Liveblogging a session at Iceweb 2006 (Iceweb2006; Iceweb)
Kelly Goto put on a headset mike and began speaking at 2006.04.27 11:21.
Was teaching here in Iceland before. I like the term “2.0”; it’s a resurfacing of everything that we are doing.
I don’t like to use the term “user” too much. “Customer,” “audience,” “site visitor” instead. Karen Donoghue’s Built for Use translates usability into business language. “Successful user experiences deliver a firm’s value proposition – the brand promise – to customers.”
Getting back to daily lives: One of the things we work on at Gotomedia is how people go through their daily lives. Coffee machines: We’re a design firm, so we got this very æsthetic, beautiful, old-fashioned retro model, but we couldn’t figure out how to use it. But it was so beautiful it generated enough interest to figure it out. And of course Americans don’t read instruction books.
Just travelling around, you learn different interfaces. I’m Japanese, fourth-generation; the only thing I know is nihongo-o wakarimasen, which might be incorrect. (Shows a toilet seat in Japan, inevitably.) You really have to trust that the interfaces you’re working with are going to work. That’s what it’s about in the end: Trustworthiness.
Is everything that we’re creating useful?
If your store is very streamlined and efficient and product-oriented, then your site should mimic that. If your store is very flashy and emotion-driven, then your site should reflect that.
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of her clients (“shhh!”), used its logo a dozen different ways, which undercuts the trust necessary for an agency that insures Americans’ bank deposits.
UCD: User-centred-design approach. The customer has to remain central to every decision you make in your organization. Brand; information design; testing. They looked at the customers of a client (also FDIC), at small and large banks and with compliance officers. Looked at people’s bookmarks. Can have two computers and three browsers open, looking at things for 15 seconds at a time rather than going through a task to completion. Fraudulent cheques are faxed to bank branches, which also get a text-only E-mail that isn’t linked to the image.
Lifestyle user experience: Perception; interaction; integration. Found three pages (in an article) just on ethnography, a word she doesn’t like to use since it’s so academic.
I’m from Seattle, so I feel I have the right to stick up for Microsoft, but they can be a very scary Big Brother influence on our country. Microsoft has changed from a top-heavy company to one with small development groups and blogging. The developers she met from “scary Microsoft” were some of the happiest developers she’d met.
How does a culture extend itself into the workforce? If you were to classify Iceland, what would you call them? Workaholics. In Denmark, they’re sort of taught not to exceed expectations or be better than everybody else. It’s a kind of open culture; they’re very humbled by the school system and their parents. But because you guys are smaller than other countries, you can integrate faster. If you try something new, you embrace it. People in America don’t change unless they absolutely have to. That’s why you guys are an innovation culture.
Focus groups tell you how people think, how people really live.
[Your scribe, who, unlike Kelly, is not a usabilitista and has, by popular agreement, little to no business sense, lost the plot around 11:40.]