UX, digital signage, Web 2.0 and stuff
Just a small advertisement 
I’m speaking at the Confex Intranet Conference 2006 on November 22. My presentation will fokus on how DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is using intranet, enterprise search and digital signage as a tool for corporate communication.
If you want to join the conference just sign up here.
/Lars Silberbauer
Thnx to all who showed up at the REFLEKS06 event!
I think it was worth all the hard work and presented the history of DR in a completely new context and showed how our archives can be used to generate new ideas and new experiences.
It basically worked out the way I’ve imagined it and the performing artist were absolutely amazing (MHM One, Bottega Areté, VJ Samesame, DJ Djuna Barnes, Ane Trolle, Copyflex, Je M’appelle Mads).
Thanks to all the guys and girls who helped us with catering, wardrope and security!! 
Click here for more pictures from the event and to give us some feedback.
All photos by Nicolo Fasano.
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
In my eyes Day Two had more substance than had day one.
The first panel, Pros and Cons of Different Wireframing Techniques (Marion Böing, David Carruthers, Rob Goris, Jacco Nieuwland, Filip Borloo), dealt with different types of wireframes and prototyping techniques. It was quite interesting to hear pro- and contra-Visio panellist discuss how they worked. I was glad that one of the panellist proudly stated that she soon would be doing her prototyping in Axure RP Pro. We have used Axure for more than 1½ years and I it’s a great tool. I’d never use Visio again for this kind of work.
One panellist told that he is using a combination of Photoshop and InDesign to generate and maintain extremely high fidelity graphical “wireframes” and flowcharts. I was impressed by his method as it was a brilliant approach if you need to do a lot of key page designs, but the time one will have to spend maintaining this kind of prototype… man. That method seemed incredibly laborious.
Next up was Jared Volkmann to present his Customer Experience Framework. An excellent and fast paced presentation that took us through the three main stages in defining the customers’ behavior. It’s all about Who’s visiting? Why are they visiting? and What are they doing? Well – I guess we all know that these questions are important, but Volkmann’s framework makes it easy to communicate to the client why the work must be done. Volkmann stressed that a combination of thourough log analysis and surveys is important to understand how how the users are behaving and why they are behaving the way they are.
The second panel of the day was about IA Education In Europe. It was lead by the very engaged but also quite talkative Dr. Heiko Haubitz who teaches IA at the University of Dublin. Unfortunately his own presentation stole some of the very precious time from the panel. IA education is an important topic but I don’t feel the panel got the room it needed. Dr. Heiko, Dr. Madsen and especially Dr. Thull all deserved more time to present their views. Also I would’ve liked to hear much more from Boris Mueller who very briefly (due to a constantly crashing Adobe Reader (that’s one-nill to Powerpoint)) showed us some very exciting designs made by his students. More of that next year, please: Examples of concrete work.
Bogo Vatovec delivered one of the great presentation of the EUROIA 2006. He talked about Content Adaptation to Mobile Devices – how well does different systems adapt browser-targeted content to mobile devices? Not well at all, Vatovec revealed. None of the tested CA systems managed to transform the test sites into anything usable. Vatovecs research was thorough and his presentation downright funny. The big question in my mind is, though: Is automatic content adaptation the way to go? Is it possible to design for both pc browsers and small mobile units? I’m not sure about that.
Jason Mesut and Warren Hutchinson from Framfab UK demonstrated their concept of The Wicked Workshop. Nothing new under the sun here, but nevertheless an ok presentation on how to make a workshop a workshop and not just yet another boting meeting.
The closing keynote was made by the eccentrically dressed but brilliant Dr. Steven Pemperton of the CWI. Dr. Pemperton is chairman of the W3C html and Xforms working group and told us about xhtml2 and how it will take html to the next level by allowing for sematic markup – microformats done the right way, as Dr. Pemperton called it.
Thanks to EUROIA, ASIS&T and the comittee for putting this great event together.
On friday October 13, DR (Danish Broadcasting Corporation) is hosting the first public event in our brand new corporate HQ: “REFLEKS06“.
In collaboration with the visual artist group Bottega Areté, we’ve (some colleagues and myself) created an event that combines architecture, design and communication.
The concept is based on the idea that our media heritage holds value that goes way beyond the use as documentation on historic events. Instead we can use the archieves as building blocks for new experiences.
Therefore, we’ve asked a cast of young VJs and DJs to use our media archieves and the new buildings to create a creative media experience that hopefully will be as spectacular as our new buildings in “Ørestaden”.
I think it’s going to be an outstanding once in a lifetime event. And we will definitely be working like crazy the next couple of days to make it happen!
