"UX Deliverables in Practice" presentation published

Update (June 22, 2009): An audio file is now available for public download on the IA Konferenz website.
(Combining the audio with the slides on Slideshare turns out to be impossible due to a combination of my high tempo and Slideshare's limitations for transitions, sorry)

On May 17 2009, I delivered my invited presentation "UX Deliverables in Practice" at the IA Konferenz 2009 in Hamburg, Germany. A first (slightly modified) version is now available.

Given that my session was scheduled right after the lunch break on the last day, I had told the organizers that I would try to make it a bit of a show. Of course the real content -- a brief overview of theories of UX plus a wider look at some of the deliverables outside of the standard research-design-evaluation triad (which I summarized using a quiz) -- was there too. I think the format worked pretty well: despite my crazy 155-slides-in-45-minutes schedule, I finished ahead of time and had room for a brief Q&A session.

UX Deliverables in Practice

View more presentations from Peter Boersma.

The presentation is structured as follows:

• intro: Peters in IA
• intro: UX Theory =/= UX Practice
• UX Theory: models
• UX Theory: defintions
• UX Practice: more than research-design-evaluation
• UX Practice: Business & Strategy
• UX Practice: Quiz "What Deliverable Is This?"
• UX Practice: Business & Manage
• UX Practice =/= UX Theory
• closing: I Want You To...
• closing: More Elements of User Experience

I have made some small modifications (mostly removing animations) to allow for a more static review of the slides. I have also included some notes (I didn't prepare speaker notes in advance, but these reflect what I said or, in hindsight, think I wanted to say). In time, I hope to be able to add audio and synchronize it with the slides.
For now, this version of the presentation is available on Slideshare: UX Deliverables in Practice. I'd love to hear what you think of it and will try answer any questions.

Oh, and yes, I had a lot of fun at the IA Konferenz and encourage you to also have a look at the other presentations, gathered by the organizers.

Presenting (more than) UX deliverables at German IA Konferenz

I am proud to be part of the third German IA conference as an invited speaker. In line with the conference's theme ("IA in Business and Practice") I will be talking about User Experience deliverables in practice.

The presentation will build partly on my talk at the Adobe User Group meeting last year (see the video in Dutch or slides in English). But instead of focusing on the core UX design deliverables as I did there, I plan to also talk the audience through project management-related artifacts as well as evaluation activities. Because only in theory is the UX practice all about design deliverables...

Other international presenters include Peter van Dijck (author of Information Architecture for Designers) and the keynote speaker Lou Rosenfeld (author of the IA bible Information Architecture for the World Wide Web)!

To stay up to date on the IA Konferenz, which will take place on May 16 and 17 in Hamburg, follow the news. I hope to see some of you there!

UX Matters breaks record for mentioning 'T-shaped people'

UX matters.com, one of the better online magazines on user experience (UX), just published the article Specialists Versus Generalists: A False Dichotomy? In it, the author (Pabini Gabriel-Petit) mentions the idea of T-shaped people. Quite often. Really often. But it's good!

This article was interesting to me since I often have to refer to my own T-model for user experience professionals T-model: Big IA is now UX (and the addition of business IA). This is another article that explains the idea behind it.

Some quotes from the article:

Organizations should not require designers who have the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience to legitimately call themselves UX designers to specialize so narrowly. The best designers are unique individuals who bring diverse talents to their work—they’re T-shaped people

In my view, deep domain knowledge, while essential in a product manager, is not the primary criterion that should form the basis of a UX hiring decision. It’s usually a valuable asset, but there are also some positives that come from hiring T-shaped people who have experience outside your domain.

My dream team would consist of both specialists and T-shaped individuals with knowledge and skills that are both broad and deep.

and my favourite:

T-shaped people enjoy sharing their knowledge—with their peers in UX, with UX team members in other specialties, with people in other disciplines on multidisciplinary product teams, and with business leaders. They’re effective mentors and evangelists of user experience.

Amen!

Now go and read the article!

I am no longer an IAI Board member...

On December 17, 2008, I wrote a message to the IA Institute Board of Directors saying I wanted to resign from my position as Director for Local Groups.

The official IAI announcement will say "Because of personal and professional reasons, our fellow board member Peter Boersma has decided to resign his position on the IAI board." Here's some explanation around that phrase:

Recently I have found that my work life, family life and hobbies (which include organizing and speaking at professional events in our industry, but that is my problem ;-)) are (again) taking too much time and energy. I need to do less stuff...

