We're working on a larger post about the awesome IxDA 2012 in Dublin last week, but in the meantime, I wanted to chat separately about sketchnoting.

I'm a drawer, there's no doubt about it. I can barely manage to consider a design problem before I'm reaching for a pen and paper, or my Tablet PC and a stylus and cranking open OneNote for an explanatory drawing or mind map. But that got taken to the next level when I attended "Visual Thinking Through Sketchnotes," a workshop by MJ Broadbent & Eva-Lotta Lamm.

In it we covered the basics of sketching and then went further into what that means for capturing the complex ideas communicated in lectures and speeches. I was hooked, and challenged. I spent the next three days both enamored of the excellent ideas being presented (high marks on all four things I look for in presentations, nearly across the board), but also trying my new skills at sketchnoting. Here's the whole set.

While in Moscow, Alan and Chris were interviewed by Igor and Anton Gladkoborodov, who are with edutainment blog Theory and Practice to talk about education and learning in the modern world.

Theory and Practice began the interview with two large questions.

Igor Gladkoborodov: In your blog you write a lot about the specifics of the post-industrial era. The new economy heavily influences all aspects of human life, and now we are entering an era of post-everything. I am most interested in the aspect of education, what can you say about the post-education era?

Anton Gladkoborodov: In the industrialized world, education was reduced mainly to the technology of working with a tool or a machine. Similarly, mental activity was usually reduced to a set of algorithms. Today, we need to raise another kind of worker, one that is more flexible and dynamic. However, modern education does not meet the requirements of modern times; it is still based on the principle of factories. What, in your opinion, needs to be done to education?

It’s a good, long conversation, and if you’re down with the Russian you can read the original at the Theory and Practice website. (Special thanks to our friends at Innova for providing the source translation for us.) Below we’ve excerpted some of the most interesting stuff, and arranged it so we don’t sound as jetlagged and meandering as we actually were.

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

Like you, I’ve been to my share of presentations. I’m that annoying guy near the back who takes a lot of notes during it: jotting down the awesomeness, the nifty sound bytes, the structure, and the ideas it sparks. If the thing is failing, I’ll jot that down, too, and try to suss out the reason to make sure that when I present I don’t make the same mistake.

After years of doing this, I’ve come to group these successes and failures into four big criteria that every conference presentation ought to have. I’m going to share them with you now in the hopes that a) I’m right and b) more presentations will fall into the “awesome” rather than “regrettable” category.

At the recent Interaction 11 conference, I spoke of the growing importance of visual interface design to both brand and user experience in an increasingly digital world. In this new world, visual interaction designers face big challenges and bigger expectations, from both users and clients.

While designing visual interfaces for dense, complex products, designers can also influence brand perception by creating experiences that are both memorable and useful. In my session, I discuss how to design a unique visual interface that puts the needs of the users first; how to add surprise and delight to critical moments of the experience; and how to use craftsmanship and attention to detail to set your design apart in a visually complex medium. Finally, I talk about how visual designers can effectively frame conversations with stakeholders about brand and experience by using personas, experience attributes, and stories to convey design ideas. Enjoy!

Presentation on Slideshare

You can also view a crisper version of the slides on Slideshare: Slideshare.

Related Reading

• A unified approach to visual and interaction design
• Using research to end visual design debates
• The power of rich visual modeless feedback
• Take the visual interface design class
• The litl: a design miracle!

Have you ever used a public service that understood your needs? We all have horror stories of waiting in seemingly endless lines at the DMV or hunting forever to find the information we need on poorly designed city websites. Who is making sure that government uses effective design and technology to meet the needs of citizens in the 21st century?

Introducing Code for America

Code for America is a brand new non-profit that is taking on this challenge. And part of the challenge is understanding the target users of the technology. To help in that effort, Suzy Thompson and I taught a day-long workshop on Research for UX Design to the fellows at Code for America.

