HCI Highlights from the 2010 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) Conference in San Francisco

By Chauncey Wilson

Two weeks ago, I attended the HFES conference in San Francisco. The conference had several of the best panels on design, user experience, and usability that I’ve seen in many years as well as some excellent individual papers. Here are some highlights and notes from the conference.

Investing in User Research: Making Strategic Choices
Stephanie Rosenbaum, Kelly Braun, Dennis Wixon, Seema Swamy, Krista Van Laan, Chauncey Wilson

What type of strategic investments should we make in user research? The major categories of invesment were staff, infrastructure, domain training for staff and UX training for stakeholders. One topic that generated some some lively discuss was investment in public relations. User Experience teams need to invest in people and activities that highlight the value of the UX team. Public relations can be at many levels starting with reports that summarize research results to brownbags and before/after posters that show concrete examples of how a team’s work resulted in improvements to a product. Panelists strongly agreed that a focus on user goals was not sufficient for success; you also need to be aware of business goals at the corporate, division, and group level. There was spirited debate about metrics for measuring the success of a user experience team. How do we connect our output to corporate goals and measures of success? Some best investment practices for user research teams include:

• Invest in a broad toolkit – don’t focus on a single method like usability testing.
• Have a diversified team with complementary skills.
• Pay attention to both business and user goals. 
• If user research is new to a company, focus on building relationships early and focusing on areas where there is a perceived user experience problem.
• Invest in understanding what types of deliverables are most useful for your audiences.
• Develop a set of measures and metrics for tracking the effectiveness of the user research team.
• Blasphemy or Pragmatics?

 

When Not to Follow User-Centered Design Techniques
Anthony D. Andre, Jay Elkerton, Steve Portigal, Cordell Ratzlaff, Dan Saffer, Dan Rosenberg

This panel, which included some well-known consultants and designers in large corporations (SAP had a controversial title and make the point that there are different types of design, each with different costs and benefits. Design approaches highlighted in this discussion included:

• User-centered design (perhaps good for evolutionary design, but not good for new creative products)
• Activity-centered design (good for improving workflow at a small level, but not good at big picture design)
• Data-driven design (e.g., designing based on Web analytics)
• Genius design (good for rapid projects but requires very skilled designers and can go “very, very wrong”.
• Geniuses in one area (design) might not be geniuses in other areas like usability or performance)
• Systems design (a focus on components that is good for large scale products with very large teams)
• CEO centered design (e.g., you design for someone like Steve Jobs and not the typical users)

Several key points from the panel:

• The type of project will influence the primary design approach.
• Developing a successful product will often involve multiple design approaches.
• Be clear about what you are designing to. Are you designing to a vision? Are you designing for discomfort (e.g., you might design a game where winning is hard)? Are you designing to “follow the money”? Are you designing to change the world?

Steve Portigal and Dan Saffer had some great slides --
Portigal's slides: http://designcorner.blinkr.net/slides-from-when-not-to-follow-user-centered-design-techniques-at-hfes/
Saffer's slides: http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2010/09/what-user-centered-design-is-good-for/

 

Harvesting Innovation in the Industry: Prescriptions for Breakthrough Products
Felix Portnoy, Victoria Bellotti, Arnie Lund, Dan Russell, Kristian Simsarian, Kaaren Hanson, Marc Resnick

This session included panelists from Microsoft, Google, IDEO, Intuit, and PARC. Here are some brief notes from the session.

• Innovation is what you see after all the hard work between the beginning and end of a project (Google panelist)
• To have innovation, you need to take care of yourself and your culture (e.g., the good food at Google and time for reflection provide a good environment for innovation).
• Give colleagues time for reflection (e.g., 20% of employee time is dedicated to innovation).
• Encourage people with different backgrounds to mix. Sit with people from different groups rather than the same group at lunch and other social events.
• Be public with your failures. The Google panelist described how his colleagues write up self-evaluations of failures and send them out widely to help others avoid mistakes.
• Follow potential users around to provide insights not possible from other methods that only take snapshots of users.
• Involve many people (beyond your own team) in the evaluation and extension of ideas.
• Apply data-driven design (e.g., A/B testing, event logging) relentlessly.
• Big changes and small changes can have profound consequences on user satisfaction and performance.
• Product design teams need to consider both the big and small.
• Consider the intersection of emotion and user experience in product design.
• Innovation can be driven by user needs AND by technology opportunities.
• Get out to the marketplace at the very beginning of a project to develop the value proposition that will follow the development cycle (agile or waterfall or something else).
• Start with a vision and validate with data.
• Consider Laseau’s funnel as a model of innovation. First there is elaboration then reduction. Laseau’s funnel and several variations are described in Bill Buxton’s book, Sketching the User Experience.

 

• “You can’t know the tiger until you live in the jungle.” Fieldwork is critical for getting design insights.
• Innovation can be bad. For examples of innovation gone awry see http://chindogu.com/chindogu/
• A primary goal of a designer is figuring out what is missing and then to develop a value proposition.
• Use stories and video to drive modeling.

There were other panels and papers worth noting in this high-quality conference, but I had better stop now or this blog will become a book. If you have comments or questions, contact me at chauncey.wilson@autodesk.com.

 

 

Comments

[Alan Millar]

Great snapshot of the conference Chauncey. And thanks for the link to the full paper on Harvesting Innovation.

[Felix Portnoy]

Thanks for the positive feedback!
For those who are interested to read more about innovation methodologies, you can download the full paper Harvesting Innovation in the Industry using this link: http://bit.ly/biFSKH