From Business to Buttons - Al Gore

From Business to Buttons

Last thursday we traveled to Stockholm for “From Business To Buttons” conference on friday, hosted by the lovely people at inUse. A full day conference around User Experience, Service Design and Sustainability.

Thursday night we separated to meet friends for dinner. Johan went to have a bite at Yuc and I went to Jamies Italian. Myself finished the night with a good night beer at the hotel bar before a good night sleep on the boat and hotel m/s rygerfjord.

Main experience and impressions after the day

  • Meeting great people who want to build great human experiences
  • Great design starts with culture: Work should be a safe place to be
  • We should challenge ourselves to focus on improving human lives, and don’t forget about the disabled ones
  • Problems can be solved through technology without yet another screen
  • We spend way too much staring at a screen during a day, what takes us away from our social life
  • In fact, we don’t need a screen interaction for everything
  • We need to gain more real human empathy for those who we design for
  • Challenge ourselves and colleagues to dig deeper and ask for the root cause of their beliefs through using the five WHYs
  • Al Gore is vegan
  • Scientists breed goats that produce spider silk in larger quantities
  • We can not use as much resources as we do today in order to keep climate in a shape that allows human and animal beings to live


ROBOTS, VIRTUAL REALITY, AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: THE FUTURE OF HUMAN INTERACTION WITH TECHNOLOGY

Dr. Susan Weinschenk – CEO of The Team W Inc., Author and Behavioral Scientist

Susan’s Slide Deck

Notes from Susan’s talk:

  • Transequence (temporary content) will increase in value – eg. Snapchat
  • People (will) use technology to be social
  • Having mobile phones on the table, even if it not ours, makes us feel socially less connected towards the ones sitting across the table
  • Unconscious data processing will increase – Technology allows us to influence decision making through signals send to our brains (What If You Could Have A Direct Feed From The Internet Into Your Brain?)
  • Technology recognizes our decisions 0.7 seconds faster from our brains before we actually take actions
  • Technology will increase neuroplastic to help people see, feel and move
  • Objects are expected to manage themselves
  • People trust machines more than human to make better decisions
  • If a car has a voice, and the voice has a name, it is more likely that we can trust it
  • The simplest robot made out of cardboard with a voice of an ten year old boy, made people talk right out of their hearts
  • Experiments with robots show how human can build relationship with digital mediums (BlabDroid)
  • We tend to have more emotions when robots are animal like, rather than human like (Watch robot dog ‘Spot’ run, walk…and get kicked – YouTube)
  • Robot pets are used today in nursery home to minimize loneliness

So what….

  • Human can in fact be emotionally attached with technology
  • Digital should feel more human, as if there is no technology involved


THE BEST INTERFACE IS NO INTERFACE

Golden Krishna – Design Strategist at Google

Goldens’s Slide Deck

Notes from Golden’s talk:

  • Sometimes we make tasks more complicated with interfaces when in fact no interface is needed
  • So called ‘backpocket applications’ allow us to interact without picking up the mobile to achieve specific tasks – the signal of a mobile simply does it for us
  • Screens now have taken over our lives
  • Screens everywhere, in cars, in your pocket, refrigerator, and even on your nose
  • An average person spends 150 times looking at their mobile during a waken day, and more than eight hours staring at a screen
  • There are apps for everything. Are you sick? There’s an app for that! Need to pray? There’s an app for that! Dead? Well, there’s an app for that, too!
  • Most apps are intentionally addictive distractions that end up taking our attention away from things like family, friends, sleep, and oncoming traffic
  • We are eager to use new technology, like screens etc. – But we forget to ask ourselves what the bigger problem is we are trying to solve for people

So what…

  • We can build a technologically in an advanced world without digital interfaces


HOW TO MAKE SENSE OF ANY MESS

Abby Covert – Independent Information Architect

Abbys’s Slide Deck

Notes from Abby’s talk:

