I last dinner last night with Greg Prang, an old buddy back from when we were in business anthropology grad school together. He was in town for work. He is at the Hartman Group working as a business anthropologist. Nice!

He was telling me about the great work he is doing there on “occasions” and investigating the world of occasions. Previously I blogged about “need states” and I think occasions are the next step along the path from need states. I see need states as having grown out of the work on shopping ecologies and how e-commerce spaces can fully take advantage of different shopping ecologies. With the megatrend growth in mobile shopping, these ecologies have blended and become co-located with occasions giving us even more blue-ocean opportunities for innovation.

User Experience might find this framework the most interesting/useful:

Instrumental >> Savoring >> Inspirational

Don’t think about products that you are launching. Think about experience design as designing for “occasions.” This framework is a strategic way to think about your customers’ occasions” and developing new products. Look at using this framework as a way to drive innovation especially on service design and mobile devices in which context can change rapidly.

References

Greg Prang

Strategic Framework for Occasions

Need States

Shopping Ecologies, One example of Pilgrimage

We played the Social Mania Game tonight at Millers. Most of our Social Team was there and we came up with 4 new products.

Attached is a PDF generated from Notable about my thoughts regarding Facebook and Privacy settings. As I've written previously in posts regarding privacy, the landscape is changing, morphing by the millisecond so anything I post in this context will probably be old news before I click the submit button.

Regardless, from an experience and design and business perspective, I noticed many things that fail to provide the (assumed) user with effective ways of not only configuring settings but understanding the configuration(s) and/or setting(s) in and of themselves.

High Level Observations:

- Why does a user have to go to a dashboard or a full-blown state/mode to configure content display models, content access or screen configuration? In other words, it would be so much more understandable and valuable to users if the settings for privacy where accessible in the context of interacting with the content.

- Why does the "preview" state have to be a state? Why can't it be a "resolution model" which shows me a real-time feedback loop of how what I choose or select impacts the "default view" of my profile from

- multiple perspectives. If you're going to force me into the "Only me, friends, and everyone" model of grouping, at least give me the option to define my own groups and ways of naming them/specifying access control. Facebook has always felt more like an application or platform as opposed to a website made of pages and page turns. Yet they insist on staying "simple and elegant" (which means they are too lazy to think about some fundamental design issues).

- Still seeing a lot of fine print, abstraction, and obfuscation burying more fine print behind links in sub or supporting copy blocks. An organization like Facebook is responding to public outcry. The experience in and of itself is a "brand message" and wholly effects "perception". It's not good enough to simply offer access anymore. What is vital if Facebook plans on retaining users or limiting attrition is to be completely transparent in policy and effect/input by the user.

- How do my privacy settings affect the use of my "social graph" in the form of several syndicatable streams, including Facebook? How does OpenID get affected? How can I manage OpenID/FBConnect privacy settings in this context? Can I?

Also stated before is the fact that social networking sites were not built to retain or protect a person's sense of privacy because they are about public (or specified as private) interactions via a channel called the "internet". In the end, these settings are a knee-jerk and quick panic response by what I assume to be c-class and legal fighting some made-up time limitation with the intent to "get something up" as opposed to provide real value (i.e. Clear understanding) to the user. The troubling pattern I am seeing here is that facebook is in a loose-loose situation. They are trying to control something that is at the core of their value proposition both to themselves and the people who use the website. Without the "social graph" and "data trail" people leave, FB diminishes in value returns in terms of relevancy and experience. By answering to public outcry, facebook has abandoned this core value structure capitulating to advertising and revenue streams due to its market position.

We all know that when the user is happy, the company will be too. I wonder when the companies of tomorrow will start realizing that this "game" has changed. That the user is in control now and that the system is expected to provide this control. It's no longer let's build it and let the user figure it out. It's the user dictates everything and I provide the tools to enable him or her or it to do so. Still, I see many companies, even as new as Facebook, holding tightly to old and failed models, repeating mistakes in favor of the business as opposed to listening to customers. This leaves a great gap for opportunity and competition, if not the death of Facebook to come (at least as we know it today).

My prediction for identity and privacy on the web: user beware and user controls. More and more pieces of our online identity have been moving to the "cloud" which means a syndicated and consistently synced identity that the user chooses where and what information is accessible to whom and when and how. We're not there yet. And the war is with the usual suspects who most of the time want to be given information without giving anything other than a bad user experience back. The value to all gets lost in the battle when the solution seems simple to those with experience: be transparent or don't do anything at all when it comes to my data and my privacy and a risk of me being harmed or vulnerable to harm through use or a system. Liability will always be an issue when it comes to privacy because the entire definition and concept of privacy is dependent on multiple people or parties. There are negotiations, norms, implicit and non-implicit rules of behavior. There are also policies in place that can be leveraged if harm does happen. In the end, it's all about personal responsibility and vigilance by the user to manage what data is provided and when and how.

Here is a great shot of our first "Experience Talks" organized by our own Judy Cheske. Fred Leise, manager of taxonomy, gave a great presentation about taxonomy, our process, and where we are going in the future. Jenny Benevento, a taxonomist in the group, also tag teamed with Fred answering the many questions that people had.

See if this sounds familiar...

A colleague sends you a meeting invite, "Brainstorm on Project X - Conference Room C - 3pm." That's it. Just bring yourself, a notebook, sometimes a laptop, (for checking email when things get dull) and if you're really sharp, maybe some extra markers and Post-its to share.

So you gather up with your co-workers a windowless conference room, a place that would do a nice job standing in for a sensory deprivation tank. Blank walls. Sterile shelves and tables. A big blank whiteboard.

