NLP

[ Transcript Available ] In this latest installment of the UIE Book Corner, we catch up with Russ Unger to chat about the book he co-wrote with Dan Willis and Brad Nunnally, Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation. Russ is a Senior UX Leader at GE Capital along with being a well regarded author and speaker. In an increasingly distributed workforce world, collaborating with design teams becomes much trickier. It’s not without it’s benefits. It opens your team to talent that may not otherwise have been available. Simply hopping on a Skype chat or GotoMeeting can be a solution, but often facilitation is the missing piece to the puzzle. Facilitation is an important skill, whether with collocated or remote teams. It drives conversation and collaboration. The ability to facilitate well is integral when conducting participatory design activities, giving a presentation, or even giving a virtual seminar. Russ joins Adam Churchill to discuss the book and the various types of facilitation in this podcast. Recorded: May, 2013 [ Subscribe to our podcast via ?This link will launch the iTunes application.] [ Subscribe with other podcast applications.] Full Transcript. Adam Churchill: We’re continuing what we’re calling the UIE Book Corner series, with a look at “Designing the Conversation,” co-authored by Russ Unger, Brad Nunnally, and Dan Willis. The book was published earlier this year, and one of the things we like to do is take a look at the Amazon reviews and see what folks are saying. Among some of the things that we saw, “It’s a great book for anyone presenting, moderating, or facilitating.”, “The book offers lots of great insights into improving the conversation surrounding design with your teams and within our organization.”, “If you ever have to run a meeting, make a presentation, or even just ask your boss for a raise.” We’re thrilled to have Russ Unger join us to discuss the book and its important concept. Russ also co-authored “A Project Guide to UX Design.” We’re recording this so you can listen in to what he has to say. Hey, Russ. Russ Unger: Hey, Adam. Thanks for having me. Adam: Yourself, Brad, and Dan, that’s quite a lineup. Tell us a little bit about how the idea for this book came about. Russ: You mentioned my first book that I wrote with Carolyn Chandler, called “A Project Guide to UX Design”. When the first edition came out, we got a one-star review on Amazon, and we got criticized for having a chapter that was called “Facilitating.” Now, the funny thing about that is there was no chapter in there, but it really kind of got me thinking about it. When it came time to write our second edition, I had earmarked facilitation as a chapter. I’d been pretty fortunate to take part in Cranky Talk Workshops that Dan Willis had put together, and facilitation was really on my mind. Especially since I’d been working with Todd Zaki Warfel on a book called “Guerilla Design and Research Methods” that’s still somewhere in the ether, and seems to remain almost finished. Well, to make a long story short, I couldn’t find a way to fit worthwhile content about facilitation into about 10 or so pages of the second edition of “Project Guide.” Fortunately, we could put those pages to better use, and my wheels were really in motion. While we were doing this “Tweak Your Talk” session at South by Southwest last year, I started talking to Dan and Brad about the idea. Before long, we pulled together a proposal, and we found that there was a whole lot to talk about. In fact, I think about 240 pages of it, all on facilitation. Adam: Alright, cool. Let’s jump into the book, taking a look at the way the book is structured. Section two is on group facilitation, section three is on one-on-one facilitation, and section four is ca

[This post is a followup to my previous post, Generative vs. discriminative; Bayesian vs. frequentist.] I had a brief chat with Andrew Gelman about the topic of generative vs. discriminative models. It came up when I was asking him why he didn’t like the frequentist semicolon notation for variables that are not random. He said […]

When you prototype, you can learn a ton of things about what you’re building and how you should build it. Prototyping is an exploratory process, revealing details and ideas that only emerge once you have something in front of you. There’s one thing you can learn while prototyping that nobody ever talks about: Who should be involved in this project? Design is a team sport. Building and supporting a product or service will need the assistance of others. The traditional approach to involving these other folks is to hand them a requirements document and say, “Here. Build this.” The hardcore traditionalists spend weeks or even months describing every mind-numbing detail in the document, pretending the people they hand it to won’t have anything useful to contribute. Then the tradidtionalists wonder why these folks are pissed for treating them like they are idiot savants. Using a prototyping alternative, we can show what we’re doing to those folks who will be helping us get it out the door and supporting it once it’s out in the world. We can ask them questions like, “Is this the best way to get these results?” More importantly, we can ask these folks, “Who else should we be talking to? What might those folks tell us about what we’re trying to do?” Suddenly, we’re building a team of collaborators instead of trying to mimic a poorly-constructed factory assembly line. If you’re prototyping, are you asking, “who else should be looking at this? Who else should be playing with us as we try out these ideas?”

