 weeks

And that’s it!
Happy 2009, hope all your dreams, goals, and wishes come true this year!

Apparently my Flickr Pro account needs to be renewed soon. I saw this page just after logging in. Isn’t it surprisingly large and somewhat intrusive for our subtle and darling Flickr? I thought so. That button may be the largest one I’ve seen that isn’t being used in jest..and that 3 with the shadow…interesting.

Due to curiosity and some light frustration by my usual laundry joint, I recently checked out Laundry Locker, an innovative laundry/dry cleaning service in SF.

Laundry Locker offers eco-friendly dry cleaning and wash & fold services, with 24 x 7 pickup and delivery, in the convenience of your apt building. Or, for those like me who don’t live in a LL-equipt apt building, you can drop off your laundry at any of the multiple SF kiosks. First you sign up online, enter your cc info, and set your laundry preferences. Place your dirty laundry in an empty locker, take the key, and when you’re laundry is ready (usually within 24 hrs) you’ll receive a SMS or email telling you to pick it up. No personal contact necessary!

My favorite part about Laundry Locker is the emphasis they put on the user preferences! Wise move, LL.  When a user signs up for an account, they are led to select preferences such as:
water temperature, detergent & bleach types, dryer sheet types, etc!

Each of these delightful preferences adds extra cents (per pound) to your total bill….which leads me to explain why I may not be a continual LL customer. It was kinda expensive. My 27 pounds of laundry came to over $40. (At my usual place it’s roughly 20 bucks).

Oh, and a side note- The day after I picked up my laundry (which was clean, fresh and lovely) I got a distressed call from LL. They asked if I had lost a tiny sweater. I quickly inventoried my brain, thinking they had possibly shrunk a sweater of mine. It turns out they were trying to idenity a lost baby’s sweater.

Yes, they have some kinks to work out, and definitely some coupons to hand out! Still, those user preferences are exemplary for the service industry…an industry we all are part of to some extent.

While designing a custom web analytic project at work, I’ve found myself increasingly intrigued in data sets. At work I’m thinking about data sets particular to the web, and at home I’m thinking about data sets specific to….just about anything, such as…
Q: Number of cookies eaten today? A: 3
Q: Ratio of plants to humans? A: 13:2

My most recent analytic love affair involves Dot Surveys seen at the new-ish Divisadero/Grove Farmers’ Market (in my SF hood). It’s still TBD if it will be a permanent fixture or if it was just a summer fling, but it seems that the organizers are using a lo-fi research method to find its staying power. Dot Surveys are a form of Rapid Marketing Assessment (RMA), and are being used to quickly but effectively gauge the market attendees. A few large pads of paper stand near the entry, each displaying simple questions and possible answers. The interactivity is intuitive. The users (market-goers) receive a sticker and place it under the answer that resonates with them. The result is a fairly fun & simple experience that delivers quantitative data to the Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association.

Some Q & As include:
Q: What would you like to see added to this farmers’ market? A: Meat, Cheese, Olive Oil, Crafts
Q: How did you get to the farmers’ market? A: Walked, Biked, Drove, Public Transportation
Q: Would you come to this farmers’ market year-round? A: Yes/No

After chatting with the research volunteers for a bit, they shared a deeper layer of logic to the assessment!  The color sticker they hand out to each individual reflects another set of data! On this particular day, the sticker was indicative when the individual was attending the farmers’ market. I was visiting the market about 2pm (which was considered the last phase of the day), so I received a green sticker. (You can see in the photos, the green stickers are mainly placed towards the bottom of the paper). This extra set of data gives a bit more context to questions being asked. I was intrigued about this secret sticker data set so I asked a bit more… it turns out at other times they hand out certain colors based on gender and age range. The organizer said if he gave me a red sticker it would mean female in her 20’s (phew! he thought I still looked like I was in my 20’s!! )

Obviously the lo-fi RMA method is only appropriate for certain circumstances, but I can’t get over how simple & effective it can be. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Google analytics, but colored-stickers-code + simple Q&As, really get the job done here.

• Keynote: Small Teams, Complex Pipelines: Writing Software for Making Movies at Pixar by Michael B. Johnson

• Lessons from Oz: Designing for Mobile Experiences by Rachel Hinman.
Check out her blog, 90 Mobiles in 90 Days

• Designing Our Way Through Data by Jeffrey Veen
Download Veen’s slides here

• Greebles, Nurnies, Tiles and Flair: Visualization By Analogy by Michael Migurski

• The challenge of Emotional Innovation by Dennis Wixo

• The Future of the Web Browser by Jesse James Garrett

Unfortunately, this talk was only based around Aurora, Adaptive Path’s browser concept

• Tap is the New Click by Dan Saffer

Download Saffer’s slides here

• Designing Natural Interfaces: Adventures in Touchscreen, Multi-touch, and Multi-user Experiences by Darren David & Nathan Moody
Download slides here

• Ubiquitous Computing User Experience by Michael Kuniavsky

• Human-Robot Interaction by Aaron Powers

• Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and other HCI Projects) by Johnny C. Lee

Download Lee’s slides here

Other HCI related projects by Lee

• Endnote by Bruce Sterling

Highlights:

• Keynote: A Game Designer’s Perspective on the Future of Happiness by Jane McGonigal

McGonigal’s inspiring keynote suggested UXers are Happiness Engineers, and that we can continually bring happiness to users by getting them to participate in every moment.

• Your Phone is Your Controller, by a substitute for Jury Hah

Jury couldn’t make it, so a co-worker of hers at Megaphone gave the talk, which was more like play time! Megaphone makes multi-player games for public spaces where players use their phone as their controller. As part of Megaphone’s demonstration, we all used our cells to play on the main screen. It was so much fun. Check out demos of Megaphone games here.

