While reading About Faces 3 by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, and Dave Cronin i began reflecting the information over the startup community.
The processes you get exposed to in the book, though aimed to the Interaction Designer / Information Architect, seem to be very useful to any product design process and seem to be very focusing when it comes to designing products from the ground up, as it is usually done with a startup.
Looking around the web for a one pager / cheat sheet of the books essence i drew a blank. there is a big void when it comes to interaction design.
So i will do my best to get this books essence in the shortest form i can to give the startup community a great guide for product design that requires less than the 600 pages in the book.
This will not replace reading the book if you want to get to the full depth of the interaction design, but it will be handy when you are limited on time and funds and want to get your product focused.
The book bundles together a few processes to create an aspiring for completeness process for creating a product.
When we think of a business about to create a product we let our thought roam in the realms of features/activities and functionality and in the look and feel of the product thinking about our users.
The reality is that we are not doing this in a methodological way and tend to try our luck more then fine tune the product before launch.
Most of us still approach the design of interfaces by asking, “What are the tasks?”.
The books takes us through the following processes

1. Goal-Directed Design
2. Implementation Models and Mental Models
3. Understanding Users
4. Modelling Users
5. Scenarios and Requirements
6. Framework and Refinement

I will try now to skim off the top of each of these and make some sense at the end.
Lets go

Goal-Directed Design
The first principle here is the Goals are not tasks, they are the end goals that the tasks lead to, the motivation for getting tasks done.
The main goal of a user is not to look stupid, keep that as one of the basic principles when you think of all the interaction of the user while using the system.
Most it products tend to:

• Make users feel stupid
• Cause users to make big mistakes
• Slow users down hampering performance
• Prevent fun and/or bore users

but how do we know what are the users goals?
User goals are not like tasks they change slowly, tasks and activities change often and relevant to context.
The way to find what are the goals are to do qualitative research understanding Why a user is performing the activity.

Goals will help later in the process to better understand the users as we model them into personas.
Implementation Model vs. Mental Model, You know how we always cry over software UI that it was “Developed by Developers”? a software like that was developed using the implementation model, thinking over the features from the developers perspective.
Mental model on the other hand is how a user perceive the experience, taking the car acceleration pedal for instance. the user needs to know nothing about the ignition or air intake to understand that pressing harder against the pedal will bring the car to higher speed, this is the mental model of the pedal.
Your users are one of these 3 groups

1. Beginners
2. Intermediate
3. Advanced

The biggest group out of the three is group 2, the intermediates, most beginners turn intermediate quickly and most of them stay like that and never get to the expert group they stay perpetual intermediates.
One thing to remember here is that users don’t use the product in a frequent thus forget how some of the knowledge they accumulated.
Software UI needs to cater to the biggest group while not harming the other group’s usability.
I recommend reading this section in the book (pages 42-48) as it is one of the toughest points you will have to deal with while designing the product.

Now the book goes into understanding the users where qualitative research is to be done to establish Personas and Goals.
The research that is described in the section requires the following:

• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
• Product/prototype and competitive audits

When trying to create the initial product in a startup we do not have the means to facilitate such a research and thus will need to create some alternative method in order to acheive partial Personas and Goals.
Some simple solutions will be to look at the competition and find out who of our friends/family/coworkers is using it, observer them and interview them.
If there are no competitors in the space we might be able to get some information from the same people while asking them to imagine the software.

When asking questions about a desired product use the guidance “Imaging that the software is magic” this will get you some ineresting responses.

If we have non of these we can try imagining what are users will be and give them qualities, we can use persona cards like organizational zoo to focus you on the type of persona’s and their associated behavioral attributes.

When approaching the personas definition (hypothesis) ask the following questions

• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be explored?