One of the things I decided I needed to do less is worry about the IAI in a dedicated manner. For the last couple of years I have done that (worry and dedicate time) but, although I will always have a personal opinion on how the Institute is doing and what could be done better, recently I have found that I don't get enough energy out of it to continue. Combined with new responsibilities at work (the process freak in me is thrilled to be allowed to document Info.nl's design process!) and at home (I'm "sort of"(*) getting married to my girlfriend!), this has made me decide to stop worrying and resign.

I will definitely miss elements from the weekly conference calls with the Board and staff, late on Wednesday evenings; the first couple of minutes, where we exchange how we're doing personally, were usually hilarious (hi Russ! hi Andrew!) and the proud feelings I got when discussing the state of the field with fellow practitioners were wonderful! But I will also enjoy the extra hours, looking at wedding rings (?) and honeymoon locations (?) in the first half of the year, and watching the kids sleep (?) and going to bed early (and dream?) later this year. Those things give me energy.

Already I feel better now, thank you :-) And the IAI Board is taking measures to make sure Local IA Groups are on somebody's mind. I will also continue worrying about at least one local group; the Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour series will continue in 2009. And I plan to continue being an internationally active IA...
But no longer as a member of the IAI Board.

There you have it. For questions about any of this this, email me.

(*) "sort of"? Yes, it's a long story but we are picking the things we enjoy from getting married without actually getting married. We will celebrate our love with friends later this year.

A sad day for Information Design...

As a subscriber to the Info-Design mailinglist I received this sad message from moderator Karel van der Waarde:

Dear list,

This morning, I received a message from Piet Westendorp's partner that Piet passed away on November 19th.

His achievements in Information Design and many related areas are substantial. To pick just three out of his long lists of publications and presentations:

• co-author of 'Open Here. The art of instructional design' (1999)
  
• editor of Information Design Journal (2000-2004)
  
• guest editor of a Visible language issue on 'Visual metaphors in user instructions' (2007)

However, just mentioning a few publications does not do justice to his influence on education, research and practice. His involvement in the Technical Universities of Delft and Eindhoven (the Netherlands), his publications in a variety of research areas, and his continuous involvement in commercial practice made him a true all-round professional.

Piet Westendorp has been a remarkable person. I'll miss his clarity of thinking and his direct aproach, but even more, I'll miss his inspirational enthusiasm and curiosity.

Kind regards,
Karel.
waarde@glo.be

The field of information design has just lost a leader. It is a sad day.

Design Documentation presentation at Adobe User Group

Last Wednesday I gave a talk about Design Documentation at Meeting #9 of the Dutch Adobe User Group.

Update (December 8, 2008): The video is available! Here is the link to the video. I had to reload and fast-forward a couple of times, and the organisers say something went wrong with the encoding and a better version will be available soon, but for now it gives a very good impression of my presentation. You can switch between me, the slides and several steps in-between. Please note that the slides are in English, the presentation is in Dutch...

In this presentation I combined material from my IA Summit poster with examples from my 3-day Interaction Design training (Dutch only) and mixed in a good portion of Jesse James Garrett's Elements of User Experience. The mix was tasty, if I may say so myself...

The presentation is available on Slideshare (who selected it as a features presentation for their homepage, thanks Slideshare!) for online viewing, or right here as a PDF (5MB) for off-line viewing, and I believe the video will become available from the Adobe User Group website.

And: thanks to Paul Reinierse from De Monsters for his 115-character review on Twitter!

3 days left to submit posters for IA Summit

This is a reminder for those considering attending the 2009 IA Summit in Memphis next spring: This Sunday, November 30, is the deadline for submitting poster proposals!

Submitting a poster proposal is a light-weight way to have a more active role during the conference. I can imagine that having an accepted proposal makes it easier to get funding for the trip.

Last year, I deeply enjoyed preparing my By The Book poster and sharing the story of Info.nl's SNS Bank project (Dutch only) by showing all of the deliverables that are featured in Dan Brown's Communicating Design. Dan even dropped by for the photo opportunity.

Traditionally, the poster program is the most inclusive part of the program, which means many proposals get accepted. This is your chance to tell the global IA community about your ideas, your project, your models, your work environment.

Interested? Read all about submitting a poster proposal. I hope to see you in Memphis!