A few weeks ago I wrote a post entitled UX Designers: Why are we hiding? In it, I highlighted thoughts on the New York Tech Meetup, as well as the tech scene in general and how we as UX professionals are not present in it. While at the same NYTM that inspired that post, I witnessed something that everyone present as well as watching on the live stream thought was incredibly awesome. A brave, talented 6th grader got up in front of the entire audience and talked about his school (one where they focus on computers, game design, etc from a young age) and demoed one of the games he created for his class.

If this wasn’t cool enough, especially for a crowd full of hundreds of techies, what really struck me was the way that he presented his materials. He actually read everything straight from his notes, a big no no for presenters today, but something that brought me back to when I was learning how to give presentations. I remember when I was in middle school, if I had to talk to the class or a big group, I’d sit down and write out each and every word and review with my teacher to make sure it was perfect. Watching this child present, I began to relive my memories of those moments. What I was remembering the most, was the process that my teacher instructed me to take. He/she wanted me to write an outline, move on to a summary, then intro and ending, then the body, etc. I could see that this young guy had gone through a very similar, if not the same process.

The point of me bringing this moment up here is not to reminisce on my youth but to point out that this presentation was probably the most detailed, clear and informative of the entire night. Everything that he said made since to me, and I clearly understood the point of him standing up there, what he was showing and why and what that meant to me. It was odd that this sixth grader stood out to me much more than any of the other presenters who were businessman/woman trying to show their ideas. I started to think that the reason why had to be his framework for writing his presentation. How many of us go through that rigor when presenting? I know that I don’t nearly as much as I should. This kid nailed it! And because of his preparation, it was a wonderful experience to hear him speak.

I obviously don’t think that we should be reading each and every word from a note card like we did back in the day, but I do think there is something to be learned here about providing a clear and informative talk using a framework that is fairly well known throughout most elementary and middle schools. Perhaps, this is what sets the great speakers apart from the bad ones to begin with? What are your thoughts? It would be great to hear your presentation prep framework tips. I’d also love to hear any thoughts or opinions on what I may be missing or if you took this an entirely different direction, especially if you saw the presentation I’m referencing. In any case I know I can say that that little guy is my inspiration from here on out for presentations.

In this week’s post on New York Entrepreneur Week, I talk about experiences that I’ve had viewing product demos. I also reflect on what makes a demo great, and how this relates to what we do in the User Experience Design field. Check out How Entrepreneur Demos Are Like Experience Design, and feel free to voice your opinion on my opinion.

I wanted to write a post addressing the behavior that I’ve noticed around Facebook’s announcement of the Open Graph Protocol. I’ll admit that I intended to do way more research on this topic before I wrote this post, but I didn’t prioritize that activity in my to do list. So you’ll have to settle with a less researched point of view. That being said I’d love to hear more in the comments about your thoughts, concerns, and suggestions regarding what else I should be reading to become more knowledgeable.

Here are some bits of information that have helped me come up to speed. First, in a post on factoryjoe.com Chris Messina talks more about OGP and helps to understand it. His argument, a good one at that, is that OGP benefits no one but Facebook and that it is dangerous for one company to own so much personal information about you. A couple of tweets have also stood out to me. From @berkun: Flickr’s privacy policy: 384 words. Facebook 5,830: http://nyti.ms/aphEW9 (via @scottros @Caterina) and from @mmilan: “Just got done talking with CBC News about quitting Facebook. Should be on tonight. #quitfacebookday @quitfacebookday”.

But perhaps my favorite bit of Facebook talk has been from Mashable in the article In Defense of Facebook by Ben Parr. In his article, Ben talks about how Facebook should not be the target for our anger around OGP. Instead, he says that we should be responsible for our own privacy on the web, and we should not give the responsibility to Facebook.

Ok, so we have the set up. Some people are pissed at FB, some people claim to want to quit FB, and some people don’t think that FB is the real problem. With all these pieces in place, I have a few questions for you.

