Digital agency team members who attend conferences are expected to “share the learnings” with team members who aren’t able to attend. So these are the takeaways I shared from from the 2013 IA Summit with our Boston UX team:
Key themes included empathy and compassion for stakeholders… basically a “we’re in this together” perspective. I particularly liked the acronym of WWaHHD? (what would a helpful human do?) as a way of thinking about what a solution should offer. Also, the importance of solving the right problems. Often a solution is already defined in project requirements, but it is important to step back and ask “Why?” “What’s the desired outcome?”
And context is so critical as we move into the interconnected future. Understanding context means more than just screen size – for example, Avi Itzkovitch talked about HCI markers, which is data collected during human-computer interaction that can indicate changes in mental, physical or psychological states… and this issue of context takes us into the really big takeaway – the opportunities presented by mobile. The pictures in the fourth slide of my presentation show the audience waiting for the new Pope to be announced in back in 2005, as compared to just recently in 2013. In the first picture, you can see maybe a couple of mobile phone screens, but look at the huge difference just eight years later, it looks like every one has some kind of mobile device with a screen.
But the point isn’t just the proliferation of mobile screens, it's really about what mobile technology will be able to do. It’s not just a responsive website on a phone, or an app. It is interconnectivity, being connected at all times. As Andrea Resmini said, we will be living in a digital environment – like water and air, digital will only be noticed by its absence.
Another particularly compelling insight was Scott Jenson's observation that digital evolution challenges our current ways of thinking: “We evaluate tomorrow’s technologies by yesterday’s tasks… the world is running ahead of out ability to conceptualize what is happening.”
Presentation I shared with the Boston UX Team
I included this last slide to answer a question that had been circulating in a Roundarch Isobar email string while I was at the conference…
This poster, created by Lis Pardi, shows the results of research she did with 18 to 25 year olds. Lis showed these screen icons to the young test subjects. It turns out that 96% recognized the floppy disc icon, and 83% understood that it means save – so there’s the answer to the question that was being discussed – whether or not the “Save” icon had any meaning to a young audience!