The brainstorm starts with a quick recap of, "Project X," then someone goes to the whiteboard, and grabs a marker. Next someone asks the worst question possible...

"Wouldn't be cool if _____?"

This is the number one killer of projects. This is absolutely the wrong question to ask. We've all seen work that makes us stop and wonder, "What the heck were they thinking?" The thinnest of strategies, the vaguest objectives, the scatter-shot tactics, the lame executions, all often are born from brainstorm meetings that look something like this.

The question that you should be asking is...

"Isn't it cool that _____?"

This is a question that you can only ask if you have insight into the audience. Any project that doesn't start with the customer, the audience, the target, the users, at the center of your thinking, will fail, no matter how smart the people in the room are.

Stop expecting your team to deliver creative in a vacuum.

Give everyone a brief and background prior to the meeting, give them a chance to chew on it for a bit, and bring their own insights to the table.

Fill the room. Make the room a workshop, not a blank slate. Have insight into the audiences posted, context for the technology, and the objectives for the business tacked up on the walls, products on the shelves, and prototypes on the tables.

Fix it now. Ask the right questions. Make it a priority to give yourself and your colleagues a fighting chance at delivering valuable experiences. Your audience deserves it.

This coming Wednesday night we are going to play Social Mania: Designing Social Interfaces. The Game. We are looking forward to using this to help us imagine and build the best social experience we possibly can. Who says User Experience Architects aren't a fun loving group.

Healthcare innovation physician and service design fan Dr. Sam Basta found this great ebook, A Brief Guide to Service Design, by Paul Thurston of Think Public and Nick Marsh of EMC Consulting. Service Design Doing is about: * Designing lots of touch points * Designing around the user experience * Using a design process * Creating a vision Service Design Thinking is about: * Helping people think like designers * Helping people focus on the user * Helping people use design methods * Helping people visualize http://issuu.com/paulthurston/docs/uxbrighton_edit.ppt?mode=embed&layout=http%3A%2F%2Fskin.issuu.com%2Fv%2Flight%2Flayout.xml&showFlipBtn=true Enjoy!

I'm at the annual conference of the American Society for Indexing, and it's amazing how much time indexers spend thinking and talking about what readers (indexers users) want and how they use an index. Yet indexers have absolutely zero time to do user research. In fact, there have been very few usability studies at all.

A study by BNA a few years ago did show that legal indexes significantly improved performance of individuals asked to find relatively simple legal information in a text compared to searching. We also know that increased use of cross-references (see and see also) improve performance in using indexes.

But no individual indexers facing the problems of indexing a particular text really know how what the users for that text would like to find or how they would like to find it. All we can do is guess. And commiserate. And dream of being able to do real usability testing of any sort.

From the J Boye Conference 2010

The 5 most interesting ideas from J Boye Conference 2010

The unbound Portal: The user is at the center. It is no longer about the end users having a portal into the enterprise, but now it is about the portals giving enterprises doorways to the end user.

CMSs are the new operating systems

The biggest way to change a company is to change who they see as their competitors.

Social Business is about 4 principles 1 We have a sufficient robust network of nodes and connections. 2 People are now more into collaborating than hoarding. 3 Communication is now becoming the work. 4 The information expanse is focusing attention on analysis and meaning.

Question: What if your employees’ tweet and no customers hear it?

References

http://www.jboye.com/conferences/philadelphia10/

by GARY WOLF, April 26, 2010

"People are not assembly lines. We cannot be tuned to a known standard, because a universal standard for human experience does not exist."

"The map is not the territory." — Alfred Korzybski

"I think the loss of our human-ness is more the result of inadequate tools that make us adapt to them instead of the tools adapting to us.

The philosophical paradigm shift this represents is on a scale with the spread of written language, the development of agriculture, or the Enlightenment. Whether we like it or not, integrating the computer into the minutia of our daily lives means we are changing the game - externalizing the computing power of our own brains. The terror and the excitement people feel at this more and more obvious change is the most convincing evidence I can think of that it's real and it's accelerating."

"I've met people like this.

I usually find them very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very very...

BORING."

"literacy was once a threat to humanity because of the way it "represented" the vagaries of human life. (I am reminded of the belief in some cultures that photographing the human form is kind of theft of the soul.) I am sure you are right that we will eventually find humanity in data, as we have in the written word.

However, it is not honest or responsible to confidently assert, for example, that early critics of the written word were simply wrong. History does not show that. History shows, rather, that the written word made its wielders more powerful. Don't forget: the written word has often been used to oppress. Think of Martin Luther and the early Protestantism--it was largely a response to the way the Church had used literacy as a tool of oppression. Our idea that literacy liberates is basically a function of the fact that it equalizes the weak with their oppressors, not that it is "inherently" liberating.

Self-tracking will undoubtedly be used to oppress. It will wend its way into mainstream culture, eventually becoming something that employers expect of you as a matter of course. The temporal "productivity gaps" which we use to daydream, think about politics or other non-work related ideas, or simply consolidate memories, will be targeted and eliminated. Also, it is almost inconceivable that self-tracking data will avoid eventually going public.
Only by grasping the subtle seriousness of this issue will we give ourselves a chance at actualizing a future that does not involve blanketing ourselves in highly granular control mechanisms.

It's probably inevitable but that doesn't make it good. Look at it this way: we will never know what the world would be like today if writing hadn't been invented, and conversely, there are an indefinite number of technologies that weren't invented hundreds of years ago, and we will never know what the world would be like today if they had been invented."