/Lars Silberbauer
EUROIA2006
Almar van der Krogt kindly responded to my not so nice comments on his presentation at EUROIA 2006 in Berlin, and I’d like to answer him with this post instead of adding another more or less hidden comment. I feel that van der Krogts decent comment deserves an answer in a more agreeable tone of voice than was my first post about his presentation.
So, Mr. van der Krogt, thank you for commenting on my post. I’m sorry that I missed your points regarding Digg, del.icio.us and so on. My bad. These services truly are outstanding – I guess we agree on that.
Please allow me to explain in more detail why I wasn’t that fond of your presentation and why I felt provoked (if not offended). First of all: To challenge a whole community is a provoking thing to do and some kind of reaction should be expected. One would like to pick up the challenge, but in this case that would be wrong as the challenge is built on false premises. It’s just a matter of words – you could have put out a suggestion instead and I could have said, “nah, I think you’re wrong – let me tell you why”. But you chose to challenge us, and that kind of ups the ante, doesn’t it?
To challenge the IA community you insisted on comparing IA to real, physical architecture in almost every aspect. The problem is, though, that despite the term architecture these fields have almost nothing in common. It’s ok to use metaphores as “land marks” when describing IA but only as metaphores – you tried to do analogies. Furthermore you chose to put this out as a challenge – to provoke, I guess (and I must say that you succeeded in my case). But what excactly was that challenge about?
“Webmarks” cannot and should not try to be what landmarks are. The differences between the real world and the infinite space of the web are too great. A landmark (e.g. a sky scraber) is deliberately placed somewhere crowded to be seen by a lot of people. It may not have a function besides containing a lot of offices, it may be beautiful to some people and extremely ugly to others, but it’s there: You simply have to live with it no matter what. It is built in a physical space and cannot be avoided, and by its mere presence it’s a landmark. Take the Eiffel Tower – in the beginning most people hated it but it was there and the Parisians had to live with it. Slowly it became a landmark. It’s completely useless, but it’s there.
On the web, something that people dislike or something that isn’t useful will not be seen, as we may simply avoid going to it. On the web we are not confined to a finite space and thus we are not forced to pass the “webmark” again and again. If we choose not to go to it, we’ll never see it. Beauty on its own may attract some traffic but only for a short while, as beauty on the web is short lived. In that way, what works for buildings and statues does not work for websites – and hence, IMHO, the analogy fails.
So, what I disliked was that you insisted on doing an analogy between physical architecture and the web and in that process got too eager to find similarities which are not there. By looking at digg, del.icio.us, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google, etc. I think it should be clear to us by now that “webmarks” are defined almost solely by their usefulness and by the degree of which they merge into the nature of the web.
Thus the greatest “webmarks” are the complete opposite of landmarks: Where landmarks stand out, webmarks merge in; where landmarks are forced upon us, webmarks can be avoided; where landmarks may be less than useful, webmarks must be useful to attract traffic and thus to qualify as webmarks at all. Webmarks cannot exist without interacting with the rest of the web and are – due to the nature of the web – everywhere at the same time (as is del.icio.us in the form of two buttons in my Firefox browser). Landmarks are defined by standing out and having a fixed location. In that way, I feel that your analogy is too flawed to support a challenge.
Best regards,
Klaus.
Creuna in Copenhagen has grown rapidly during the last two years. We have now become too large for our old (but very charming) HQs in the center of the oldest part of Copenhagen. So Friday we packed up all our stuff and moved out. Monday we will start a new era in larger and more up to date offices. We’re getting more than twice the room than we have now and we will be situated in an even more posh part of town, the eastern part of Copenhagen City.
Our new address is:
Creuna
Hammerensgade 4
DK-1267 Copenhagen K
DENMARK
EUROIA2006
So. Finally home from Berlin and from EUROIA 06. It took some time to get home, though, as SAS had grotesquely overbooked our flight. I, one colleague and two other Danes had to rent a car to get home in time for meetings Monday morning.
Why is it that SAS feels that it’s ok to sell more tickets than there are seats on the flight? And to overbook a small 72 seats De Havilland with (at least) 4 passengers is down right unethical gambling with my precious spare time. I’m expecting SAS Customer Service to refund my almost DKK 3.500 for a rental car, ferry and diesel very quickly and with an apology.
This is excactly why I deliberately never flies Ryan Air or any other discount airline. But I guess it doesn’t matter – obviously they’re all amateurs who can’t count.
Anyway: The EUROIA 06 was great. The logistics super, the premises at Hotel Maritim ProArte very good (although Italian design and Berlin pop art do not blend beautifully 
and Eric Reiss was as always a great host. Simply put: The geist of EUROIA 06 was high!
