It’s been almost two weeks now since I returned from Interaction ’10 in Savannah, which was a fantastic conference packed with phenomenal people and content. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect (and recover from post-conference illness), here are some of my takeaways.

Meaning
Finding and providing meaning in the products and services we create was one of the repeated themes of the conference. Jon Kolko discussed the emergence of this theme in his post reflecting on the conference, as did IxDA board member Matt Nash-Lapidus.

This year the discussion moved from designing to affect behavior to designing to inspire. ‘Meaning’ was presented as the apex of design resonance, more central than aesthetics or emotion, and connected to a greater societal sense of ‘good.’ Nathan Shedroff said, “All design is the process of evoking meaning,” and Jon Kolko named ‘meaning’ as one of the four pillars of our profession and offered this quote from Yves Behar, “If it’s not ethical, it can’t be beautiful.”

Design as Collaboration with End-Users
Aside from debates about what to call ourselves, it seemed to me that the community has accepted the idea that we don’t design ‘experiences,’ because each person’s experience of an interaction is personal and individual. Many of the talks this year encouraged embracing the users as active participants in design. Cindy Chastain related interaction design to storytelling and made a clear point that a central component of every story is the context and expectations of the audience. Liz Danzico spoke about designing “frames” within which users can successfully improvise interactions. Allan Chochinov (in his standout presentation) said, “It’s not what you make, it’s what you facilitate.” Ezio Manzini encouraged us to “enhance people’s capabilities.”

From Screens to Physical Objects
Christopher Fahey had a slide in his talk showed a quoted from Don Norman in 2007 claiming that one of the “next UI breakthroughs” will be “the return to physical devices.” It seems that future is now. Timo Arnall and Matt Cottam both gave thoughtful and thought-provoking presentations of tangible interactions and physical computing, often in devices without a screen. Richard Banks, in his talk titled “The 40 Year Old Tweet,” spoke about the possible need to make digital objects tangible when preserving them as heirlooms.

In his FastCompany piece, Rob Tannen sees this as retrospection, but I saw it more as a sign of the inevitable seamless blending of technology into our surroundings.

Real People Are Compelling
The standout moments of the whole weekend for me were the moments in presentations that showed real-life (non UX) people. Just as our work suffers when it doesn’t have regular exposure to the people we are designing it for, some of the weekend felt a little light on perspective from outside the design world.

One of the reasons Allan Chochinov’s presentation of his students’ work was so outstanding was that most of the student pieces referenced actual people’s stories, such as the supremely touching story of a mom with cancer who wanted to make her baldness less scary to her children. Jon Kolko presented a fascinating student project which designed encouragement for college dudes to use condoms (“Man Shields”), complete with chuckle-inducing quotes and photos. Matt Cottam showed a very funny video of unsuspecting city residents taking an “abandoned” chair off the street and giving it a place in their home. Timo Arnall included captivating video and photos of a young girl delighting in toys and objects embedded with RFID chips. Richard Banks spoke of a man who had inherited a box of rocks from his grandfather, with no note or context to explain why.

These are just a few of the examples of real, non-designer people mentioned in the talks, but to me they clearly illustrate that (in presentations, anyway) people are more interesting than principles.

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Below is a slide-show of my notes from the conference. For in-depth, thoughtful recaps of all four days of the conference, see the Johnny Holland recaps.

Flipping through my notebook recently, I came across my notes from our second LA UX Book Club meeting. We discussed About Face 3, and were lucky enough to have a phone Q&A with the original author and inventor of personas, Alan Cooper. I thought it would be great, along with the public launch of this blog (Hi, everyone!) to share some of what he said to our group that day.

Angel on the "phone" with Alan Cooper

I didn’t make a transcript, so these quotes are rough, from my memory and notes. If you remember it differently, feel free to let me know in the comments.

On design:

• Good design is finding focus. Where do you focus on making the experience great?
• Users will forgive painful interactions that happen on the fringes if the core experience is great.

