CanUX - Banff - Nov 16th-18th, 2008

CanUX - Banff - November 16th-18th, 2008

Introduction

This is a seriously smaller conference than I have attended for a long-time, and I was looking forward to the intimacy in contrast to the large scale organization and co-ordination that you get at conferences like CHI. This conference puts a cap on 70 people - with the intent to keep it small and focused. It is organized by nForm Experience Consulting, based on Edmonton.

The first session was a design slam:

Design Slam

We started the conference with a hands-on design activity. The 'clients' were a somewhat ailing airline: Best-Jet, serving North America internal flights, and also running vacation destination trips to Mexico. In turn, each of the four employees of the company, in their respective roles - CEO, operations, sales, marketing, gave their respective concerns about the company, and the changes that they'd like to see, and they also provided a bit of customer feedback data. 

The task was broad - to create a plan to improve experience for customers; but it mustn't cost too much because of financial issues the company is facing. The experience needed to be accessible, and personalized.

Each table - of about 7 people - were the consulting company, and needed to come up with a competitive pitch. In all the responses from each table were remarkably similar. Most teams had considered a few primary personas: the business traveller, the vacation traveller, and families. Teams had particularly looked at the common needs these personas had, and created a proposal to address these needs, as well as the issue that had been raised of the lack of engagement of cabin staff.

The pitches presented to the client were also aligned by considering the experience before, during, and after the flight, and teams advocated piloting the improvements in a phased approach.

Here are some of the suggestions that were scoped out:

Before:

• Build an on-line profile, based on existing infrastructure of frequent flier miles.
• Profiles can be used as the basis to building 'groups': frequent travel partners, families.
• Develop a system that captures info to provide a more personalized experience based on preferences, and enables in-flight options to be automatically 'turned on' for assigned seat.
• Advance info. about food options, entertainment options (even this level of info. doesn't exist today - and passengers are forced to make decisions about what food to consume before the flight, and what personal entertainment to bring - without knowing what will be offered in-flight).

During:

• Profile info. of customers enables cabin staff to serve needs, increases function and meaningfulness of job, increases job satisfaction, and motivation.
• If seat gets switched, profile gets moved automatically.
• Using profile info. to define seating zones, such as the family-friendly, work, and sleep zones.
• In-flight internet access - enabling business travelers to access documents in the cloud, online shopping etc.
• Provide the option of in-seat screen internet access + keyboard (as opposed to having to manage a laptop on-flight).
• Enable plug-in in-seat screen use - direct from laptop - so that all documents can be accessed via the in-seat screen. Use of a privacy screen with this.
• Enable automatic uploading of photos to your favorite online site. Provide option to make public for an in-flight slide-show, that collates photos from passengers and shows them on a channel of the in-seat entertainment system.
• In-flight chat options, multi-player gaming options (like Virgin America is planning to provide).
• Travel destination information, ability to purchase local attraction passes.
• For destination travel, enable co-branded flights ("the fun starts before you board the plane").
• Partnership with Google for online info. system: AdWords & AdSense
• Partnership with Amazon: Kindle - use on aircraft, and rental for vacation; pre-loaded with material related to your profile.
• In-flight survey, rewarded with milage points.
• Automated in-flight notifications sent to 'your flight collection contact', updating arrival info.
• Faster existing aircraft - utilize all 3 exits.

After:

• Update profile with data from flight. Personal analytics of flights: games played and scored, movies watched, photos etc.

The Design Slam worked well as a first session. It got us to know each other, and think broadly about changes that could be made to an end-to-end user experience.

Web Form Design - Luke Wroblewski

Luke kicked off the second day of the conference with a presentation on web form design.

He started off by giving plenty of illustrations of web forms that suck, and using big numbers to help us realize the inpact of having bad form design: such a numbers of forms that are filled in for ebay, given that 30,000 people in the US alone make their living off ebay, and it being the 30th largest economy in the world. The main structure of the presentation revolved aound considering 10 fixes to (an old version of ) a form that users need to complete to use Boingo (the wifi connection service).

