We Did It! “Trading Cards” from Gamestorming

Last week we finally had the chance to road test some of the games described in Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.

Because I’m embedded in an organization most of the time we all know one another when we get together for brainstorming sessions.  But this event was special.  We had a wonderful mix of expertise from inside and outside the organization.

I don’t know about you, but I have a miserable time trying to remember names as they are fired off at meetings.  You’ll see me frantically writing down names as people introduce themselves and there will *always* be one person whose name I totally miss.

So we decided to replace traditional introductions with the Trading Cards game (page 130).

We had 10 people in the room and budgeted 15 minutes total – 5 minutes for sketching, 10 for introductions.

• Some attendees were nervous about drawing a self-portrait.
• Others were worried about disclosing a fact about themselves that would *not* come back to haunt them.

In the end, it was wildly entertaining and a perfect way to warm up.   If we had not opened with the game we never would have known that we had a Junior Olympic champion in our midst, or that someone was named after a jar of olives, or that you could actually letter in Academic Team in high school.

And the best part is that I never had to frantically write down someone’s name!

“Keep it? Pull It?” – An I Can’t Garden App

“May I just say it cracks me up to walk into your office and see a picture of an iPhone with the word WEED! sketched on it?”

– A colleague

While weeding the garden (a garden I did not plant) I kept asking myself, “Is that a weed or a plant?  There’s GOT to be an app for that.”

But to my surprise, there wasn’t.  Or maybe I just wasn’t talented enough to find it when I searched the Apple iTunes App Store.

(I did get a LOT of apps related to weed – but not the kind of weed I was interested in.)

Surely there’s some company out there…I dunno…Scotts, even Lowe’s, or some other big weed killer company developing an app that allows you to take a picture of a plant and using something like facial recognition software to tell you what the plant is and whether or not it’s a weed.  Something that says, “Keep it!” if it’s a plant, or “Pull it!” if it’s a weed.

If you don’t see the app you need make it up yourself.

I tried sketching out an iPhone app for the first time.  Nothing fancy.  I wasn’t going to spend serious time on this.  And I quickly discovered what I knew was true all along – the interaction on the phone is tricky, tricky, tricky!  But that’s what made it fun too.

I started looking at different weed identification sites for a reality check.

You need to be a botanist or master gardener to develop this app!

Simply having someone enter their zip code to determine geography, season, etc.  is probably not enough to identify a weed.  You’ve got to consider different stages of growth and development too.

So I scratched (wait for the foreshadowing!) my grand plans for a “Keep it? Pull it?” weeding app and took the suggestion of my colleagues:

The question most asked at my house, “Is this poison ivy (or poison oak)?”

Brilliant.  And probably less tricky to create?

In the meantime, I’ve learned there is a team of smart people (a.k.a. researchers) developing the LeafSnap App. It’s limited to tree species in the Northeast at the moment, but I hope they expand it over time.  Right now you can download the iPhone app for free!  iPad and Android versions are “coming soon” according to the site.

LeafSnap is exciting because it gives me hope that my dreams of a “Keep It? Pull It!” app and a “Leaves of three leave them be?” app are not too far off.

Happy gardening!

Is Imagination Dead? They Quit the Marshmallow Challenge

In my day going to the office with Mom or Dad was a BIG stinky deal.
You wore your good clothes.
You were on your best behavior.
You smiled really purdy even when your Mom’s boss pinched your cheeks so hard you thought they were going to fall off (true story).

And if someone gave you a task, even if it was just for fun, by golly you worked hard so you wouldn’t embarrass Mom or Dad!

Today was the annual Bring Your Child to Work day at our office. It’s a terrific program our human resources staff organizes every year. Kids between the ages of 8 and 12 go from station to station experimenting and learning different aspects of science and engineering.

This year my group suggested running Tom Wujec’s Marshmallow Challenge.

I was beyond excited. I couldn’t wait to see the crazy structures these kids came up with!

How would they work together?
What would they do first?
Would the boys do better than the girls?
Would the younger kids perform better than the older ones?

It’s the end of the day now. A memorable day for sure. The experience has made me concerned about the creativity of future generations. Or maybe I’m just very naïve about the attitudes of kids today?

There were some glimmers of brilliance – our best group built a structure that reached almost 27 inches tall! Some kids were full of excitement and unique ideas that didn’t always work out. One young lady proudly declared, “My father is an engineer…” and then fully took charge of the group.

But those moments were overshadowed by a more
common theme: Quitting.

I was stunned by the lack of team work. To be fair none of these kids knew one another and certainly that makes it more challenging, but are good manners dead?