And how was the presentations? Well, one or two of the presenters could work on their English communication skills, and a single one of them simply should have stayed off stage. But that’s minor stuff – EUROIA 06 was without a doubt a great succes and we all had a good time discussing our practice with fellow IA’s from all over Europe.
We (I and 3 colleagues from Creuna) reached Berlin four o’clock friday and met with a group of conference attendees for happy hour at the Barist bar at the Hackescher Markt. Even though the beer flowed slowly at the start (the bar’s fault, definately not the hosts’!) it was a happy couple of happy hours. Thanks to FatDUX and ÙI for hosting this event.
Later on most of us had dinner at a Vietnamese place across the street – nice folks, great talks.
Day One
Day one was the less great day of the EUROIA 06. Morville and Reiss did great but most of the other presentation was not above average.
Saturday started off with Peter Morville‘s key note. He talked about his new book on ambient findability and stressed that search will become even more important in the future and that too little effort is put into site search. Ambient findability is about finding what you need when you need it, no matter where you are. We are not there yet, but as tagging becomes more populare, more focus is put on meta data and as search engines continues to improve we’re getting closer.
Eric Reiss told us about seven main trends in information architecture and that we must be careful that strategic IA and tactical IA do not loose touch. We don’t want those strategic business IA guys to define our practice without having tried to do real, hands on IA. Is this a threat to our profession? Well, maybe. But as long as we have a hard time defining our own practice we can hardly blame people for taking the IA way of thinking to the strategic level can we? We have to be aware, though, that IA doesn’t turn into yet another MBA kind of buzz word.
“The Strategic IA” was the title of Olly Wright‘s presentation. Mr. Wright is one of the IA’s that’ve gone strategic, and maybe Mr. Reiss is right after all: It’s dangerous to loose touch with the hands on IA. I felt that Mr. Wright didn’t get down to business but simply stated all the right things to do as an IA strategist: IA’s must understand how the client’s business works, know the roles of all the stakeholders, do all the right analysis, say all the right words, do the ROI calculations and so on and so forth. The IA must be an economist, a designer, a leader, a consultant and on top of that a very decent human being. It’s all true but it’s too much – too vaguely defined.
Ariel Guersenzvaig talked about persuadability on commercial sites. Too me there was nothing new in this talk but I agree with Guersenzvaig that all websites should be thinking in terms of conversion. Not a bad presentation at all but maybe a bit shallow for a professional IA audience.
The first panel – “A Place for IA Deliverables” clearly showed that the chosen panel format did not work. Too much time was lost on the panellist presenting themselves and the panel never really got going. I think that the committee should reconsider this format. Larisa Warnke from Carlson Marketing did good but the panel as such ended up talking about proces models more than deliverables.
Digital UK – Re-engineering the Content Architecture to Communicate the UK’s Move to Digital Television was just another case story. It was simply a presentation of your every day web design case with too much focus on average page layout. Maybe if Harvey Turner had talked more about the process and less about the very average page design it could have been more engaging.
In one of the more hard core presentations Luca Rosati, Emanuele Quintarelli and Andrea Resmini told us about their research project on combining facets and tags into a social tagging system. By using facets to enrich the one-dimensional tag clouds information can be retrieved more easily. To be honest, especially Luca Rosati was very hard to understand and I may have missed some important stuff. It’s an interesting piece of work but I can’t help thinking of systems like iBox from Interse that already uses facet schemes combined with automatic and manual tagging but in a more dynamic and customizable way that shown here. This has already been done and implemented but nevertheless: It’s exciting stuff that – but the presentation needed coherence and clarity.
To round of day one came the guy that I think should’ve saved his plane fair and stayed home in the Netherlands. Almar van der Krogt proposed a “challenge” to the IA community: To build a “webmark” or piece of “virreal architecture”. He feels that no websites are like the real skyscrabers and that we need sites that stands out in the same way as reality’s land marks. Maybe we do – but not in the way Krogt thinks, because he is right in one thing: Websites are not sky scrabers and they never will be. EBay, Google, del.icio.us, Digg, Flickr, Yahoo, Amazon, and so one already do stand out. But their not pretty, Krogt says. Who are you to decide, Mr. Krogt?
I’m sorry but I have to be rude here: This was pure BS presented in a corny ninetiesish powerpoint design. It’s great that anyone have the guts to get on stage and tell us and Peter Morville that we are no good, but this was done without any knowledge of the field, without any irony and without Krogt having the slightest clue of what he wanted to achieve besides hearing himself speak. Krogt – or anyone – may attack my work, my profession and my person at any time, but please do a bit of research before doing so.
And so day one was at an end. We joined the poster session (the presentation of Swipr was interesting, but it sure doesn’t beat Axure) and then went for Indian food at Amrits. Ok food, questionable service.
My post about day two to follow soon.
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