• New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space by Jake Barton
Download Jake Barton’s slides here

Jake Barton is an emotional powerhouse! He’s one of the 9/11 Memorial designers, as well as an interaction designer for StoryCorps, which may be the most emotionally-charged online media I’ve seen. He’s one of the pioneers of UGC. I can’t even begin to summarize the what I got out of his talk. I highly suggest checking out his work at Local Projects. Oh, and be ready to shed some tears!

Last day of UX Week in next post…

Highlights from Tuesday were :

• ‘Our Mission is User Experience: The Design of Zipcar’s Service’ the keynote by Zipcar’s CEO, Scott Griffith

As a Zipcar member, I enjoyed the reminder that their product is not the car, but the service. Griffith noted ‘Zipcar is really an IT and Marketing company that happens to have a lot of cars.’ Great stuff! I can’t wait to see how the Zipcar service improves with their new site debut soon!

• ‘The DailyShow.com, FakeNews, 24/7′

Audrey Chen, a Sr. IA for ComedyCentral.com, spoke about her team’s tricky tasks of designing for massive amounts of content. She spoke about having to hire 2 full time screening teams (for day/night shifts) to screen hundreds of thousands of hours of the Daily Show. The screeners were hired to continually watch the show and constantly tag the Daily Show jokes. These tags were necessary for back-end taxonomies, but also for front-end users’ findability. Needless to say, I now have a very high respect for UX professionals working with a ton of media like Chen.

• ‘TV With an API!’

My friend Rod Naber and his coworker Dan Levine, both who work for Current, spoke about how TV is struggling and how they’re experimenting across their tv network as well as their social news website. I wish I had taken more notes during their talk. I was involved (and impressed) in how quickly they were responding to audience member’s questions via real-time tweets. Nice job!

Workshop: Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer

My coworker Sabih and I both signed up for this workshop and were in the same group for the hands-on portion. We were tasked with concepting and prototyping a touchscreen installation. The installation would be in music stores and allow users to sample and purchase music.

Our group decided on a circular table top installation that would serve many different users simultaneously (similar to Microsoft Surface). We didn’t have much trouble with concepting the physical architecture of the installation. The trouble came later when we all had different thoughts on what gestures would trigger interface results. It was frustrating to see many of our ideas were directly copied from common iPhone gestures. We couldn’t seem to find any unique gesture that seemed ‘right’ for an action. This may have been because, in general, we all are somewhat inexperienced with gestural interfaces. It also may be due to the iPhone being the first mainstream device of its kind. We’ve adapted the gestures so quickly that we tend to only focus on what we access, instead of how we access.

While I was working on my masters thesis last yr, I concepted, designed, and prototyped a touchscreen device that used gestural interfaces. I took a lot of guesses (especially since the design was done pre-iphone). This workshop was a great intro, and would have been very helpful for me to take prior to completing my thesis.
Anyway, I’ll check out Saffer’s upcoming book, and hopefully be able to do more gestural interface designing soon.

Last 2 days of UX Week in the next post…

The first day of UX Week focused on ‘The Fundamentals of User Experience’
It involved a stellar (but quirky) keynote between Peter Merholz, prez & founder of Adaptive Path, and Don Norman, the Zeus of UX!

Throughout the discussion, Norman pointed fingers at various items he finds faulty. One of these items was the conference badge each of us were wearing. The problem was that the lanyards were way too long. He noted that to read someone’s name on the badge, you had to stare at their crotch. He took off his badge, made a quick adjustment by tyeing the back of the lanyard, and placed it back over his head. Simply & effectively, he had re-designed the badge to sit correctly on his upper chest.

Next was the upbeat I am a UX Team of One pep rally/talk by Leah Buhley, a designer at Adaptive Path, and conference cheerleader. Next was Jensen Harris, a manager of the UX team at Microsoft who spoke about The Story of the Ribbon, a tour of Microsoft Word, from its early days to its current version many many years later. He noted how they learn from each rendition, even when it meant admitting to mistakes. There’s a saying my boss/friend Justin Baum often says that relieves me when I become timid or frustrated about mistakes I’ve made. He says ‘fail fast and early.’ The Story of the Ribbon really made this saying come alive.

The afternoon consisted of a short presentation from a theater team called the Neo-Futurists, a delicious catered lunch at the Palace, and a 3 hr workshop.

// My Workshop:
Storytelling for UX Design by Kevin Brooks

The goal of the workshop was to learn how to communicate and listen effectively. During the workshop we each practiced telling a simple autobiographical story to a partner, then switched places and took turn listening to our partner’s story. We incrementally went from speaking for 1 min to 3 min, all the while uninterrupted. It was a challenge! To speak and look at someone for 3 minutes without getting any kind of feedback or recognition is brutal…try it!

Although it was interesting, I didn’t get much of a sense of how the workshop pertained to UX (or the work environment) until the very end. I figure Brooks’ teachings hint that successful storytelling can lead to a more creative process. I enjoyed the reminder about listening, since we all know open-ended listening (and observing) is fundamental in learning about your user.

Brooks is in the process of writing his book, Storytelling for UX, which releases next yr. We’ll see what becomes of it. Storytelling sure seems like a tough thing to learn about from a book!

More about the following days @ UX week in upcoming posts…

AND…a UX week specific social network!! (omg, I really loved this, it made networking so much easier)

This was the first conference I’ve attended that was focused specifically on my job role. All in all, it far exceeded my expectations. It was undoubtedly awesome.

Oh and Adaptive Path did a terrific job recruiting the speakers to form the day-specific themes-
Tuesday: Fundamentals of User Experience
Wednesday: Service Design
Thursday: Play and Immersion
Friday: The Future of User Experience

The highlights of these days coming up…

photos from UX Week