6ix Passions

Eye Gazing

Ok for this edition of Show ‘N Tell, I’ve decided to talk about something unusual. Jason, the initiator of this project, told me last time there are no rules and I can talk about what I want. Remember Jason, you told me so ;-)

I’m currently reading the book of Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek. Probably one of most important book that has been written since the Internet exists if you ask me.

In one of the chapter, Tim introduces the Comfort Challenge. Most important actions are never comfortable, but according to Ferris you can condition yourself to the discomfort and overcome it by doing a series of uncomfortable exercises.

I’ve decided to play along and accept each of his challenges as I read the book.

The first one was Eye Gazing. For the next two days you had to gaze into the eyes of others - whether people you pass on the street or conventional partners - until they break contact. Some of his hint goes from blinking from time to time for not looking as a psychopath, to maintain eye contact while speaking and to practice it with people more confident or who impress you.

What did I discover? With all the technologies around us, we are more and more distracted and we are lacking attention and focus. The first victims of this technological omnipresence are the persons around us. By keeping an eye contact with them, we learn to really focus our attention and be more present. So it is not only giving you more confidence, it’s giving you the edge of reading the other person mind and body language by keeping all your attention at them and to what they say. They will also be more interested to you and tell you more about themselves.

Since I’ve done that exercise for two days, I’ve decided to always keep a regular eye contact with most around me. Some will ask you why you are looking at them, but then you simply need to smiles to distract them.

That was my little Show ‘N Tell contribution of the week.

My Setup - What I use to get the job done

Inspired by the interviews at The Setup, what do people use to get the job done? I decided to replicate it for myself for the Show N’ Tell Friday. Not sure it fits in what you had in mind Jason. Sorry!

Who are you, and what do you do?
I’m Jean-Philippe Cyr. I’m a freelance user experience strategist in Montreal. I work with marketing agencies and private companies at transposing their business and communications needs into interactive solutions. I edit a blog since 2004 called 6ix Passions.

What hardware are you using?
I use a MacBook Pro 2.16 Mhz with 3 Gigs of RAM and a small hard drive of 100 GB. I use a PC Goldtouch ergonomic keyboard that makes everyone say: “Wow, your keyboard is broken!”. I listen to my music with a pair of Sennheiser HD 280 Pro. My sensitive data, including my music and photos are daily backup on remote server using iDrive. I use a small My Passport portable external drive of 500 GB to backup my computers and any other medias every month. I carry my laptop with me between my home and office. I always cary my iPhone 3G in my left pants pocket.

And what software?
I’ve been on Windows for many years before switching for OS X three years ago. I had the fear not to find the appropriate software for my needs, to loose productivity and to go from a power user to a user. I could not be more wrong and today I cannot think for a minute to go back.

I use Google App intensively for my mail, calendar, text documents and spreed-sheets. I synchronize everything with my iPhone using Google Caldav for my agenda and Google Mobile Synch for my mail and contacts.

I surf with Firefox. I tried Safari and Chrome, but both of them, even being quicker at rendering HMTL and parsing JavaScript cannot compensate for the increase in productivity I get from my customized Firefox. I use a single address and search bar with plenty of quicksearch shortcuts and “I cannot live without” the extensions: Tab Mix Plus, FireGestures and Easy DragToGo.

On a daily basis I use TextEdit and Notepad (on the iPhone) to take notes. I didn’t find anything more simple and easy to use.

I keep my workspace clean and to the bare minimum. My menu bar is clean and only the applications I use on a frequent basis are in my dock: Finder, Firefox, Adium, Transmission, Offline access to Google Gmail, Calendar, Docs, iTunes and Parallels Desktop.

I’m a shortcuts addict and always look to increase my productivity with little tools and apps. I use Spark to customize all the keyboard shortcuts to control system functions, iTunes and launch apps from my PC keyboard. I use TextExpander to speed repetitive writing and signatures and Google Desktop as a replacement for Spotlight to access files and apps easily.

I use Parallele Desktop to use Microsoft Visio in Windows XP. The only software I use with a custom build plug-in: WorkFlow, that I co-inspired to develop, to do information architecture and wireframes when I really need them into a digital format.

I use Dropbox to share files, but also as a hosting platform for the media on my blog. I have a custom script, that I called ImageReeSizr that resize any screenshot to 400 pixels wide, put it into the appropriate Dropbox folder and copy the public Dropbox link, so I can simply paste the link into my post when I’m ready.

On the personal side, I’m a big fan of Lightroom and iMovie. Inspired from the old days, when film strips where stick together manually, I think that iMovie 8.0+ is a little revolution in the way we edit movies. I enjoy doing personal storytelling in videos from the raw data I acquire.

If I had to choose a single app on my iPhone, it would be Instapaper to read the Web while I’m commuting. I would even buy an iPhone for that application alone (yes even before the possibility of making calls - yes I know, I should buy a iPod Touch then). Because of it, I read more (or should I simply say: I take the time to read). It is the most valuable application I ever used. Period. And I mean it.

What would be your dream setup?
I’m pretty close to my dream setup in term of software, I would just like to have Visio native for OS X or to find something better to do digital wireframes. I have tried them all and nothing is quite productive enough to my taste.

