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This Thursday I’ll be presenting an extended version of Discussing Design: The Art of Critique as part of UIE’s Virtual Seminar series.

I’m outrageously honored to be doing this. Those of you familiar with Jared and his team know that they consistently deliver high quality content on super relevant and timely topics. I only hope I don’t break their streak and ruin their reputation :)

If you haven’t seen Aaron and I talk about the topic, now is your chance. And if you have, well, there will be more and new material in this updated version. So what are you waiting for? Go sign up! Get on it!

You can check out the 3 minute preview below:

I’m very excited to be hosting a pre-conference tutorial on Design Studio as part of this year’s annual UPA conference in Las Vegas.

Those that know me, know that two of my biggest areas of interest in design are collaboration and critique. And for me, Design Studio is the perfect blending of those two aspects.

Here’s the tutorial description:

The generation and exploration of ideas is a critical early step when designing products and services. The work done in this stage of the product’s lifecycle will help set a path for its future. It will also begin to solidify the problems and challenges the new product will and will not address.

But trouble often arises at this early stage for a number of reasons:

• teams may lack an effective structure or process for generating ideas, falling back on the non-descript “brainstorm” session
• various members of the team, beyond just the design team, may have their own ideas for the product.
• there isn’t an efficient structure in place for capturing, evaluating, and eliminating ideas.
• and more…

The Design Studio is a method for idea generation, evaluation, refinement and even elimination. It takes place in a collaborative, fast paced, interactive environment that leads to a shared understanding of the product, the problems it will address and how it will address them.

Participants in this tutorial will be presented with an idea for a potential product and a partial scenario describing how a user intends to use the product. They will then be split into teams and, through the Design Studio process, generate, evaluate, and refine their ideas for the product’s design.

Participants will be required to sketch their ideas, however no real drawing ability is necessary. If you can draw a rectangle, triangle, circle and wavy line, you have all the skills needed to illustrate your ideas.

Additionally participants will be required to provide feedback on other’s ideas and receive feedback on their own. Experience in a critique setting is a plus, but again, not at all required.

I look forward to sharing this method with you. It’s been a major component in the process I and my teammates use to approach new projects and can have long lasting benefits not just on quality of work, but on relationships and other collaborative opportunities.

If your going to be attending the conference, I hope you’ll consider attending my session. It should be a lot of fun.

And if you haven’t been thinking about attending the conference, you should. The line up looks pretty kick-ass.

See you in Vegas!

I feel very lucky to have started a new phase of my career over the past year and a half as a public speaker. It’s the realization of a goal I set for myself a few years ago. And while it’s not the same as being an educator, a role I experienced only briefly, it gives me a lot of the same satisfaction and enjoyment.

Over the I’ve been speaking, and in conjunction attending many more conferences, I’ve formulated a few guiding rules for myself to help make sure I create solid presentations. In the off chance they’re helpful to others, I figured I’d share them here.

Set the right goal.

In my opinion the goal of a good conference talk is not to “teach” but to expose. You want to get your audience to open themselves up to a new idea or way of looking at something. You don’t have to explain every intricate detail. There won’t be a pop quiz for them at the end. Just give them enough interesting points that, when you’re done and get off stage, they’re left saying to themselves: “Damn, that was kind of cool, I should look into that more.”

Show them you’ve been there.

I owe this one to Jared Spool, who told me that in order to get an audience’s interest right from the get go, you need to show them you’ve been where they’ve been. Identify the pain they’ve felt or experiences they’ve gone through and tell a story about it so that they feel like you were there with them the whole time. Then start talking about your solution or new way of looking at things.

Don’t sell yourself.

So many speakers, especially new ones, spend a significant amount of time telling the audience who they are, what they do, who they’ve worked for, etc. It always feels to me like they’re trying to convince me that they belong up there.

Introducing yourself is necessary, but keep it as short as possible: your name and (if pertinent) who you work for, that’s it.

I know that at least I, as an audience member, assume you must already have something that the conference committee feels is worth hearing, and that’s why you were selected. Nothing you can say in your introduction is going to convince me of that more. Your on stage, it’s time to show me what you’ve got.

