Update from SXSW: Buster and Thor Get It

I know once you found out that Russ and I are at SXSW Interactive it put you on the edge of your seat, waiting for another batch of sketchnotes. Well, you’re just going to have to wait until next week for the full sketchnote reveal. Just a quick post about Day 1:

SXSW is gigantic. For example, Saturday morning I have to select from over 20 sessions happening between 9:30 and 10:30. With all of those options, choosing is difficult…and it’s more hit and miss than you might think. Landing in one that’s disappointing means you are missing something valuable somewhere else. Finding a home run session is huge, and that’s why I decided to write this post. If you’re considering presenting at a conference – take note:

Buster Benson of Health Month and Thor Muller of Get Satisfaction get it: they practiced what they preach in their session Gamechanging: Turn Your App into a Cooperative Game. Rather than just talk about game design for an hour, they designed a game into their session. Within minutes of the beginning of the session, around 500 people in ballroom 12AB of the Austin Convention Center were arranging themselves chronologically by birth date. Each month was a lifeboat, and we all had to find our boat and arrange ourselves chronologically by day or we’d drown. I found myself standing on a chair screaming “OCTOBER! OCTOBER IS HERE!” while two new friends stood by me holding up handmade signs reading the same thing. Five minutes later, October was complete, and so was every other month of the year. Five minutes, folks. 500 people arranged themselves in chronological order in five minutes.

What does 500 people organizing themselves chronologically by birth date look like?

This led into a discussion about an important aspect of designing collaborative games: emergent self-interest-based cooperation. Soon, they introduced a second challenge designed to demonstrate their next aspect of game design. This time, they offered bourbon to the winning team.

Buster and Thor ran out of time before they could run the third challenge, but it didn’t matter. They showed rather than told – and that’s so rare at a conference, I thought it deserved its own post. Not only is it good design, it takes guts to ask 500 people to change their carefully-chosen seats in a packed room. Bravo, fellas!

More next week after we recover. Unless perhaps one of us is blown away again in the meantime and moved to post. Fingers crossed!

Interactive SketchNotes: “Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design”

Not long ago, a few of us Thinkers gathered around the Polycom and projector for one of UIE’s famed Virtual Seminars: Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design with Stephen Anderson. I’ve been practicing Interaction Design for the better part of 5 years now, and when a deck of Stephen’s Mental Notes cards recently started floating around the ThinkSpace, it sparked some great new debate and thought – so we jumped on the opportunity to attend and kick some of these ideas around further with the man himself.

Rather than do the complete play-by-play here on our blog, I encourage you to flip through the interactive sketch notes that I captured during the event which include highlights and links to related information. You can also view a very similar presentation to what was covered in the seminar from Stephen on SlideShare. Enjoy!

Mike's Sketchnotes from UIE Virtual Seminar: Seductive Interaction Design

TEDxPhilly Recap

A contingent of Think Brownstone descended upon the stunning Kimmel Center in downtown Philadelphia yesterday to attend the TEDxPhilly event. TEDx events are independently operated versions of the TED event held in California every year.

Brian's Sketchnotes from TEDxPhilly

The official theme of the event was “Right Here, Right Now” but my unofficial theme was one of the universal truths we all know, yet few of us practice: “If you let people own the solution to a problem, they can do amazing things.”

I’m not going to go into a deep recap of every speaker – there were 16 of them and each had a unique story to tell. Some were better than others and some were downright inspiring. The event was recorded and streamed and I’m sure if you follow @TEDxPhilly on Twitter or Facebook or keep an eye on TEDx in general, you’ll be able to see recordings of some of the better talks.

At the end of the event, someone said to me, “This was great, but what are we supposed to do with all of this?” I thought hard about it and that’s what made me get out of bed at 4AM and start typing. It’s a good question. TED events aren’t like a typical conference where we hope we can learn something new to make us better at our job or someone gives us marching orders to fix a problem. For me TED exists to highlight the extraordinary work of the people around us – hopefully to get us off our asses to do something extraordinary ourselves.

For instance, Chris Lehman from the Science Leadership Academy started his talk with something we already knew: High School Stinks. Why? Because today’s education system focuses more on making sure we “don’t suck so much at the stuff we’re bad at” than embracing the stuff that makes us passionate. To demonstrate his solution, all of the video and photography at the show was run by SLA students – they wanted to be there and make a difference.

There were many talks with that same theme in different contexts.

Nic Esposito showed us how Urban Farmers are more successful when they not only plant the food, but they sell it.