Computational Intelligence for Natural Language Processing

In this week’s UIEtips, Margot Bloomstein shares examples of how organizations are successfully incorporating content strategy into their information architecture. Here’s an excerpt from the article: What’s in, and what’s out? “In my experience, it is very easy for brilliant information architects (or UX people who do information architecture) to underestimate the importance of editorial planning, voice and tone, and detailed guidelines for content creation. And conversely, it’s very easy for highly skilled content people to underestimate how much information architecture has to do with things other than content: the finicky details of application behavior and interaction design, in particular. I’m a huge fan of collaborations between information architects who care about editorial concerns and content strategists who love structure and talking about data. But whatever your situation, it’s important to know your way around structural design, if only so that you can provide useful feedback and support.” Read the article: Incorporating Content Strategy into Your Information Architecture. How do you incorporate content strategy into your information architecture? Let us know below.

It’s my great pleasure to announce to the world (i.e., all 4 subscribed readers to this blog) that Alex B. Fine successfully defended his thesis entitled “Prediction, Error, and Adaptation During Online Sentence Comprehension” jointly advised by Jeff Runner and me. Alex is the first HLP lab graduate (who started his graduate studies in the lab), so we gave him a very proper send-off and roasted the heck out of him. Alex will be starting his post-doc at the University of Illinois Psychology Department in June, working with Gary Dell, Sarah Brown-Schmidt, and Duane Watson. Dr. Fine’s defending Alex’s thesis investigates syntactic expectation adaptation. Work over the last two decades has firmly established that language comprehension is experience- or, more precisely- expectation-based: comprehenders draw on previous experience in order to robustly and efficiently predict (and thereby understand) the linguistic signal. Yet sociolinguistic and variationist work has documented that speakers and writers differ in their production preferences — the same message might be realized with different phonetic, lexical, and syntactic material. This raises a question, not previously acknowledged in the literature on sentence processing: how can it be that comprehension seems to make efficient use of probabilistic beliefs about linguistic distributions if the statistics of these distributions depend on the speaker, register, style, etc.? If the systems underlying language comprehension have evolved to efficiently deal with such (subjective) non-stationarity, we might expect comprehenders to a) store and use environment-specific (e.g., speaker-specific) syntactic expectations based previous experience, b) readily generalize based on these previous experience to novel environments, and c) integrate information about novel environments with previous experience. Alex’s thesis focuses on the third prediction. In series of self-paced reading experiments, he presents evidence i) that readers implicitly adapt their syntactic expectations to converge towards the statistics of the current linguistic environment, ii) that these effects cannot be reduced to task-based learning, floor-effects, or saturation effects, iii) that the time-course of such syntactic expectation adaptation depends both the on the prior statistics in a comprehender’s life-long experience and on its statistics in the current environment, iv) that syntactic expectation adaptation can be seen as cumulative syntactic priming (for those who prefer to think about phenomena rather than theories), and v) that the strength of syntactic priming in comprehension is sensitive to the prediction error experience while processing the prime structure. If you’re interested in his work, his work on the role of prediction errors in syntactic priming has recently appeared in Cognitive Science (Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. 2013. Evidence for implicit learning in syntactic comprehension. Cognitive Science 37(3), 578–591). Another paper, summarizing the first few studies of his thesis is currently under review. Preliminary reports of other studies can be found in various CogSci proceedings from 2010-2013, e.g.: Preliminary modeling work: Fine, A. B., Qian, T., Jaeger, T. F., and Jacobs, R. 2010. Is there syntactic adaptation in language comprehension. Proceedings of ACL: Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, 18-26.Uppsala, Sweden. Kleinschmidt, D.F., Fine, A.B., and Jaeger, T.F. 2012. A belief-updating model of adaptation and cue combination in syntactic comprehension. The 34th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci12). Sapporo, Japan. July, 2012. More evidence for the account: Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. 2013. Syntactic priming in language comprehension allows linguistic expectations to converge on the statistics of the input. In TBA (eds.) Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Scien

“We tried creating personas and it was hard. It took us months and they never got traction. Eventually we abandoned the project.” I’ve heard this dozens of times from design team managers. They all embarked on these big persona projects, often with energy and excitement, only to find that energy dissipate and the project lose its momentum. Personas that don’t help make design decisions are a waste. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. These projects fail because of a perspective problem. The design teams think of making personas as a project in itself. I’ve come to the conclusion that thinking this way will lead to failure. The alternative to having personas be a project is to make them just a step inside of every project. Instead of making them once and trying to use them everywhere, we come up with a low cost way to insert them into each project as they are needed. We can divide well-done design projects into a discovery phase (where we explore the boundaries of the problem we’re trying to solve), an exploration phase (where we toy with different possible solutions), and a refinement phase (where we choose a direction and fill out the details). (Not everyone does design projects well, but the folks who do end up following these three phases. The ones who don’t, well, they skip one or more of these stages then regret it later. Or maybe they are unconsciously incompetent.) Part of the activities in the discovery phase are to gather information about the users of the design and what they’ll need. We can do that with fancy-ass research or we can do it by just collecting all our thoughts about what we already know. The more specific we can get each question, the easier they are to answer. For example, if we were building the part of a clothing e-commerce site that showed the product previews, we’d want to know how people used previews in their shopping. We can make guesses or ask our peers. Or we can go into the field and study shopping online or in stores. Now, we can group what we’ve learned about our users into behavioral categories. We might group people who love to match different pieces in one pile, while we group people who prefer to see pre-designed outfits in a different pile. We might group the folks who are matching colors to things they already own in a different pile from people who don’t trust the colors they see and will use the free 90-day return period to ship back products they don’t like. These different groups become the persona clusters. And the things people did in those groups become our scenarios. If we’ve done a good job of collecting our data and knowledge about the users, it should be quick to create these personas around this specific functionality. Less than a day, in fact. And there we have it: Detailed personas about using previews. There’s probably a ton of design decisions these personas can now help us answer. (And where they can’t, well, that points out for a little more research.) At the end of the project, when our preview module is out there and being used, well, the personas aren’t that useful anymore. But because only spent a day on them, we don’t need to “protect our investment.” We just toss them out and create new ones for the next project. There you have it: cheap and easy disposable personas.