Include frequent little “ah-hah”s.

Most sessions that I’ve been to average 40-45 minutes, which depending on how you look at it, can seem like a ton of time, or no time at all to both the speaker and the audience.

On the speaker’s side, if it feels like not enough time, you’ve got too much. If it feels like too much, you may not have enough to talk about.

For your audience though, you’re in control of how it feels. You’ve hopefully got their attention for the first few minutes while, and you want to make sure you keep it. It feels pretty bad to look out into the audience and see multiple pairs of eyes slide shut as the heads their embedded in snap back on their necks due to talk-induced snoozing.

To avoid this make sure that your talk’s content is exposing little “ah-hah” moments frequently, about every 3-5 minutes. And don’t leave those “ah-hah”s to be determined by the audience, be explicit with them. Quote them in your slides. Think about the kinds of things that someone would want to quickly post on twitter, short and too the point. That’s what you’re after.

Be cautious in using only one example.

In the last few conferences I attended, I sat through a handful of talks that tried to use a single example to illustrate their entire concept.

Now this isn’t always bad. If that example can illustrate a number of smaller sub points, all of which are “ah-hah” worthy, it can work. But in all of my recent experiences, the speaker had no frequent “ah-hah” moments. If they did, I missed them entirely.

It just felt like they were going through an overly intensive examination, the kind you’d be subject to in a college lecture, and going back to my first point, the goal is to expose, not educate. The examples dragged on and on, until at the end I had lost all interest, no matter how valid the point the speaker was trying to make was.

The other challenge with single example presentations is it can sometimes give the impression that there isn’t a lot of validity to your point. Were you not able to find other examples to illustrate with?

Agree or disagree?

Like I said before, these are just a few things I’ve picked up on and come from my own personal opinions and experiences. I’m sure their formulation is due in large part to the types of conferences I attend. They may very well not apply to other types of conferences, for example, more academically focused ones.

If you’re just getting started speaking, I hope you find them helpful. If you’ve been speaking for a while and have different or conflicting opinions or suggestions, feel free to share them.

Over the years, as both an internal designer and a consultant, I’ve observed design teams struggle with eliminating potential solutions to the problem they’re trying to solve and focusing their energy on pursuing and iterating upon a single solution.

The problem itself stems from a few different factors in the team’s make-up and process and has numerous negative impacts, not only on the project, but on the team members as well.

Before the holiday break I posted some thoughts on the topic, as well as two rules I find critical to avoiding the problem on the Mad*Pow blog. Have a look and let me know what you think.

Hey, guess what. Social networking and media is a hot topic. What? You already knew that? Well shit…

So maybe it’s not big news. But the rate at which new apps and services built around social networking in one way or another are being released other hasn’t slowed much, if at all.

Being a designer, I tend to come across a lot of posts, tweets, etc about these apps as they’re in their early releases. And often I’m tempted to try them out, see what they do, how they’ve been designed and built. Creators have gotten the hang of making signup simple and so it can be really easy to find myself with accounts on more services than I can count or keep track of.

For a little while now I’ve been thinking about all these things I’m signed up for and how they tout how great they are, how they allow you to connect and keep in touch and know what’s going on with friends and family and random strangers. You can know what some is listening to, what they’re eating, when they got to sleep, when they wake up, and even when they take care of certain bodily functions.

Who cares?

In the tech industry there’s a certain amount of social pressure to be a part of all these. To see what kind of experience their creators have tried to make for us.

Here’s the thing though, aren’t we in control of our own experiences? Even though there are these phenomenally talented and creative teams out there crafting these “amazing” social experiences for us, in the end, don’t we get to design our own?

Think about all the apps and services you’re signed up for, and ask what kind of value they provide for you. If they don’t have value, why are we using them? What problems are they really solving for us? Here’s a look at some of the services I’ve used most recently and how they faired when I asked myself what value they were bringing to my life.

And please note that this isn’t meant to be a critique of these apps and services or their design. It is simply my personal review of their impact and place in my life.