On personas:

• Nothing is more misunderstood than personas.
• Our most often used tools can also be crude.
• The important thing about personas is that they each represent a unique set of goals.
• When in use, personas need to be thought of as an actual, single person.
• Personas should be a process of discovery rather than invention.
• The value of a persona is that it gives focus and specificity. They can tell what (and who) not to worry about designing for.

On Agile:

• Just doing the technical “Agile” steps doesn’t make you agile. Really believing in the process makes you agile.
• As designers, we need to get on their schedule.
• Agile is good because developers take responsibility for quality through the process and ask themselves, “How can we make this better.”

On the future of the UXD practice:

• He used to tell people that he “swept sand off the beach.” Our job is an endless job. For every broomful we sweep off, developers sweep two on.
• There followed 15 years of people ignoring him. “The web is full of sand.”
• But the meme that he and others set loose in the ’90s has put down roots. What used to be “Get smarter users,” has changed to “Create smarter products.”

I really enjoyed our chat with Alan who was gracious, entertaining, and insightful, and I’m happy to be able to share this experience with you.  And I’m really looking forward to sharing even more with you here in the future!

A few weeks ago, I presented an introduction to the Nudge concepts at the LA IxDA meeting. This was my first UX public speaking appearance, and I was pretty nervous leading up to it, but I think it went well. The audience (though small) seemed pretty engaged and interested, I had a lot of fun presenting it, and my presentation was followed by some lively and intelligent discussion.

I’ve posted my slides on Slideshare, and there should be a video of the presentation up on the La IxDA site soon. All feedback welcome!

In December of last year, I started seeing a lot buzz on Twitter about a new wave of local book groups under the global banner of UX Book Club. I got really excited, because I realized I’ve been hoping for something exactly like this.  Motivation to read the books I’m always meaning toread, and a smaller, more personal gathering of interested folks with which to exchange thoughts on UX stuff. So I excitedly waited for someone to set up a Los Angeles group. And waited. And then I realized, duh, everyone else is also waiting for someone to step up, so if I really want it to happen, I should be brave enough to take the initiative.

So I set up the UX Book Club Los Angeles in February, and haven’t looked back since. It’s been a huge success, with more than 20 people at each meeting and a lot of positive feedback. I have gotten more out of it even than I had hoped.

Our first UX Book Club meeting

Shortly after our first meeting, Steve (‘Doc’) Baty, the initial godfather of the global effort, contacted all the local organizers asking for a short quote about their experience with UXBC for a Boxes and Arrows article. The article is finally out, and a little piece of what I wrote is quoted in it. You can read the article here: UX Book Clubs: Coming Soon to a City Near You, and my full response to Steve is below.

I started the book club in LA because, especially in this economic climate, it’s nice to get a chance to think outside the constraints of my day job and to chat about the bigger UX picture with fellow professionals. Also I have been meaning to read many of these books for ages, and I thought book club discussions and deadlines would be a good motivator.

Our first meeting actually exceeded my expectations. I know that everyone is busy with limited time for reading, and in LA you can guarantee that most people have a long drive to any meeting place.  I thought we might get 10 or so, but we gathered almost 25 dedicated and enthusiastic people. I was particularly gratified to see such a mix of professional titles. Most UX people I know are web interaction designers like me, but the book club drew developers, software UI designers, business strategists, visual designers, and various flavors of agency and in-house IAs and IxDs. Despite some complaints on the email list prior to the meeting about the book being difficult to get through, we had a really engaging discussion on sketching in all of its forms, how it fits into our process, how sketching might or might not overlap with wireframes, whether or not Agile is antithetical to the kind of design process Buxton recommends, and how sketching might inform personas.  Conversation never flagged, and at the end everyone seemed glad that there was this forum to come together to continue our professional education and have a quality, small-group conversation with our peers. In short, I thought it was invigorating and awesome, and I’m really looking forward to the next meeting.

If you are in LA, I HIGHLY recommend you join us at our next meeting! Just join the Los Angeles UX Book Club LinkedIn group and follow the discussion for meeting and book news. Or watch this blog for any exciting announcements. Oh, and you can follow me on twitter here: @sgmitch.