Stanford Thompson didn’t just tell us how kids need longer-term goals to deal with the pressures of life, he brought out thirteen kids from Tune Up Philly who hadn’t held an instrument before September to show how they are already achieving those goals.

Simon Hauger's High School kids built a Bad-ass Hybrid

Simon Hauger asked his students, “What’s missing for you with hybrid cars?” His kids decided they weren’t fast enough or cool enough, so they built a hybrid Ferrari that beat MIT in national competitions.

Zoe Strauss started her I95 Photography project ten years ago knowing she needed to do it even before she had fully figured out what it was.

Michael Solomonov explained how a terribly tragic moment in his life led him take a risk and open his own restaurant. (you should see what his baklava does to Bmac)

I’m skipping some of the other inspired speakers to keep this brief. I will say that throughout the day, Steve Krug‘s voice echoed through my head: “This isn’t rocket surgery.” We all know that owning the solution makes us better at solving a problem. The bigger problem is that very few of us do anything about it.

At least once in your life I’m sure you have experienced a teacher/boss/client/parent/person of authority who looks at a work-in-progress and says:

“Mmm hmmm, that’s great. But I want it green, add a picture of a fish with a hat smoking a cigar and make it more like Facebook.”

You can tell these moments – they are delivered in a tone that screams, “Because I said so.” These are the things that take the wind out of your sails. Your authority figure may even know what he/she’s talking about – but it’s being directive in a collaborative process. The wisest among us get them to participate in the process rather than direct the solution, but that’s a hard job to do.

This is why we get excited at Think Brownstone when one of our clients walks up to the whiteboard, grabs a marker and starts sketching on top of our work. They’re not telling us to make it green, they’re showing us their process. At that point, the Brownstoners make eye contact, someone grabs their phone and tweets something like: “Another client just grabbed the marker #thinkbrownstone” To us, it’s not ego. It’s a beacon to anyone who wasn’t in the room that a client is starting to own the solution with us. That’s what we do.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to Roz Duffy, the TEDxPhilly organizer, and her team of talented volunteers. They worked on this project for nearly a year. Putting something together like this is an incredibly complex undertaking and not for the faint-of-heart. While Think Brownstone was thrilled to be a sponsor the event, we know that writing a check was the easy part.

BlogWorldExpo ’10 Recap (Social Health)

Phil and I just returned from BlogWorldExpo 2010 in Las Vegas (it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it), and my mind is swimming with ideas sparked by the smart, passionate people we encountered there as part of the Social Health track sponsored by Johnson & Johnson. As a company we’re extremely interested in the potential of social media as a part of the broader healthcare conversation, and are engaged in discussions about it daily – so this was extremely relevant for us.

As usual, we’ve got interactive sketchnotes from the sessions up on Flickr with a bunch of links to the speakers, their blogs and causes, and recommended resources. Note that Phil and I split up for coverage where there were multiple sessions held in the same time slot, so he may chime in with some additional insight – but here’s my quick recap of the day.

Badges Of Honor: BWE10 Social Health Track

Things kicked off for us with a keynote by e-Patient Dave. I had been aware of him in the past but hearing his story first-hand was incredible – it was the perfect way to start the conference. When you’ve got a serious lump in your throat 15 minutes into the day, that’ll do wonders to open your mind and make you want to change the world. I truly believe that the other participants we met there (doctors, patients, industry folks, and consultants) were all interested in doing just that.

Dave’s core messages were as follows:

1. Every person must accept a certain measure of responsibility for their own recovery from an illness (quoting Norman Cousins).

2. Networked patients will move from being passengers to being drivers of their healthcare decisions.

3. We are all patients, and as bloggers we are free to be “mouthy”. This has the potential to elicit positive change.

4. The chance to be engaged in your own treatment is a huge mood booster and motivator – it’s a much better alternative to helpless passivity.

5. Laugh, sing, and eat like a pig.

Next was a panel moderated by Trisha Torrey, including patient bloggers Amy Tendrich (Diabetes Mine), Jenni Prokopy (Chronic Babe), and Lisa Emrich (Brass and Ivory) – and what an eye opener. There were great discussions about the types of resources these folks recommend to their readers, how they validate them, the role they’re intended to play, and what they believe are the right ways to engage with industry. However, it goes beyond that – anyone interested in how to create vibrant online communities can learn volumes from what they’re doing, but the work being done here to provide information and fellowship to folks dealing with chronic conditions is so unbelievably important…I had no idea how traditionally underserved these populations are, and it was a game changer for me. In fact, so was hanging out with the speakers late into the evening (add Kerri Sparling from Six Until Me, Manny Hernandez from TuDiabetes.org and Scott K. Johnson to the mix) and not only being allowed a glimpse into their unique worlds and perspectives, but literally laughing until my face hurt. Inspiring and challenging peeps, these.