  • Many people get overwhelmed when encountered a mess
  • The majority of mess is made of information (and people)
  • Information is not like content or data
  • Data are facts, observations, and questions about something
  • Content is whatever a user interacts with
  • Information is whatever a user interprets from the arrangement or sequence of things they encounter
  • Information architecture is how we arrange the parts to be understandable as a whole
  • Language matters
  • The goal is not simplify an arrangement or sequence of things – the goal is to be clear with you mean when you say what you say
  • There is no right way
  • There are only five ways to organize anything: 1. Location, 2. Alphabetical, 3. Time, 4. Category, 5. Hierarchy
  • Organizing things isn’t the hard part – Agreeing is the hard part
  • We need pictures – Pictures give us something in common to point to
  • Visualizing something when it is hard to explain in words
  • Show process, not just results

So what…

  • Involve real users to solve the mess, understand how they would organize the content
  • Group navigation rather so it makes sense to users, not how it reflects internal structure or your own common sense


FROM DAY ONE TO DAY NONE: THE LIFESPAN DESIGN CHALLENGE

Patricia Moore – President at MooreDesign Associates

Notes from Patricia’s talk:

  • Don´t make things for disabled people, make them for everyone. If someone disabled could use them, everyone can
  • Get empathy for your user, put yourself in their position – feel how they would feel

So what…

  • Being a user for a day helps to bridge empathy
  • Talking, listening and understanding users allows us to dive deep into their context, needs and goals


DESIGNING CULTURE

Jeff Veen – Design Partner at True Ventures / Former CEO of Typekit

Jeff’s Slide Deck

Notes from Jeff’s talk:

  • Equanimity (Latin: æquanimitas having an even mind; aequus even animus mind/soul) is a state of psychological stability and composure which is undisturbed by experience of our exposure to emotions, pain, or other phenomena that may cause others to lose the balance of their mind
  • Don´t find someone to blame, leaders need to build a safe workplace and spark a mental calmness
  • The five whys model helps to identify the root cause of a problem or critique
  • Share why something went wrong, how can we solve it and how could we fix so it won’t happen again?
  • Great teamwork with no disturbance could solve almost every problem
  • Focus to solve the task. Things that Jeff’s team at Typekit planned to take months was solved on a weekend
  • Culture should allow us to share our true thoughts
  • Chatt allow us to collaborate and act quicker
  • Chatt allows employees to respond more open on an opinion
  • We should feel safe in a work environment in order to spark innovation and creativity
  • Grow a team that trusts and respect each other leading to better products and service

So what…

  • Be open for critiques
  • Ask why five times in order to dig for the cause root of an opinion


THE MINDFUL MANAGER

Simon Bennett – Managing Principal for LASTing Benefits (AU/UK)

Simon’s Slide Deck

Notes from Simon’s talk:

  • Usually it doesn’t feel good when you screwed up
  • Being wrong is entirely different from realising that you are wrong
  • We are expected to be professional
  • Being professional should mean being complete human
  • Usually, the higher in an organisation you are, the less you have to defend yourself
  • Distinguish between being emotionally intelligent and being emotional
  • Ask yourself, do you hold beliefs or do you have knowledge?
  • Human beings are social animals, our communities can define, coerce and corrupt us or blame us
  • Share the burden
  • Safety is everyone’s responsibility
  • We experience others from the outside – but ourselves from the inside
  • From the outside the irrational use of power looks irresponsible and ugly
  • Leaders should use their power to shape new realities instead of distorting our view of the existing one

So what….