Code for America signage at their offices in San Francisco, autographed by the 2011 fellows

Code for America helps local city governments leverage the power of the web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory. Built on a model similar to Teach for America, CfA encourages developers and designers to apply for a year-long fellowship, during which they will create open-source technology solutions for city governments. Out of over 300 applicants, CfA chose 20 fellows for their inaugural year, from a wide variety of backgrounds including Web 2.0 startup entrepreneurs, developers for local city governments and school districts, open source contributors, a researcher for the New York Times, a digital journalist, an intellectual property lawyer/programmer, and a museum exhibit designer.

Code for America 2011 fellows (image used by permission from Code for America)

Code for America Institute

The fellows are spending the month of January in San Francisco at the Code for America Institute, learning from guest speakers about a wide variety of topics, including treating government as a platform (Tim O'Reilly), building local communities (Danielle Morrill), being a change agent and nurturing social network communities (Caterina Fake), and taking an entrepreneurial view of their city projects (Eric Ries).

Host City Projects

Each of the fellows is assigned to one of four city teams, each with a target project:

Boston	An educational services platform that allows the city to track the effectiveness of academic and after-school programs, and allows developers to create apps for student learning outside of school.
Philadelphia	A platform for using social network media to help citizens organize, and to connect government leaders with neighborhood civic leaders.
Seattle	A platform for using social network media to help citizens network and contribute to public safety programs. Also helps city leaders to quickly locate and organize neighborhood leaders.
Washington, DC	Civic Commons: a platform for municipalities to share custom-built technology solutions, so cities can leverage their development investments and avoid reinventing the wheel.

The fellows will spend the month of February in their host cities, learning about the IT infrastructure and interviewing city stakeholders and users of their system. They will return to San Francisco in March to design and develop the open-source applications. They will present and hand-off the applications to their host cities in the fall.

Cooper Training

Because Cooper has extensive experience connecting user research to product design, Code for America asked us to come in and present a one-day workshop. From our courses on interaction design and design communication, we carved out a day's worth of materials on finding stakeholders and users, preparing an interview instrument, conducting interviews, debriefing interviews, and synthesizing and presenting research findings. We also gave them a look-ahead to personas, scenarios, and framework design.

The fellows got a chance to plan an interview instrument and conduct a 45-minute interview with members of the CfA staff. Conducting good ethnographic interviews takes practice -- I think the fellows came out of our workshop with a sense of confidence in talking to their city stakeholders and application users in February. I look forward to hearing about what they learn about their users, and to helping them create personas and scenarios from their findings. And I can't wait to see the amazing applications that result from their work.

Great Government Research and Design

A question to our readers: Where have you seen user experience design principles applied to government applications or services, to achieve an amazing outcome? At Cooper, we're currently working on a project with CalSTRS (California State Teachers' Retirement System), and in the past have done pro bono work with the SF Department of Health. I have also read about fellow Cooperista Renna Al-Yassini's service design work for the Roudha Center in Qatar. What user experience design work in the government or social service sectors has impressed or inspired you?

What’s been your proudest achievement in life? Think about this for a minute or two. The accomplishments that I hold most dear are those that have occurred mostly outside of my professional career. But are we missing opportunities as designers and developers to contribute directly to furthering social causes? Social psychologist Jennifer Aaker and social media innovator Robert Chatwani say that we are. Cooper is proud to host these two Bay Area thought leaders at an open studio event on Wednesday, November 17th, from 6 - 9 pm at our offices on 100 1st Street on the 26th floor.

Jennifer Aaker and marketing technologist, Andy Smith’s new book The Dragonfly Effect is a must-read for designers and developers. The book details how people using Twitter, Facebook and YouTube beat the odds, made a difference, and literally saved lives. It tells how a former nightclub owner made a way for some of the world’s poorest people to have clean water, how a girl’s lemonade stand inspired fundraising for breast cancer, and how Barack Obama connected with a younger generation to become the first African American president of the United States. It underscores the importance of connecting meaning with social media when trying to create infectious action.