Some kids hogged the supplies! Fellow team members complained to the adults “they won’t share.” (I thought sharing was only a struggle for my toddler.)

Teams of all boys often broke the spaghetti into such tiny pieces they couldn’t build anything. And they were pretty darn vocal about it!

Teams of all girls, though not as vocal, sometimes became just as frustrated and worked independently of one another.

We noticed that when kids sat around the table instead of standing they were less likely to be successful.

Competitive drive was present to an extreme in some teams. In one session all three teams were so focused on beating the record 27 inch structure that none of them ended up with a working structure.

Very few teams iterated or tried to improve on a successful structure. Two different teams developed a working structure about 12 inches tall and declared they were done even though they had many, many minutes to spare.

We saw this during our dry run with adults too. After ten minutes the team had a working structure and four pieces of spaghetti left. They decided it was ‘good enough’ and forfeited the remainder of the time. The structure was over 19 inches tall. If they had kept going could they have reached 26 inches?

A total of 18 teams tried the Marshmallow Challenge today.
Only 6 built a successful structure.

I’m disturbed by all of this.

Sure not every kid is an engineer or designer, but I was surprised by the number of kids asking, “How do you do this?” and expecting a set of directions to follow.
Is imagination dead?

Should I have paid more attention to Hara Estroff Marano’s article, “A Nation of Wimps.” Is there is something to that?

Or worse is Laura Seargeant Richardson’s finding that kids are not getting enough play today spot on?

To think that the playful mind is dead scares me.
Is that what I witnessed today?

IA Summit 2011 Talk: The Reluctant Design Strategist

::deep sigh::

It’s over.  Already.  The IA Summit 2011 just ended.

I survived my out of body experience.  I met lots of great people along the way.  And I learned new things.

My goal was to have 5 people show up to my 9:00 AM session. 

Happily I had 5 people there. And they were fabulous.  All 5 of them.  They laughed in places where I hoped they would laugh.  They spoke up when I hoped (and prayed!) they would speak up.  They were even super, duper nice to me on The Twitter. 

(Update 4/5/2011 – A colleague took me at my word when I said there were 5 people there. I’m exaggerating. There were a LOT more than 5!)

And a few of them told me they liked the presentation to my face! It meant the world to me. If you were there, thank you for being part of my first talk. 

Thank you to the IA Summit for giving a newbie a chance.

My slides for The Reluctant Design Strategist have been posted on SlideShare and right here!  If you were at my talk, you know most of my slides consist of photographs.  You’ll need to download the presentation to view the Notes section, which summarizes the stories I shared.

And if you have any burning questions or comments, feel free to send me a note. I’d love to hear from you.

Counting Down to the 2011 IA Summit

On Saturday, April 2^nd at 9:00 AM I may have my first out-of-body experience.

There are only 8 days left.  Only 8 days until I take the IA Summit stage for the very first time.  It will be the first time I have ever walked onto a conference stage.

I am nervous.  I am excited!  I am praying the Twitter backlash won’t be too harsh.

I wonder how many times I will find myself stumbling saying, “And so,” even though I have painstakingly practiced and recorded myself almost every single day for two and half weeks now.

I practice in the car driving home from work, standing in front of the full length mirror late at night, and with my trusted colleagues at work.  My theater roots have been called back into action.  I forgot how much I missed them.

In short, putting this presentation together has been the center of my universe for a while now.

I hope people show up to my session, but there are two really good talks going on at the same time as mine:

• Discussing Design: The Art of Critique with Adam Connor, Aaron Irizarry
• A Practical Guide to Measuring User Experience with Richard Dalton

The worst part is that I would LOVE to be sitting in on both of them!

If I only have 5 people coming to my session I’ll be happy with that.

If you choose to come to my presentation, The Reluctant Design Strategist: The Story of a UX Team of 1.5 Failing Forward I think we’ll have fun. I hope you will leave feeling like you can do more with less, and that failure, as devastating and personal as I once thought it was, doesn’t have to be.

A Recipe for a Lighter F.I.D.O. Method

I’m a dog fanatic.  Specifically, BIG dogs.  Sure I love them all, but I have a preference.  I’ll pass on Puntable Pooches and take a Big Bruiser any day.  So naturally when I stumbled upon the “FIDO method” I had to check it out.

What is the FIDO method you ask?

It is not a dog training method!  It actually has nothing to do with dogs.

