Analytic Design Group

A few days ago I got an invitation to join the Konnects network of someone I know. At the time I was not a Konnects member but thought I’d join to anyway as it’s good practice to be checking out new sites and services.

Not only was the profile creation process annoyingly long and disruptive, it didn’t take me back to the invitation I was trying to respond to. In the process I kind of forgot about the invitation and got on to the more pressing issues of running a UX consulting firm.

The subject of information architectures based on audience types has cropped up around the office a lot lately. A number of our clients are talking about it. It is a popular approach, one that seems to logically support user-centered design principles. But it is an approach that can reduce the findability success rate of a site and disrupt the user experience.

Today I was contacted by the Revenue Services Group. Who?

Even after talking to the woman on the phone I wasn't entirely clear who these people are so I did what everybody does, popped the name into Google...nothing. That's odd.

She did send me an email a little later and now I've got a URL http://revenueservices.ca/.

Around the time Alan Cooper was giving his really great talk An Insurgency of Quality at this year’s IxDA, I was giving a talk that came to some of the same conclusions from a different starting point.

I’ve always hated card sorts, they’re the sucker punch of user research. The goal of user research is to find out about user behaviors,  preferences, current experience, expectations and so on. We are seeking to understand user needs or requirements. There are numerous techniques with which to do user research and we generally approach whatever we’re doing with the caveat that we’re NOT asking the user how to design something, just what their impressions, experience, and feelings are towards an existing or proposed product, site, concept etc.

Lately stories and storytelling have become a bit of a theme around ADGi. It started a couple of months ago with me noting that a company we were doing some business with referred Very Often to their “story” as in “we have a great story to tell about our SharePoint implementation services” or “I met with those guys and didn’t like their story.”

In the last few months I’ve been forced to negotiate far more and for many more things than ever before in my life. I’ve discovered that I hate it. Really. It’s so hard. I’ve also discovered that I’m not alone. In their book Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation--and Positive Strategies for Change , Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explain the primary differences in the way women and men approach negotiations.

Three weeks ago I was at CANUX 07 listening to David Armano’s talk, The Fuzzy Tail, where he described an approach to fostering collaboration and innovation at Critical Mass.. His approach to achieving collaboration and innovation is to combine a hierarchical structure with a collaborative model.