When thinking about a persona we need to cover all aspects of the product usage.
Its nice when entering content is smooth and easy to a first grader but when the IT guy needs to create an export of that content and make it available to in the new upgrdaded environment we need to think of him too. He is a persona using the product.
In order to differentiate the Content Editor from an IT administrator we need to specify roles in the system usage. a role is constructed from a given number of tasks needed to be completed successfully with the system

Up to now we have a very flat persona with a Role and some character specifications but we need the persona to get some depth,
The depth of the usage is what we are more interested in as oppose to the theological thought that user might have, though they can indicate user behaviour.

The 3 measurement vectors are Frequency, Desire and Motivation.
Frequency represents the users frequency in usage of the feature.
Desire represent the will to do tha action.
Motivation is the reason behind the action, this could potentially be nowhere near the actions result.

So now you know more about the persona and its goals for some of the usage of the system.

From here the book will go into the methods of research which is valuble in the standard company improving product scanario, but has less relation to a startup before the first alfa, you can purchase the book by then with some funding on the table.

image curtesy of Design and Technology student

Reading Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy post, only because the post title was interesting for me personally as a parent.
During the reading i got to the thought that this post is not true just for writing, its true for conversion and SEM as a guide.
The mental image i got while reading the line

“Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They���re overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you���ll lose them to option paralysis.”

Was so strong that I had to autosuggest it to the latest shopping experience i had for a compact flash unit.

most of the shops don���t offer all the information in a simple way, when you go to the electronics shop front you have 10-25 categories on the right hand side asking you to start drilling down, their titles are not always that easy to encrypt even if you are a tech guy. Memory in one shop is RAM at another and Media at a third.
The massive amount of links makes it impossible to choose the items that are right for you, nor is it easy to find items at all.
This resonated for a while in the need to create some easy to follow conversion rules.

I will start the list and want you all to participate in adding to it.
So here are the items i got so far:

• use simple navigation and make the choice easy – don���t give me 15-30 navigation points to get me to the subcategories of these to get me to a list of items for the subcategory! Give me my product in the realm I would look for. give me the product using classification and not your internal stock order, if I need a Compact Flash card put it in memory->compact flash or camera->memory->compact flash, Don���t make me think!
• cough up the cost – I want to know how much is delivery before I click “add to cart”, give me related alternatives if there are with costing.
• tag your products and make them match – use tagging to handle products that need to match, i.e. cpu to motherboard, memory to motherboard, display adapter to motherboard, soil for pots to pots and so on.
• push me to buy it – this is the place for the store to shine, make me know how good this product is and how much i need it, be the salesman I miss. Learn from Amazon and give me the full store experience. Taking the article answer to the ���Why?��� question
  

  “Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they���re making the right decision for them are going to take action ��� and confidently so.”

• Put yours in the comments

NOTE: this rant is brought to you from the latest online shopping experience I had for compact flash, most of the stores I gone through didn���t get my business because they made me think. I didn���t buy from the easiest to use but I spent more then 30 minutes to get the bloody thing even though I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to spend.

Google have changed the IA of the news.google.com section and started serving the Wikipedia values matching the news items you watch.

Now i find it strange that when i click on the news from australia the topic contains no Wikipedia results. is it limited to US?
I am not dissapointed but happy that i have not been pumped out with the useless value definition of the wikipedia article.
I think that a slow changing article in an encyclopedia is not what i am looking for when i search for news. i want to see twitter updates from the last hour as part of the google news page IA, that will make me smile and be happy.

Information architecture and the way radio websites are built.
Taking a look at the Radio of Collage of digital arts in Holon called halas.

My first impressions were that the site is not just minimalist in form but very functional. first when you go to a radio station you want to hear that station right. so the radio starts streaming straight away. that is a goof Information Architecture choice you get what you want.