It stands for Freehand Interactive Design Offline (F.I.D.O.) and Donna Tedesco, Ann Chadwick-Dias and Tom Tullis are responsible for developing this participatory design method.  Their paper,  “Freehand Interactive Design Offline (FIDO): A New Method for Participatory Design” [PDF] is on the ‘older’ side, submitted to UPA back in 2004.  I haven’t investigated whether it was published or presented, but don’t let the age fool you:  This team is freakin’ brilliant!!!!

In a nutshell, here’s what they did:

They wanted people to create their ideal financial services homepage. So they went to five different financial services websites and took screen shots.  They cut out the page elements, or components, from each of the pages, laminated the pieces, attached magnets to the back and then asked users to pick our their favorite pieces and arrange them on a magnetic whiteboard.

Read the entire paper because there are some brilliant details and photographs.  Plus if you follow the method to the letter you’d have an excuse to buy some out of the ordinary office supplies.  Heeeellllloooo, BLACK LIGHT!

But that’s the thing.  I couldn’t find a black light in my office supply catalog.  And while I COULD find a laminating machine, I didn’t want to invest in something I might only use once.

So like the chemists over at Cooking Light, I decided to lighten up this wonderful method.

All you need:

• A wall.
• Cardstock paper.  It’s got to be heavier than every day loose leaf paper.
• Sharpies.
• Scissors.
• Poster Putty (preferred) or Double-sided Tape.

And this is the real story of how we used the ‘Lighter FIDO Method’ yesterday.

One of our colleagues came down and said something to the effect of:

“I’d like to refresh our homepage, but we don’t have a lot money to change the template. I got a couple of complaints that the boards are too hard to find and I’d like to see if I can make them more visible.”

The time was 1:35 PM.

Step 1:  Print out the homepage and identify the design components you CAN change.

In this case, there were a lot of design elements that were off-limits because it would require changing the underlying content management system template.  We needed to focus on what we COULD change.  We outlined those parts.

Step 2: Draw new design components that fit in the areas you can change.

To get the dimensions right, I just lined up the cardstock with the print out.  Though we do not have a formal component library, there are some components we know are available for reuse.  We talked about the ones that might ‘freshen’ the design and drew them.

Once you’ve got a component drawn, cut it out, slap some putty on the back and walk right up to the print out and stick them on.

Pro Tip: There’s no reason you can’t use this method to design from the ground up.

If you have a component library why not print out your components on card stock, cut them out and bring them to the meeting?

Step 3: Put what doesn’t work off to the side.

Change your mind a thousand times, create new components and keep moving things around and around until you reach a ‘final’ design.

We spent a lot of time just taking the paper pieces off, moving them somewhere else, talking about what might work better, etc.  It was a wonderful collaboration.

Step 4: Annotate the design and scan it.

We got to a place where we felt we were “done” with the design.  So we annotated and scanned it.

DONE! The time was 2:05 PM.

That’s exactly 30 minutes to get to a ‘final’ first design.

But WAIT!  There’s more!

The first design is never the right one.  We all knew the underlying grid was ‘off’ and it made us uncomfortable.  Unfortunately, we may not be able to do much about it because of the budget and template constraints.

In our last 30 minutes we talked about what we might do if more money was allotted.  And then I raced to sketch the idea.  It’s probably the worst sketch I’ve made in quite a while, but at least the idea is now on paper.  It won’t be forgotten.

There you have it – the recipe for a Lighter FIDO Method.  Give it a whirl and let me know how it goes!

Help Clients Find The Web Design of Their Dreams

Growing up my Mom used to dread going shopping for Prom dresses because I’d have a vision of what I wanted in my head.  We’d go to the mall and hunt through store after store. My Mom would hold up dresses saying, “How ’bout this one?”  If she was lucky I’d say, “Gross.”  Most of the time I’d give her the Stink Eye along with a look that said, “Seriously?  Do you know me at all?”

She’d try to get me to describe what I wanted, but I never could.  After visiting nearly every store, we wouldn’t find anything close.  And I would pout.  And sulk.  And be a typical teenager…

Sorry, Mom.

Eventually I’d settle on *something*.  But it was never the dress I had in my head.

Today I find my clients in a similar situation, and  I’ve been trying to figure out how to help them describe the Prom dress of their dreams.

Okay, I’m not literally trying to help them describe a Prom dress.  But I am trying to help them describe the ‘look and feel’ they have in mind for their website.

From time to time this is what would happen.  Maybe you can relate:

I’d be in a client meeting with a graphic designer.  The graphic designer was tasked with turning my conceptual web design into a work of art.  The graphic designer and client would discuss the so called ‘look and feel’ and I would hear clients say:

• “We want it to be clean.”
• “We need pictures of [scientists].”
• “We really like how [another website] looks.”
• “The [house ad] has to pop.”