The Name Of The Game

Next was another panel discussion moderated by Bob Brooks from Wego Health (another seriously funny guy, with whom I share an uncannily parallel past) including the aforementioned Manny H. and Amy Kiel of Una Vita Bella. This session provided more insight on ways in which industry could provide value and partnership without diluting perceived validity and authenticity, tips on ways to manage the information fire hose as a patient and a patient blogger, and exactly what patients are looking for from these communities. Here we’ve got three basic tiers of information needs coupled with the desire to network and find others in similar situations:

1. What is this condition? What do I have?
2. How do I treat it?
3. How do I cope with it? What practical advice is there on how to live with this condition?

We also attended a few general keynotes outside of the Social Health track, but they were much more broad and I’d like to stick to the script here. So, we’ll jump to the final session of the day – a whiteboarding session facilitated by Marc Monseau form Johnson & Johsnon and David Armano of Edelman Digital (check out his sketches from the session), which everyone I talked to later spoke of as a highpoint of the day. Basically it was an open conversation among folks from the various communities represented, addressing the question: “OK, we’ve all gained some great new insight throughout the day…what are we gonna do about it?”

The conversation was fast paced, passionate, and intense – the microphone traveled quickly around the room and the group was highly engaged. Where did we end up? There was a lot of great thought captured visually by David, and ultimately the day concluded with this statement: as different groups of folks with different needs and drivers, we need to come together to envision the future of healthcare in the same way Apple did in 1987 for the future of computing – no one group can go away and successfully do it on their own. Then, as a broader healthcare community, we can begin to make strides toward achieving that shared vision. It has been 23 years since Apple’s vision and they’ve achieved a good deal of what they dreamt up but not all…yet. How long will it take us?

Event: Light The Night Walk

Think Brownstone is participating in this year’s Light The Night Walk in Philadelphia on Saturday, October 23rd to support The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The gang will be out in force with our families, and we’re trying to raise at least $3000 to donate to the cause – funding better therapies and cures for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. If you’re interested in lending a hand with a donation, no matter how small (every little bit counts!), please visit our fundraising page. Thank you in advance for your help with this most worthy cause!

Wharton UICONF 2010

Two weeks ago, I attended Wharton’s UICONF 2010, which focused on user experience design in the context of higher education. While a greater percentage of our work happens in other sectors, it was interesting to revisit how the concepts and principles we trade in are applied (or not) in academia.

Several themes emerged across the days, highlighted by the two keynotes: Don Norman’s “Living with Complexity” and Cory Ondrejka’s “Angry Dinosaurs.” These two speakers couldn’t have more divergent styles (Norman, the wise and respected mentor; Ondrejka, the double-caffeinated fast-talker who knows he’s right, but is just respectful enough to let you realize it yourself) but ultimately spoke on the same topic: Change.

The upshot of Norman’s talk (and upcoming book) was that complexity is not only OK, but is to be desired…especially when the alternative is baffling simplicity masquerading as “design.” As our worlds become more and more complex, he claims, it is up to us as designers to ensure it doesn’t become more complicated. We must design for memory, not for the moment; creating pleasurable experiences that will overcome the frequently less-than-ideal interface trade-offs of today’s mobile devices.

Quick, what time is it? The sundial is simplicity incarnate, but the wall clock's complexity helps reduce complication.

Ondrejka took a different tack on the theme of “change,” positing that agility (or adoption rate) will become a–if not the–key competitive advantage in the near and long-term. He railed, rather convincingly, against the “Angry Dinosaurs” of the world who fail to see that their business model is crumbling around them (NYT, RIAA, we’re looking at you). Admitting you have a problem is only the first step, however. Ondrejka continued to outline how to build an agile team (that’s a small “a” for all you SCRUM/Agile/Lean geeks) in these massive institutions, how to foster innovation (which he likens to art and pornography…you know it when you see it, but nobody can define it), and why few of us can see massive world-rocking change coming before it’s about to swallow us whole.

Beyond the keynotes, some of the breakout sessions covered such topics as conducting quick and dirty usability tests, the benefits of prototyping, what to expect (or not) from your CMS, and designing interactions with Ajax.