  • It is ok to screw up, as long as we realise we did
  • Screwing up helps us to learn
  • Encourage assumptions before knowledge


ELEGANT TOOLS: THE FOUR PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS DESIGN

Margaret Gould Stewart – VP, Product Design at Facebook

Margaret’s Slide Deck

Notes from Margaret’s talk:

  • Advertising industry need to adapt to reality
  • We need to earn the right to be in people’s pocket
  • If Facebook wants users to continue trust, they need to continue deliver values
  • Design and act for people where they are
  • Understand device and internet connection people have access to
  • Giving advertising industry possibility to reach people in a relevant context

Four principles for designing quality business products

  1. Help people grow
  2. Balance efficiency and effectiveness
  3. Bring clarity to complexity
  4. Be accurate and predictable


TRANSFORMING A CITY: RE-DESIGNING DENVER

Kjell Persson – CEO at inUse

Kjell’s Slide Deck

Notes on Kjell’s talk:

  • inUse to help Denver to be a better city
  • Denver wants to be a more smarter and more sustainable city
  • Learning about citizens through data, observation and interviews
  • Bringing highest managers from different unity together once a month
  • Building shared understanding across different denver departments
  • Building measurable short term, mid term and long term goals


THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF TECHNOLOGY

Al Gore – Nobel Peace Prize winner, former US Vice President and Environmentalist

Notes from All Gore’s talk:

  • It was less technological advancement and user involvement we payed attention to, Al Gore impressed us mostly with his passion and engagement for environmental change
  • Guest in restaurant: If you dye your hair black, you’d look exactly like Al Gore, and you sound like him too
  • Science allows us to combine a spider with a sheep. (Spider sheep) – Interesting for biologist, more scary for normal human beings
  • We need to react on keeping smaller families in order to keep the population in a manageable amount
  • Al Gore is vegan
  • We all must make a change to environment now
  • Al Gore is positive towards winning the global warming issue
  • Do we have to change? – Yes!
  • Can we change? – Yes!
  • Will we change? – It is up to all of us
  • There is no plan B if we fail to prevent the climate change
  • We couldn’t rescue people from hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, we definitely cannot rescue world’s population from failing to prevent the climate change
Stockholm
Stockholm (Photo credit: Johan Magnusson)
From Business to Buttons - Golden Krishna
Golden Krishna (Photo credit: Johan Magnusson)
From Business to Buttons - Al Gore
Al Gore (Photo credit: Johan Magnusson)
Florian UX Design
Florian Fiechter, User Epxerience Designer (Photo credit: Johan Magnusson)
johan-magnusson-visual-designer
Johan Magnusson, Visual Designer (Photo: Florian)
QCon London venue

QCon London 2016

 

I’ll try to summarize three great days at QCon in London, not going into detail about all sessions that I attended but high-lighting some of the ones I really liked.
Most sessions were recorded and will be available for the public audience over time, make sure to check them out!

 

QCon offers a wide variety of tracks ranging from low level “Close to the metal” to more “soft” skills like “Optimizing You”.  There were also a track for the main sponsors of the conference. The wide variety of content and speakers made choosing what session to attend somewhat of a problem; I had made a schedule before traveling to the conference, and it broke down during the first presentation of the tracks before the first keynote…
Kicking of QCon was a great keynote “Unevenly Distributed” by Adrian Colyer. Adrian reads a paper a day, summarises it and publishes it on his blog “The Morning Paper”. This was a very inspiring and well presented keynote that raised my interest in reading papers and as Adrian said “5 reasons to love papers”:

  • Great thinking tools
  • Raise your expectations
  • Applied lessons
  •  Great conversation
  • Unevenly distributed

The only problem with reading more papers and learning more is that:

“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” – Einstein

After the keynote we listened to Gavin Stevenson, Engineering Lead at WilliamHill, who talked about WilliamHills betting engine and how they are transitioning from a large database centric solution to a micro service based architecture (this was a common theme during the conference). They were building a “production ready” betting engine in 2 week sprints, testing it with real production data. The most interesting take away was how important it is to really try to break your system. When the system fails, that’s when you learn. The old saying “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” just doesn’t apply anymore.