The book begins with a very personal story: In 2007, a friend, Sameer Bhatia, was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML). His one chance of survival was to find a bone marrow donor but his odds were slim: 1 in 25,000. Sameer’s friends, led by Robert Chatwani, used social technology to find a match for Sameer. And that’s just the beginning of the story!

Please join us at Cooper’s studio to meet Robert and Jennifer and to find out more about The Dragonfly Effect and the excellent design principles that were invaluable for affecting change. RSVP to rsvp@cooper.com.

Jennifer Aaker

A social psychologist and marketer, Jennifer Aaker is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: “What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think makes them happy?” “How can small acts create infectious action, and how can such effects be fueled by social media?” She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CBS Money Watch, NPR, Science, Inc, and Cosmopolitan.

A sought-after teacher in the field of marketing, Professor Aaker teaches in many of Stanford’s Executive Education programs as well as MBA electives including Designing Happiness, How to Tell a Story, Building Innovative Brands and The Power of Social Technology. She has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and Columbia and is a recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award, George Robbins Best Teacher Award and both the Spence and Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar Awards.

Robert Chatwani

Robert Chatwani leads Global Citizenship for eBay Inc., which covers a range of technology-driven social innovation across eBay and PayPal. Reporting to eBay’s CEO, he oversees the company’s global social impact and business goals across three areas: entrepreneurship, sustainable commerce, and communities. eBay’s platforms have enabled 25 million sellers around the world, powered the sale of over $100 billion in pre-owned goods, and raised more than $200 million for nonprofit organizations. Robert previously co-founded WorldofGood.com by eBay, the world’s largest marketplace for socially responsible shopping. Prior to eBay, Chatwani was the co-founder of MonkeyBin, an online consumer marketplace for trade and barter. Robert began his career with McKinsey & Company in Chicago and Washington DC, where he served a range of Fortune 500 clients and launched McKinsey’s Globalization practice. Chatwani received a bachelor’s degree in economics from DePaul University and an MBA from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. He was named to Time Magazine’s Top 100 Green Pioneers of 2009.

Dave Hussman, one of the leaders of the post-agile movement, recently hosted a one-day conference on the topic of “Redesigning Agility”, and invited me to give a plenary talk. The focus of the conference and my talk were how to integrate agile development with interaction design. I was very pleased with how things went.

Here you will find the complete text of my talk, entitled “An Insurgency of Quality”, along with all of the slides I showed. I made a few ad libs, but mostly stayed with the script in order to assure that my message not be misunderstood.

The conference, called “Code Freeze” (due to it being January in Dave’s home town of Minneapolis), was sold out and the audience was razor sharp. The attendees were developers; that is, mostly programmers, but with lots of designers, coaches, testers, and managers, and not a few who wore several of those hats.

This talk is a complement to one with the same title I delivered at the IxDA's Interaction08. That one was directed at designers; this one is for developers.

The Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO) hosted Lane Halley and Jeff Patton for a talk and workshop on blending agile practices and user-centered design. On Wednesday night, May 6th, Lane and Jeff presented a talk titled “Making Sense of User-Centered Design and Agile.” Thursday, May 7th, Lane and Jeff taught a full-day workshop titled “All Together Now: Blending Interaction Design and Agile Development Techniques.”

The slides from the May 6th talk are available on SlideShare. Pictures of the May 7th workshop are available on Flickr.

Last night, our own Kim Goodwin presented her talk "Designing a Unified Experience" at the IxDA NYC, generously hosted by our friends at LiquidNet.

(Click the button on the bottom right of the "screen" for a fullscreen view.)

About the talk

Interaction design, visual design, and industrial design are distinct disciplines for good reason: Each excels in different ways. Interaction designers must be good at imagining structure and flow, which requires strong analytical skills and a high degree of rigor, especially for complex systems. Visual designers and industrial designers are masters of visual and physical usability but are also masters of emotion: They know how to evoke caution, attract attention, and instill desire for a product at first glance. Users have just one experience of a product, though. All three aspects of the design must work in concert, or the product will fail to satisfy. Integration of the three disciplines is a central theme of Kim’s new book, Designing for the Digital Age.