Regarding the hardware, I cannot live with a resolution lower than 1440 x 900, but I would dream to have a MacBook Air 15 inches with the CPU clock, graphic horse power, and battery longevity of the new unibody MacBook Pro 15 inches with SDD.

NOTE: This post is now featured on The Setup Community page.

How I Conceive Interactive Solutions

Following the suggestion Show ‘N Tell Friday by Jason, to post a project each Friday on what you are working on or have worked, I have decided to be more generalist and talk about how I design Web sites.

I always start each project by listening to my client needs by deliberately not looking at his current Web site or any of his competitors. I want from the start to think outside the box with less influence as possible. During the debrief I try to ask all the questions that come to my mind. I don’t really have a series of questions that I always ask, I just let them come as the conversation flow. For sure the common ones like: “If you had to describe your service/product in a single sentence what will it be?”, “If you had one thing to improve, what will it be?” and “Who are your audience(s)?” have to be covered in some way during the exercise.

I then take a break from my client and let him know I will brainstorm and do some research about his project and come back to him. It’s the perfect excuse to enter in what I call my “brain dumping” moment. No way I will keep in my head all those ideas that have poped-up during that meeting. I take my TextEdit.app or my iPhone Notes.app (while in transit) and write all the ideas I have, all the possible solutions, marketing or communications strategies, functionalities and killer features the future site may have. If I think of any references I also type them down. At the bottom of the text entry, I keep all the questions I will need clarification on (from my client or any of his internal or external sources). Only then I look at the current site of my client and do some benchmarking to find references to his competitors and also to all the ideas I had during my brain dumping session.

To narrow my focus, I try keep my solution around only three axis (three problems, challenges, desires, elements to communicate). I generally have a couple of concepts already in gestation in my head. For those concepts to take form I need to enter in brainstorm. You can hardly enter in brainstorm mode with yourself. Too much thinking hinders action, you need to share your ideas and bounce it with others. I like involving the art director/designer, the copy writer and the developer. I try to keep my team small. It has to enter into a taxi cab as I like to say (max 4 or 5 persons). Your best tool while bouncing ideas is to try to make them take form in an user experience: what the users will see, read and interact with, by sketching it.

I find that blackboards are the tool for the task for many reasons:

1. As they can be painted on any wall using a special type of paint, they are larger than any whiteboards or any piece of paper and become at the human scale level.
2. Because of their large size, everyone can see what you are drawing and participate by taking the chalk.
3. You cannot go into too much details and it’s forcing you, and anyone participating, to focus on what’s important.

You can find answers to most of your challenges by writing, in bullet points on the board, what you know about your client: his principal challenges, who are the audiences and what need to be accomplished by your interactive solution, and then by sketching how those can take form in a user interface. You can choose to illustrate the home page and/or any other important pages of your site. Again list the goal(s) of the page, each pieces of content that should be in it, in priorities, and draw the page until each aspects takes form. There are no good or bad ideas and you can conceived as many scenarios until you are satisfied (just make sure to take a picture of each for future reference - and maybe posterity). Once the concept is done and approved as the best solution by all the participants in the room, it’s time to share it with other persons in the company to get some feedback and eventually with your client.

There is no need to go further with your project if your client is not buying your concept. Sketches on blackboards are again the best alternative as your client will keep his attention on the concept and not the details of it. Questions about the details of the technical, visual or copy how-to can be answered verbally or later on. What is important is that the client understand how we try to solve his challenges and if he is in accordance with the concept. I suggest to invite your client over and to show them what you have drawn by explaining, standing and pointing to each aspects of your concept, why you think this is the best solution for his problem.

When I have the approval, I describe, in writing, the overall concept and layout the entire site architecture. I try to assess all the content, functionalities and any other user interaction elements in every sections and pages of the site. I find that if you can describe your solution in writing, you have a deeper understanding of all its aspects and their interactions.

The work can begins soon as the blackboards are accepted by the client and the site architecture is defined. The art director can begins to design the main pages/sections, the developer can begins to code some functionalities and the copy writer, the content in each page. When we need more details about some of the pages we didn’t do in sketching, we sit together again and layout what we think. I try to skip as much as possible the detail wireframes and functional specs in favor of simply drawing, describe, design, code, test and improve the solution.

Proposal: Tumblr Show ‘N Tell Fridays

strake:

Even though I’ve never met most of the people I’ve discovered on Tumblr, I feel like I have a pretty good feel for their personalities and interests. For some of these people, I have a general sense of what they do for a living although I have no idea what they work on when they aren’t reloading their Tumblr dashboards.

So I had an idea I wanted to propose to the Tumblr community. What if we had a Show ‘N Tell Friday at the end of each week where you’d post something you’ve worked on? This goes for anyone - designers, developers, writers, musicians, photographers, etc.

Here are some general guidelines I was thinking:

1. On Friday (or thereabouts), take a few minutes and post something you worked on that week.

2. It could be big (you finally launched that project that took 14 months) or small (you made your life easier by making a tweak to your site’s deployment script).

3. Be sure to have permission from your employer/client/etc. if applicable.

4. Tag your post with sntf for easier browsing.

If you’re interested, please reblog this (or write up your own post) to help get the word out.

This is a great idea… You can learn a lot about people about what they do and how they do it. It reminds me of the Inc.com articles: How I work. You can count me in.