“If it ain’t broken, try harder!” – Gavin on testing

One of the few really non-software related talks was held by long distance runner Simon Wheatcroft.
When losing his sight the age of 17 due to a genetic degenerative eye condition, he began a journey of adapting tech to achive the impossible.
Through the aid of the Runkeeper application, he started running solo outdoors. Simon will be running his first solo race in May 2016; the Four Deserts Series Sahara Race in Namibia. There, he’ll use GPS coordinates and a mobile app to navigate across the 250 kilometer distance.
A very inspirational and humbling talk!

“You just have to tell yourself that pain doesn’t last forever”- Simon on running 250k

From non-technical to real in-depth low level Netty implementation details. Norman Maurer from Apple described how Apple is using Netty as a web service delivery platform for most of Apple services. Apple are running 550000+ Netty based services, handling 10s of Petabytes of data every day and millions of request per second.
Norman guided us in different aspects of the Netty framework and how the default JDK implemtations just aren’t good enough for this kind of load and how they’ve commited several improvements to the Netty open source code. Very interesting and down to the metal of how to hack the JDK and using JNI to get better performance with; for example memory allocation and SSL.

Martin Kleppmann held one of the best presentations of the whole conference where he talked about keeping data sources in sync, moving away from (distributed) transactions to streams. The content was not very in-depth, but Martin had deep knowledge of the subject, excellent slide and a lot of energy when presenting. This is a talk everyone should watch and learn from.

“Stupidly simple solutions are the best” – Martin Kleppman

Day two started with Linda Northrops keynote “Reflections on Software Architecture”. Linda looked at software architecture and how it’s importance and acceptance have changed over the last 20 years. To summarize: architecture is important, and it’s a way to manage technical debt.

Josh Evans from Netflix presented how Netflix have expanded there streaming services to almost the entire globe (Netflix#Everywhere).
Netflix have had some major outages and failures, both in their own software and the underlying cloud AWS-platform. Josh concludes that “Failure is inevitable” and that one really have to embrace the failure and not fail in the same way twice. This had lead Netflix to embrace a “Failure-driven architecture” approach when building their platform.
Netflix’s architecture is really impressive, although not applicable for most comapanies/services, so it’s always interesting to hear what they are doing to actually run the platform at that scale.
Josh presented Netflix four architecture pillars; data, caching, traffic and micro services, and how they use (among other techs) EVCache, Cassandra and DNS to keep their services up and running in case of total failures of an AWS datacenter/region. He also showed how they test failure in different regions and route trafic to another region to minimize customer impact.
If infrastructure and architecture at scale is of any interest, watch this talk when it comes online!

“Never fail in the same way twice” – Josh Evans

Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp) gave his talk “Observe, Enhance, Control: From VMs to Containers”. In his talk he takes us back to 2006 and the age of VMs and how the datacenters and the problems to solve are driving the architecture of the software for Monitoring, Configuration and Deployment. Jumping to 2016 and the age of containers, Mitchell argues that the “state-of-the-art” tools from the age of VMs are not really suited to handle the tasks anymore. Even though the tools are extremely good, they do solve a completely different problem. The content of the talk was nothing new, but it is really inspiring to listen to Mitchell talk.

Gil Tene talked about Hardware Transactional Memory. Really low-level stuff about CPU pipeline and cache optimization. HTM in the JVM is not new, Azul has been delivering both hardware and a customized JVM with JVM for 10 years. What’s interesting is that it will become mainstream now when Intel is shipping CPUs with support for HTM. Gil succeeded in a very educational way describe the complexity of HTM and how it can be implemented in for example the standard JVM. In the end Gil talked about how the developers must reason about locking and synchronization to make the most of HTM in their code.

One of my most anticipated talks during the week was Dan North‘s “Making a sandwich”. I hade very high expectations for this talk, and Dan managed to exceeded them (as usual). Dan talked about giving feedback, how feedback in itself is a system and why we should do it. Giving and receiving feedback (which is really just to say ‘Thank you’) is, in my opinion, one of the hardest skills to master and we should really practice a lot! Dan presented some useful techniques and tricks, but you should really watch this yourself!