For the most part, the lessons of the conference were broadly applicable and not just suited for the higher ed world. While the keynote speakers were clearly in a different league than most of the breakout hosts, the conference did provide good value given its extremely reasonable fees. Looking to 2011, this conference seems well suited for those in early- or mid-stage UX careers looking to build their repertoire, but may leave more experienced practitioners wanting more deep dives.

Review: UIE Web App Masters Tour

We received some great feedback about our reviews of An Event Apart Seattle 2009 (AEA) and ePatient Connections 2009, so we figured we’d make it a tradition. Earlier this week we attended the Philadelphia stop of the 2010 UIE Web App Masters Tour – brainchild of UIE (User Interface Engineering) founder, and host, Jared Spool. Putting on an event tour like this takes moxy and a lot of coordination, so kudos to Jared & Co. for pulling it off quite smoothly in Philly. Overall, we had a very pleasant experience and were glad we attended; we walked away with both new insights and new ways of articulating concepts we’ve been batting around with clients for some time now.

Brian's Sketch Notes (Click the image above to see 'em all)

First things first… “Web App Masters” is a bold claim…did the speakers live up to it? We give that a solid “yes”. Whether or not the topic was in our particular wheelhouse, there were still solid takeaways from each talk even if some connected a bit more than others. Plus, we were also very encouraged by the undercurrent of experience design throughout the two days – we felt like these folks were speaking our language, and that they clearly understood the importance and value of user-centered design.

Luke Wroblewski wowed once again by combining his “greatest hits” around web form design with great new insight on collecting user input using mobile devices and beyond. Other highlights included the peek behind the curtain at 37signals (we’re fans, and use their products every day), Mark Trammell’s Twitter insights and Jared Spool‘s wise words about Vision, though the talk we found most inspirational was Stephen Anderson’s – a brilliant piece called “Serious Play: Designing Seductive Business Apps” that not only covered off nicely on the scope of the title but also offered principles and insights that can be applied more universally. Inspiring.

Stephen Anderson & Mental Notes

It also helped that Stephen was an engaging and dynamic presenter, which brings up the first of a few suggestions – that the overall energy of the conference could probably have used a shot in the arm. Granted, we’ve got our experience at AEA to compare this to – but there were a few things from an experience design standpoint that we thought could be tweaked.

Great authors and great designers don’t necessarily make for great speakers, and things tended to get a bit monotone at spots. Make no mistake, at conferences you get out of it what you put in – and there was plenty to be mined… evidence: Brian’s Sketch Notes. But to make it feel more like an “event” and keep things crackling, maybe pulling back from 75 minute presentations to a tighter and punchier 30-45 would help. For talks that got deep into execution that sometimes weren’t relevant to the entire audience, the next attention-getting topic shift was a little too far away.

Witticisms From Jason Fried, 37signals

Also, as far as execution goes – it was indeed fascinating to hear how web apps like Netflix and Basecamp were dreamt up and iterated. However, several talks were very focused on lengthy, in-depth use cases that not everyone could necessarily relate to. Certainly there were nuggets in there for people to take away and match up against their own experiences/organizations, but they weren’t always clearly pulled out as usable tips and pointers that could be more universally/practically applied. Put simply, there was more “here’s what we did” than “here’s what we did, here’s the broader concept it exemplifies, and here’s how you might think of applying it.”

Still, these are minor quibbles with a conference still finding its feet. The crew of speakers was down to earth, good hearted, and approachable – there was a great sense of community in the room and a sense of common purpose. The Twitter stream was equally collegial and respectful, and though it contained few new insights from attendees, it did provide great bite-sized takeaways for those unable to be there in-person.

Tools Of The Trade, As Suggested By Mark Trammell

If you’re looking for a solid conference to attend and are interested in the topics, you’ll certainly get good bang for your buck from this one. There’s one more stop on this tour in 2010 – July 12-13 in Seattle…so don’t delay!

Quick Thoughts from ePatient Connections 2009, Day 1

Our friends at KruResearch invited Think Brownstone to conduct 1:1 coaching sessions at the first ePatient Connections conference.

Blogs will be filled with recaps and Twitter is already teeming with comments hashtagged #ePatCon.

Rather than recap the day, I thought I would share a common theme I picked up from most of the presenters: The healthcare landscape is changing; listen to your patients and follow their lead. As we often note on our blog, listening to the user is the job of any experience designer.