In his presentation at An Event Apart in San Diego 2013 Scott Jehl outlined a number of ways to build responsive Web sites that take performance in account. Here's my notes from his talk: Responsive and Responsible. We need to build Web products to be universally accessible. This includes a lot more than just people with disabilities – it includes slow network connections, less capable devices, and more. Defensive design and progressive enhancement are a safety net against Murphy's Law. We can't think and code in absolutes. Responsive design is just part of building a responsible design. We need to consider a number of factors beyond the layout: performance, behavior, accessibility, and costs. Most of poor performance is our fault: the average page in 2013 weighs 1.4MB. The average load time of a top 2000 site is 6 to 10 seconds. Good performance is good design. Fast loading Websites make people happy. Webpagetest.org and Web Inspectors in the browser provide a way for you to measure performance and see what's slowing pages down. 86% of responsive designs send the same assets to all devices. Content Parity, Optimized Experience We want to deliver content based on our user’s needs. Only a few years ago we were locked into normalizing things across a number of browsers. Today the diversity of devices makes this idea seem ridiculous. Instead we want to optimize for different devices. Content parity does not mean every experience is identical. Every browser that comes to our Web site is unique. We need to code in a way that doesn’t presume too much about: viewport size, orientation, font size, settings, preferences, and input modes. Being responsive from a layout perspective doesn’t preclude being responsive form a performance perspective. Using em-based breakpoints in your media queries means you are not dependent on device sizes and allow users to adjust font size without breaking layout. Delivering Content To load content from a Website, a client makes a request, DNS sends it to the right host, and the host replies with the requested assets. The DNS server finds the right IP address to serve, then goes to a host to get content. On mobile devices, we go to a cell tower first, then to a DNS, then a host to get content. The connection to the tower takes two seconds and is totally out of our hands. That delay is unique to mobile and only happens once. Then we can send files back and forth after the initial connection is made. From there we load HTML and any referenced files when all blocking files (that impact rendering) have been received. Be careful of what you include in blocking requests. After 8 seconds, the carrier will cut off a connection so we want to load as much as possible when that initial connection is open. Every http request we make is a bit of a gamble -it can fail. So we don’t want to gamble too much with many requests -especially if they are blocking. Delivering HTML Tiered delivery: if a piece of content is already accessible somewhere else (through a link on the page), you might consider loading it lazily. For example: home pages are navigation tools. They mostly include links to other parts of the site.These kinds of pages are prime for deferred loading. In the initial load, we could just include the critical links in the source then use Javascript to load additional content (like samples of what’s behind that link) after the initial page downloads. We can enhance the content itself using a technique called Ajax-include. We start with a simple URL and add a data attribute that references an HTML fragment to the link’s mark-up. When Javascript is executed, the link will be replaced with a full set of content using Ajax. To do this, consider using a data attribute on a link like “data-after”. You could take this deferred loading further and only show the additional content if a certain media query condition is met. Delivering CSS CSS is a blocking element:

Join us on June 20, when Adam Connor presents Design Studio: Building Design Consensus Early in Your Process. Design reviews can result in conflicting lists of stakeholder feedback and out-of-scope ideas about what the design should be. Bruised egos, longer timelines, and higher budgets are often par for the course. Adam Connor builds design consensus naturally by running a Studio, which structures team brainstorming early in the process, then uses sketching, presentation, and critique activities to get everyone moving toward a shared vision. Before long, you’ll be running faster among a team of happy people — and you’ll all be building better products, too. You’ll Learn to: Solve problems as a team Generate ideas during a Studio Build consensus around a shared idea Use critique at the “right” times Special Offer – Register by May 31 and immediately get access to Adam’s first seminar, Discussing Design: The Art of Critique.

Last year, I illustrated the importance of mobile by highlighting how many devices enter the World each day compared to the number of people born per day on our planet. The ratio was striking. Looking at the same figures today is even more sobering. The End of 2011 The total of smartphones entering the World per day was about 1.45M devices compared to 317,124 births. The End of 2012 The total of smartphones entering the World per day was about 3.6M devices again compared to the same 317 thousand births. Hope you've got you multi-device design strategy in order.