1. Has anyone actually quit FB over this? Are we seeing a mass exodus from the social media site? Personally, I have not noticed any behavior around quitting. I have noticed talk about quitting, but have not seen it happen. Why do you think that is?
2. Do you think FB is to blame for infringing on your privacy? Are you angry at FB for implementing OGP?

For me, the answer is No to both questions. No, I have not quit FB and have not seen people do so and I believe it is because deep down in their core people realize that FB is not to blame for privacy infringement. Maybe I’m an idealist, but I have to believe that people see that it was not FB that filled out the personal information form with their name, birthday, address, phone number, martial status, etc. It was not FB that uploaded those pictures from their last kegger (got some coming soon folks no worries ). It was not FB that spouted off about their boss or their spouse or their friend. All FB did was give us the medium to do so.

Thus, I could not agree with Mr Ben Parr more. Yes, FB should’ve communicated better. But, our information, our lives and protecting them is our responsibility, not FB’s. They can do with our information pretty much what they want as long as they give us the 1000 privacy controls with which to set. And you know what? They know, just like you and I do, that we won’t quit the service. Why? Two reasons: we know that it’s our fault all our personal information is on the internet, and we love sharing our lives, even our very personal lives, with others. FB knows this, that’s why they created their online services, and that’s why they continue to use your information to promote their services and integrate them more and more with the web. They are trying to become indispensable, and in truth they’re pretty darn close to it. If they weren’t indispensable, you would’ve quit already right?

Since OGP has come out I’ve refrained from clicking anything that looks like a Like button on the web. I’m not sure why really, but mostly I’m pretty sure it’s my attempt to try to protect my privacy. I believe it is my responsibility to take care of my information and I’m going to be careful with sharing things, as I’ve always been.

My point of this article? Despite all the hype and misplaced anger, no one is quitting FB. FB will continue to grow and sites will continue to integrate with it. Therefore I, as an individual who uses their services, have decided to take control of my information and when I share it. No one will protect me but me, and I am not planning on quitting FB anytime soon. I doubt that you are either, so if you are mad about your privacy become more educated about and active in protecting it.

Yesterday, UX Booth published an article that Gabi Moore and I wrote entitled Mission Impossible: Shrinking the UX Process. In it, Gabi and I write about the experience we had at her workplace, AnyClip (a site where you can find and experience movie moments), this winter. While there, we worked together to create a UX Strategy for AnyClip, a company that was about to re-release at Austin’s SXSW. The caveat is that we had to create the strategy in only three weeks.

The article outlines what our process was, what worked for us, and also where we went astray. Lastly, the article provides tips for other UXers to be able to recreate the same output that we had. During this time, we found such a great deal of satisfaction and success in our work, that it only felt natural to share it with all of you. Hopefully there is some information that you can glean from our experience to add to yours.

Read the full article here.

UX Booth is a blog for and by the user experience community. It is organized and ran by three awesome, highly intelligent and talented individuals: Andrew Maier, Matthew Kammerer and David Leggett. I cannot thank them enough for giving us the opportunity to present our thoughts to the UX Community. I am proud to have been able to become an author on such an outstanding website.

Special thanks are due to Karen McGrane and Whitney Hess, for contributing feedback as well as helping to edit this piece. Most importantly I owe a huge thank you to AnyClip for letting me join their outstanding team for three completely awesome weeks.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Since my background is in programming, and I started my stint in UX by working on the client side, I never really worked closely with a creative director or branding team until I moved to NYC. When I moved to NY I found myself working a great deal within agencies or with people that came from agency backgrounds. The model was set up such that the “creative” (usually visual design) reigned supreme and everything had to be passed through a creative director for approval. Each bit of functionality and development had to reflect the brand correctly. Ok, that made sense, however what threw me off was that the brand and the experience were usually thought of as separate. Also, The Brand came first in the process, and was more important, even if portraying it disrupted the experience.