Two memorable quotes from the day are good examples of how this message permeated the sessions:

We don’t blog because we have to, we blog because it helps us heal

-Kerri Morrone Sparling, Diabetes awareness advocate and sixuntilme.com blogger addressing her motivation to blog.

The users will tell you what’s relevant, it’s not about us

-Tricia Geoghegan, from Johnson and Johnson, when discussing how to determine what the best channel of communication is for your audience.

The questions asked during my Facebook 1:1 coaching sessions focused around, “How do I use Facebook to promote my (organization, product, service, non-profit…) My advice was twofold:

1. If you’re not already active on Facebook, get on it and use it in earnest for at least a month. During that time period, learn how the space works: the jargon, the etiquette. Become a user.
2. Don’t bother trying to force your audience to come to you. Every user group is different. Develop methods to identify where and how they communicate, but don’t be a stalker. The focus should not be on promoting, it should be about informing. Their voice is stronger in this landscape, when you’re providing value to your audience, they will listen.

I’ve known the folks at KruResearch for a while and even though this is their first big event, they get it. Probably because they have attended enough conferences that lacked focus or focused too much on star power and not enough on practical application.

Russ will be there today. Stop by his 1:1 coaching session if you’re around.

*images courtesy of the ePatient Connection Photostream

Refresh Philly Recap

Earlier this week, Russ and I presented at Refresh Philly. The best way to describe Refresh is to quote from their site:

Refresh is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.

The Refresh Manifesto:

Let’s Gather Great Minds

Let’s Share All Of Our Knowledge

Let’s All Grow And Learn

Let’s Promote Local Talent

Let’s Be More Than We Think Can Be

Let’s Make Our Cities Better

We were preceded by two great presentations: Shaun Gering showing off Chirp – (a new tool for online communities for TV viewers from CIM) and Tom Boutell from P’unk Ave walking us through Symfony, a technology solution that employs a full-stack framework and a library of cohesive classes written in PHP5. Our presentation was titled Experience Design Step 1: Starting on the Right Foot and focused on the first step of any design project: Problem Statements and SMART Goals.

One of the great things about Refresh is that it’s wide open – the members get to define what their intentions are and how they will execute the Refresh Manifesto in Philadelphia. Our interpretation was that this is a unique opportunity in the design & development community to use our skills in an altruistic way to improve the city – however we, as a group, decide where we can have the most impact. Russ’s analogy of us all being like the “Superfriends congregating at the Hall of Justice” focused on the fact that some of the brightest designers and developers in the Philly area were overlooking our city on the 45th floor of the Comcast Center looking for ways to improve it. We opened the floor to a discussion of the types of things that could “Make Our City Better” – trying to be open-ended and idealistic about it in order to eventually come up with some goals and then figure out what skills and technology could be used to achieve them rather than the other way around.

What was even more exciting to me were the conversations that occurred after the sessions. As the crowd dissipated, everyone was buzzing over what Refresh would/could become. The Think Brownstone crew retired to a local watering hole with some friends to talk about where we fit into the Philly design community. The next day, Tom posted an entry on the P’unk Ave blog that began a discussion over the difference between front-end, back-end and design – and what the most productive relationships between those in each camp might look like. Jonny Goldstein posted a napkin sketch of our presentation.

I hope Russ’s superhero metaphor continues to prove itself: by day we could be mild-mannered competitors, vendors and clients, but by night we could band together to use our talents to refresh our communities. It will be interesting to see how this one pans out.

A Company is “Born”

It was a great night. A dream come true, really. Now that I’ve had a few days to reflect on it, the best way I can describe what happened on Friday night is to compare it to the birth of a child. OK, I know it sounds weird, but stick with me.

201 Fayette Street, Second Floor, Conshohocken PA

Last September we started Think Brownstone. Carl and I had a vision, some basic principles, and a few really great clients. Yet with just a placeholder web page, fake business cards and no real office space, Brownstone was still somewhat under wraps, hidden from view.

Collect all nine colors

Over the last 12 months our company developed. Several incredible people joined our team. We defined our brand with a logo and website. Business cards were printed. An office space was transformed into a Think Space. A date was set, invitations were mailed and anticipation grew.

Lots of great friends

Then on Friday November 7th, 2008, Think Brownstone was introduced to the world. A company was “born”. Thanks so much for coming out and making our First Anniversary Celebration and Open House truly a night to remember. Even more than that, thank you all for your support, passion and trust through the years. We are going to make you proud.

Think Space

Visit our Flickr photostream for more photos from the Open House (thanks Steve!).