The graphic designer would probe the clients for details:

• Clean (as opposed to dirty)?
• Scientists in lab coats with test tubes or something else?
• What do you like?  The colors of the website?  The typography?
• What do you mean ‘pop’?

And on and on.

After an hour or so, both client and graphic designer would begin nodding.  It would appear they understood one another.  Everyone was happy.  Everyone was excited.

The graphic designer would go off and create.  The clients would wait filled with anticipation.

Then the magical day would arrive!  The BIG REVEAL! And in some cases, that was the day I would get a phone call from my client that went something like this:

“Megan, umm…we got the designs…they…umm…aren’t exactly what we expected.”

And then we would talk about what they enjoyed, what surprised them and what concerned them.  In other words, I’d try to lead them through a thoughtful critique.  The designs would be revised and the clients would be happy in the end.

Technically, there is nothing wrong with this process.  Design is iterative.

Still, the whole thing reminded me of picking out Prom dresses with my Mom.  Are we unintentionally asking clients to settle on a web design?

Can we do better?  Can we do something to help clients describe the Prom dress (or web design) of their dreams?

Here’s what I came up with:  A Guide to Communicating Your Design Vision [PPT file, 12 MB].  If you download the PowerPoint File, you’ll find two ‘parts’ in it.

Part 1:  Examples. I wanted to show clients how color, patterns, textures, photography and typography can come together to create this ‘look and feel’ thing we talk about incessantly.

Part 2:  Client homework assignment. I started asking clients to create an inspiration gallery.  I’d ask them to visit websites they liked and disliked, take a screen shot, and then answer a few questions about the screen shot.

My clients are comfortable working in PowerPoint, so I created slide masters that allow them to simply ‘fill in the blanks’ and drop in their screen shots.

(Though I am not including one in the download, I also give them a completed inspiration gallery so they can see what it looks like at the end.)

I ask my clients to bring their completed inspiration gallery to the meeting with the graphic designer.  When clients take the time to complete the exercise, it really seems to help. Maybe it’s because their inspiration gallery becomes the starting point of the conversation.  Maybe it works because they begin thinking about design as more than just color.  Maybe it simply helps them feel more empowered to talk about design.

Whatever the reason, I really hope the Guide gives them a way to describe the web design that is stuck in their heads.

This is still a work in progress.  Please send me your suggestions!

In fact, feel free to download it, destruct it and share it with others.  If you do change it, promise me one thing:  Promise me you’ll send me a copy so I can use it too.

Speaking of inspiration, I want to thank some of the people who inspired me to come up with the Guide to Communicating Your Design Vision:

• Leah Buley.  “Things to do at the beginning of each project.”
• David Sherwin. “Better Ideas Faster.”
• Jared Spool. “What Goes into a Well-Done Critique.”
• Project Runway. Clearly I have watched too many episodes as my previous post proves.  Fashion designers aren’t the only ones who create mood boards.  The inspiration gallery is my lightweight version of a mood board for web design.

By the way, the opinions and statements included in this file are mine and mine alone.  They are not necessarily adopted or endorsed or verified by my employer, the National Academy of Sciences.  Jim, I hope this disclaimer is sufficient.

I Like To Do Drawrings

Well you know my name is Megan and I like to do drawrings.

I made a drawring.  Do you want to see it?  Do you?

This is a drawring I made of Simon’s Daddy at the Roulette table.  His Daddy was shouting for more credit.   So Simon (played by hilarious Mike Myers) said, “I think you’re a great Daddy!”  But evidently that was not the kind of credit he needed, and he was whisked away into a darkened room.

***

I’m just learning to make drawrings again.  Can you tell?

It’s both amusing and embarrassing, but I keep going because I’ve discovered what so many others already know:

Drawrings are better than words.

My return to drawring began when Brandon Schauer, of Adaptive Path, showed a video of how he and his colleagues used sketchboards.  It was fast, collaborative and portable.  I wanted to try it.

But! I insisted, “I can’t draw…”

Dan Roam points out in, The Back of the Napkin, that I’m not alone.  According to Dan, I’m a ‘Yellow Pen’ – a highlighter – reluctant to head to the whiteboard and more comfortable with words.

My goal is to become a ‘Black Pen’ – someone who runs confidently up to the whiteboard and has no problem coming up with visual metaphors to explain ideas on the fly.

I’m also trying to drag my colleagues along for the ride.  Misery loves company, right?