Last day started with a very entertaining and inspiring keynote delivered by Kolton Andrus (Netflix) and Peter Alvaro (University of California). Peter and Kolton shared their expereience of a very successful collaboration between industry and academia. Peter had a “big idea”, Lineage-driven fault injection, and together with Kolton this evolved from a theoretical model into an automated failure testing system that leverages Netflix’s state-of-the-art fault injection and tracing infrastructures.

“My code is now actually running live on Netflix…” “…well, minus all of the println statements”

Vikki Read and Alex Wilson from Unruly described how they are using the extreme programming (XP) ideas to deliver high quality software and how it can be made to work in a very agile environment. Since agile and XP focus a lot on collaboration and knowledge sharing, they shared some problems that they’ve had with getting new employees up to speed and how growing teams make for example (too long) stand-ups being a problem.

The final session I attended before heading to the airport was Tammer Saleh at Pivotal talking about the mistakes people make when building a microservices architecture, i.e. Microservice anti-patterns. When are microservices appropriate as an alternative to the monolithic app? The problem with monolithic apps is not about the code, it’s about the teams! Large teams (or multiple teams) can’t work effectively in the same codebase.

Its not about code, its about teams

Its not about code, its about teams

Tammer stressed that “the most common mistake is to start with microservices”. Start monolithic and extract as needed, because microservices are complex and impose a constant tax to your development.
Tammer explores how to draw the lines between services. dealing with performance issues, testing and debugging techniques, managing a polyglot landscape and the explosion of platforms, managing failure and graceful degradation.

“Boring is beautiful” – Tammer Saleh

Most of the interesting sessions I attended during the week were about failure, and how to handle failures. Quotes like “Failure is inevitable”, “Failure is an opportunity to learn” and the importance of building an architecture that can manage failures were common topics. Migrating from a monolithic application to a more micro service oriented architecture were also popular.
Overall QCon London was a great conference, I will most likely try to get back next year! All tracks had great speakers, which is problematic since you have to choose between sessions – on the other hand most of the sessions are recorded so I know what I will be doing the coming weeks.

 

DESIGN FOR DELIGHT WITH THE KANO MODEL

Delightful, excellent, fantastic, awesome, great, incredible, satisfaction.

Which of the above differs from the others? — Why aiming for satisfaction, when we can build for delight?

Developed by Japanese economist, the Kano Model shows how to map a customer’s journey from frustration to delight – and keep them there. These are the main principles in the Kano model:

  1. Eliminate unused features to avoid experiences rotting.
  2. Look out for missed and failed expectations.
  3. Use joy, flow and meaning to define what pleases users and customers.
  4. Remember that today’s “OMG” is tomorrow’s “same old, same old.”
  5. Innovating our way to aspirational experiences, one small step at a time.

When following these 5 steps, we are on our way to a winning a strategy.

Source: “Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers,” by Jared Spool

Design as a value for growth

Remember your last bad experience you had with a service or product, and how that made you feel?

According to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, we experience approximately 20,000 moments in a waking day. Each moment lasts a few seconds in which our brain records an experience. The quality of our days is determined by how our brains recognise and categorise our moments; either as positive, negative, or just neutral. Rarely do we remember neutral moments.

This fact is interesting for design. We need to ask ourselves how big of a human problem are we solving? How can we intentionally design for positive moments? Moments that is remembered as genuinely delightful will drastically affect how people feel about a brand, service or product.

People talk to others about moments as they remember it. Think about it as all delighted customers become a part of the marketing team. That’s why we strongly believe delighted customers can help us truly grow for the long-term.

That doesn’t mean that we should ask ourselves – can we build it? Because the answer is yes. Today’s technology allows us to build almost anything.

Therefore we should truly ask ourselves why, and what is the future that we want to build together.

Inspired and adopted from “HOW DESIGN BECAME THE NEW LANGUAGE OF BUSINESS,” – A documentary by Invision

Do we need the database at all? – Event Sourcing!

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