Twitter

I use this daily. For me right now, it’s a keeper. I’ve been able to make so many great connections, including some very important friendships and the connections that helped me land my sweet gig with Mad*Pow.

There are some big downsides to Twitter though, one of which is if you aren’t careful, you can fool yourself into thinking that many of the connections you make are deeper than they really are. And that those people are there for you all the time. Some connections may be, but many won’t, and often you can feel like you’re just talking to a wall.

Another big downside that I’ve been seeing more and more is the mistake in thinking that Twitter can facilitate meaningful conversations and debates. It’s very hard to do these things with a 140 character limit and blind conversational exchanges. 

Instagram

For a while this one was just fun to play with. The design is pretty well thought out. The filters are nice. But it wasn’t adding a ton of value for me.

That is, until I loosened up on who I was following and started to follow artists I’d never met or heard of before, people who I came across just by looking in the News tab under “Following”.

Now I’ve got a steady stream of amazing art and work-in-progress photos to look at. It’s like a never-ending feed of inspiration and I love it.

Untapped

I love beer. I’m not going to lie. It is absolutely one of my favorite things on the planet. An app for connecting with other beer lovers? Sure, I’ll give it a try.

It’s a nice app. The design is pretty solid. But I’m finding that I’m not getting a ton of value out of it. The connections haven’t meant much to me, there aren’t a whole lot of social interactions going on.

The best thing this app has done for me is to serve as a log for the beers I’ve tried and what I’ve thought of them. I keep it around for that, though I know there are tools available that are more focused on just that use case. Maybe someday I’ll switch to one of them instead.

Facebook

I’ve gone back and forth on this one over the years. Initially it allowed me to reconnect with a lot of people I hadn’t talked to or seen in a long time. But most of those connections have died out again, maybe for the same reasons they died in the first place.

The biggest benefit I’ve seen from Facebook came this past year when I created a page for my illustration work. It’s been a decent avenue for connecting to an audience that I probably wouldn’t have reached otherwise.

Google+

I’ll admit I haven’t used it much at all, but that’s largely because I can’t find a reason to. The people I’m connected to there are almost all connected to me on other networks.

It feels to me like an alternative to Facebook, but I haven’t found a reason to need an alternative. I haven’t yet found anything in Google+ that gives me a significant value over anything else I’m already using.

The one thing I like most about it though is Hangouts, which is the best video chat/conferencing tool I’ve ever used. But my need for that is rare. I keep my account, but I rarely use it.

Foursquare

I tried this one out purely on social pressure. I go get a cup of coffee, I can log that I’m at the coffee shop and post it for all to see. I go to the mall, logged. And I rack up points for some sort of competition, win badges, and can see where my “friends” are.

But is there value? Not for me personally.

This type of thing hasn’t changed my relationships with anyone. And it hasn’t improved my life. I know that some businesses offer rewards for check-ins, most often to the “mayor” but I don’t visit many places often enough to become the mayor.

So for me, Foursquare (and all of the other check-in services i’ve tried) don’t have any value, and so I rarely ever use it.

Path

One of the newer kids on the block. I’ll say right off the bat, that the design is gorgeous. I love what they’ve done, but again, I’m not finding anything new to give me value I don’t already get elsewhere. It just feels like another Facebook alternative. And for me, the beauty of the app isn’t enough to keep me going with it. I’ll leave my account there, but I probably won’t be using it much, if at all.

So that’s 7 apps/services, made by 7 teams, all working to create these social experiences for us. And like I said earlier, it’s easy to get in the mindset of having to be present and using each one.

But what value does that provide you with? How does it make you’re life better?

You are in control of the social experiences you have. You can design them by choosing what services you use. You can decide to get out and meet people face to face and have lengthy, meaningful debates that aren’t impeded upon by character limits. You can choose to make real friends, keep people as acquaintances, whatever.

Maybe I’m late to the party on this. Many of you reading are probably saying “No shit Adam, you dumbass.” But I do think there are people that forget this kind of stuff. I know at one point I did, and I’ll probably do it again sometime in the future.

Look at what you’re using. How is it really benefiting you, really making your life better than it would be if you weren’t using it?