So this week after the annual Holiday bash, we sat down to complete some of the exercises in Rapid Viz:  A New Method for the Rapid Visualization of Ideas.  Fueled by caffeine (and a little beer) we turned random doodles into drawrings of kitty cats and steaming cups of coffee. Next we moved on to drawring Abraham Lincoln taking a bath.

(Were you lookin’ at Abraham’s bum?  Were you?  Bum lookers!  Cheeky monkeys all of you!)

When we were done with the Introduction exercises we were feeling pretty proud of ourselves.

Then came Chapter 1:  Perspective – The Box Method.  It went downhill  quickly.  Trying to hold a flimsy sheet protector still in your non-dominate hand with one eye closed while tracing the box you see through the sheet protector was…well…hard.

And that’s when we decided that maybe we didn’t need to learn “perspective”. We bring “perspective” to the conversation, not the drawrings.  With more time and practice I know it will all become second nature.

Do you want to see Simon’s drawring?  Do you?

If you’ve never seen Mike Myers play the role of Simon on Saturday Night Live, watch this classic sketch with Danny Devito.  And when you’re done, tell me whose sketch is more readable:  Mine or Simon’s?

The Rules I Will Present By

Will I ever be lucky enough to give a talk at a major user experience conference?  No idea.  Part of me wants to barf just thinking about it.  Another part of me is just dying to try it.  Someday if I am entrusted with the awesome responsibility of engaging an audience (even if it’s only for 5 minutes) these are the rules I will present by:

I will…

Strive to include “tweetable moments”. My colleague and I agree:  Some of our all time favorite presentations were filled tweetable moments — those catchy, memorable, poignant take aways that can be shared in 140 characters or less.  Read how you can get them…

Include my Twitter name on every slide. Speaking of tweetable moments, thanks for including your Twitter name on your introductory slide! I didn’t write it down.  Could you show it to me again?

Give away templates for reuse. If I’m teaching you a technique I’m going to give you whatever I can—a template, sample questions, mad lib, rubber duck, etc.—so you can go home and use the technique immediately or improve on it.

And I won’t…

Introduce myself and offer to autograph my book. And not just because I don’t have one!  I remember Edward Tufte doing this.  It was the first time I had ever seen him.  All I knew about him was he made some kinda chart about Napoleon’s March.  If he had not started out by saying, “I’ll be signing autographs later,” I probably would have begged for one afterwards.

Give a Prezi presentation unless I know what heck I’m doing. Just because you can use Prezi, doesn’t mean you should.  Watching bad slides on Prezi is like having a really bad hangover.

Show a list of bullet points in 12 point font on a busy background. “Oh, I guess you can’t read that, can you?” the keynote speaker said to the 300+ audience members, “You can download the slides and read it later.”  True story.  Do you think I downloaded the slides?  Please read (and practice) Slide:ology.

What did I miss? What tops your list of things a presenter should and should not do?

What Would Tim Gunn Say About A Web Design?

Still digesting all the amazing information I learned while at Jared Spool’s UI15 conference, I find myself in a silly mood on this gorgeous Fall Friday afternoon.  A while ago I posted this question on Quora:

How do you teach a non-designer to effectively critique a design?

Today I got the answer I had been waiting for.  Thank you O’Danny Boy (a.ka. Dan Saffer), who I’ve long been a fan of.  Dan suggested:

Make them watch how Tim Gunn critiques fashion designers on Project Runway. Be sure to instill the idea that you want to understand the REASONS the design doesn’t work for them, not for them to offer solutions as to how to fix it…. [Read the rest of Dan's answer]

Dan’s spot on.  And to illustrate his point he wrote, “Everything I’ve Ever Learned About Giving Design Critiques I Learned from Tim Gunn.“  It’s a must read.  I also wrote my own set of tips for delivering a critique, but I really like Dan’s article more.  So listen to Dan, not me.

Tim Gunn has made such an impression on me over the years that I find myself using his many catchphrases, called Tim-isms, during design critiques.

The Top 10 Tim-isms I find myself using during a web design critique:

1. Talk to Me
2. This Worries Me
3. That’s a Lot of Look
4. I Am Not Bored
5. This Is Going to Be a Wow Moment
6. You Don’t Want It Too Judy Jetson
7. Don’t Think Too Much
8. Bring That Critical Eye to Everything
9. Make It Work!
10. You Don’t Want It To Be Too Matchy Matchy

Yes, my tongue is firmly planted in my cheek on some these.  But not the Judy Jetson reference.  That was a very real moment.

Need to soak up a little Tim Gunn?  Watch him critique the fashion designers on Project Runway.

Happy Friday!  Thanks for reading.