The screen is split not evenly attracting you but at the same time annoyed me until i picked up why it was split, a click on the Info button opens the player up displaying a very informative text on the show.
Apparently the right side is station information and the left side is current broadcast, a thing that you don’t get quick enough but a minimalist design requires intrigue.
The symbols are almost coherent and release you from thinking to some extent. They are obviously using common icons to make it identifiable.
Button labels are popping on the top bar buttons but not on the lower part so there is some missing coherency? or may be a design bug?
I dont think it was not planned. this site was very very planned and thought of, the minimize X button implies that there was a real thought of thoroughly and was designed thoroughly.
The Splitting line apparently is the show timer stating the position i am in and the total time of the show.
The creators of the site boast with not so great site signature of annoying wastage of real estate.
But back to the radio, as oppose to the creators site, is spreading on your site correctly and gives you the information you want when you want it. the information appears in the center of the player and spreads the radio player on your screen to put the information in a table or iconized layout that is true to the information it represent.
In the overall i really think that the site is much more condensed accurate available and the Information Architecture is well thought of.
Its unfortunate that the creators site is not as good.

Its an interesting world when i am just wondering over the web and stumbling uppon some thing that was interesting to all of us, following up on Jon’s post Which Comes First the crew or the CMS.
The underlying problem there was that we lack a pure methodology that dictate the process of Knowledge management.
This was the state until i stumbled upon Mike! well to be exact MIKE 2.0.
Well mike is an open source EKM (Enterprise Knowledge Management) established by BearingPoint.
Mike is yet to be fully understood by me and will take me some time to figure it out.
It seems that it is inspired by Wikipedias information collection process.
The most relevant piece of work relating to our pondering is the 5 Phase method that specifies the difference between the Blueprint and RoadMap derived from it.

The most important part of the blueprint to our discussion is Phase 2 “Technology Assesment” Running right after the “Business Assesment” but before the content development. This sounds to me like a solution for the question of what comes first. i have yet to find the reasoning behind the decision and am still looking around for it.
In a deeper look there is another term in the technology which is the Technology Backplane, referring to an architecture that is technology independent and thus can take information from both new and legacy environment.

The Technology Backplane Architecture reduces the risk of technology obsolescence. Application suites become ���plug and play��� with respect to the infrastructure.

Using the Technology Backplane Architecture, new and old environments can co-exist, helping to more effectively support mergers, acquisitions, B2B and as well at IT transformations.

But what all of that implicate on our question? do we select the technology and then the crew, or the other way around?
Simply put the documentation currently does not reffer to the process as part of the whole business process so the technology selection depicted is not designated as before or after agency selection. it seems that if the agency is working to make the IA and EKM they are probably involved in the selection of the content management vendor.
But then again they might not be part of the implementation and thus have nothing to do with it.

What makes the memory remembering when we listen to old music? i am currently listening to an old to the Singers and Songwriters and whenever i hear a song that i know it comes with pictures from the past.
I wonder what is triggering that? and worse then that i wonder how much of that is programmable by all kinds of media blasts?

Well some of the songs do remind me of some innocent times and fun times.

But why when relinquishing in the past we tend to be melancholic?
Its not like the current times are less of fun. and it is not that what we have now is not as fun.
The main difference between our times and the next are information technologies and the spread of information over the world.
We KNOW more. if that is better or worse time will tell. my gut feeling that its case sensitive. some cases we are better with info and some we are better off without. ignorance is bliss on some occasions.

So do flashes from the past due to some sensation can be trusted as resources of information or some sort of feeling that is associated to the event? what do we really register? there is no singularity in these researches so we are to wait a little.

I believe that my kids will have a better registry of all their past due to the shier amount of media we create with them starring at it.
My boy can only look at some of his videos and see what he did when he was a kid no need to hear stories from mom. and when he will grow he will probably take his own videos. is that better then memories of tall grass behind the house or the mattress i burned? neahhh memory is much more clever and can make bad things seem so much fun.
In all youtube you cant find movies like the one in your head. and yeah reality is way nastier then we want to believe.
So keep your memories in tact and have fun listening to music. just make sure you change it often and re-listen to the old junk you did when you were a teenager.

WireFlow is the combination of Wireframe and Workflow.
Its used to describe Information Architecture in an Agile methodology.
here is an example:

I took the image from this presentation.
I recommend to get through it.