For instance, I was in a meeting where we were looking at a mobile web application. Because the application would be used on a mobile device, the page weight had to be light for a faster download speed, and contrast had to be taken into account as the user could be using the device inside, outside or anywhere. When I brought up the concerns that I had with a particular design not taking these practices into account, I was told that the look and feel had to be a certain way due to The Brand. I couldn’t help but wonder what people would think of The Brand if they couldn’t use the application (one they would have to pay for). Basically having a bad experience with the application would seem to reflect badly on The Brand itself. Somehow, this connection was not being made on the other end, and this made me feel like I was insane! Was I the only one in the room that saw what would happen if we didn’t update our thinking??

Coincidentally, Joshua Porter recently wrote a great post on the 52 Weeks of UX site that described exactly what I’ve been mulling over. Of course, his description was much more clear and elegant and I encourage you to read through the post: Experience Precedes Branding. The basic premise is that people don’t use products simply because they look good or have a consistent look and feel (although these are important). They use them because they provide a good experience. And the better the experience they provide, the more a user will want to engage with the product. It’s simple really, experience is the brand, brand is the experience. They are tied together into one. In the print days, the user didn’t interact with an ad for a product. They saw a static view that conceptually portrayed the product, what it did, and who it was for. Now that we are in the digital age, the portrayal has become less conceptual and more direct. People are now using our applications, not looking at them to sell the product, they are the product. It’s time for a change in thinking.

I’ll leave you with a question. How do we begin to get our creative counterparts and others, mostly from a print background, to understand this? Is it just a simple case of pushing back, or of getting executive level leadership in place who own the experience? What ideas do you have to help us progress?

Last night I attended the May 2010 New York Tech Meetup. For those readers that don’t know what that is, it is hands down one of the largest if not the largest tech event in New York City. It is held every month and brings startups and small businesses together to receive announcements about what’s going on in the tech community, and view demos of what other web startups are building and trying to get funding for. This is a huge deal, last night even the FCC was there with announcements and I have seen the mayor’s office there in the past.

During last night’s event, I couldn’t help but note several different ideas for blogs posts, and was planning on combining all of them into one redux post. I think, however, that that would dilute each topic’s importance, so multiple posts it is. Today, I wanted to talk about the lack of UX representation at these events, and how truly sad that is. I may have written about this before, but the thought and emotion behind it struck me again last night, so I felt the need to expound upon it.

As a user experience designer, I personally love attending NYTM as often as I can for several reasons. Most important is that going enables me to communicate and meet others who work in digital but aren’t in the user experience space. Just me being there and talking with others enables the tech community to be more aware of what UX is and how it can be helpful to startups and small businesses. Our UX community is a small world, and frankly I think that we look internally for ideas and even new jobs way too much. It seems that we are Obsessed with the Reputation of being known in the UX community or working at one of the big wig companies, more so than actually solving problems outside of our community. When I walk into these demos at the NYTM there are gazillion UX problems that I see (not that these people aren’t trying their hardest and don’t have great ideas and products because they are truly coming up with some amazing things). I can’t help but ask myself why we, as user experience designers, aren’t jumping at the chance to be part of this community. Think about it. If you live in NYC, why weren’t you there last night? Would you be so careless to miss an opportunity to talk with Jared Spool or another well known UXer? I know that Jared and other well known UXers have a GREAT deal of experience, and have taught me a great deal of what I know, BUT have they given me the opportunity to USE what I know. That opportunity lies within your local tech community, whether you want to face it or not.

Last night a number of new website products demoed. I would say about 80 – 90% of them were hiring, and none of them were hiring UX designers. Does that mean they already have someone on staff? No actually it means they either don’t know what we do or don’t care. Why? Because we aren’t making ourselves known… we aren’t even showing up and trying to be a part of the tech community! These start ups are the future Twittters, Foursquares, Facebooks, Google, etc. These are the ideas at the start of the success, and we are not included and it is not because they don’t “like” us. It’s because we choose not to be included. We are excluding ourselves from the technology world, then wondering why nobody cares about UX.

My message is simple. It’s time to stop whining that no one gets what we do and it’s time to stop being frustrated about it. It’s time to show up to the court, ask who needs an extra player and show off the madd skills we have and how we improve products and businesses. It’s our time… you got game?