Luke kept the audience attentive during the two hour session, not least by his relaxed and engaging style of presenting, as well as simply having insightful and interesting content; but he also engaged the audience in a game of web-form-design bingo! Prior to delivering the content, he requested that we note 10 ways that the Boingo form could be improved, and then during the presentation we matched our answers to his suggestions. This provided a bit of fun, and a game-like quality to the presentation.

The top 10 suggestions that he gave were:

1. Create a clear path to completion for the user

2. Fix labels - in this case by top aligning them

3. Minimize the help and tips required

4. Provide validation in-line: example - user name availability

5. Make a distinction between primary and secondary actions

6. Make it clear what's going on, when actions require some time to process

7. Clearly communicate an error has occured, through top-placement and visual contrast

8. Remove fields that ask for info. that is not needed

9. Improve form organization: examples: grouping of questions, speak with one voice using natural language

10. Employ gradual engagement: enable them to experience your product (even a bit of it) prior to requiring them to sign-up

Luke emphasized that these principles work for small and simple forms, as well as large and complex ones. Large complex forms can typically be made much simpler, by striping out unnecessary segments. A quote, that his team back at ebay apparently put on their slides when purusing an endeavor to reduce form complexity: "no one raindrop believes that they are to blame for the flood." Finally, the idea of gradual engagement is somewhat new online, and something that we will see more and more of. Inspiration for this comes from Will Wright, creator of Sims, and Spore, who has emphasized that people should have success with your product within the first 5 minutes.

Luke's materials on web form design can be found at:

http://www.lukew.com/

http://www.lukew.com/ff/index.asp

http://www.uie.com/articles/forms-fairmont-hotel/
http://www.uie.com/articles/form_design_wild/
http://www.lukew.com/resources/web_form_design.asp

UX Swimlanes - Yvonne Shek

This presentation was about creating swim lanes for use in design. Swim lanes are a bird's eye view of a story, scenario, or working component - that shows the user's experience, business processes, and under lying technical systems that support the story.

Yvonne presented an example of swim lanes, that supports materials tailored for execs and project sponsors (comics), project managers, ux, mid level business, and tech / architecture types (tools and systems).

Swim labes are used very early on in the project ideally, in order to get everyone on the same page & buy-in. They help to define the process, and the scope. Developing swim lanes involves understandint the user, their goals, motives and tasks, and also maps out the start point, end point, and outcomes.

More materials on swim lanes can be found at:

http://nform.ca/blog/2008/04/swimlanes-for-the-win
http://www.affectivedesign.org/archives/240

Session - Banff Centre, Creativity

  

Trainiers from the Banff Center provided 3 options for creativity leadership experience: (i) collage creation (ii) drum rhythm from around the world (iii) improv

I chose the improv class, and enojoyed an afternoon of creativity and leadership awareness improve techniques. The introduction to this reviewed the ideas around improv, and we started off by partnering up to engage in a unique form of introductions, comparing the environment youcome from (where you grew up), with the environment you are currently in. This enabled us to focus on who we are, rather than the standard details about what we do.

Much of the session involved experiences improv activities, starting withe the class 'red ball' activity:                      

o improv ball-throwing with everyone in a circle

o improv ball-throwing in pairs, repeating the sound of the ball, and making a new one

o improv reflection mimiking, with one person the driver, and the other the follower, then both 'following'

o improv statues, with each new statue, resulting from the previous

Some important insights from this session included:

• Learn to banish the inner critic, either through working quickly - and not giving it time to surface, or by boring it away. If you move quickly, and 'just do' then unique ideas are surfaced. If you lull it to sleep then you can free yourself from its contraints.
  
• Attend to non-verbal communication to better understand what is being communicated.
• Don't over-think things. Allow ideas to emerge.
• Other professions (music, sports) are primarily about practice - as leaders we need to create opportunities to practice.
• If teams can work together well, they can improvise, and find new inspiration and ideas. They are likely to produce fruitful, impactful work, and these may devaiate, and be better than, initial plans.

A Better Method for Designing with Developers (Jerome Ryckborst)

Slides

Jerome created the five sketches technique to instill good thorough design-processes in his work place, in a situation where there were no designers, and developers did design. In previous situations he had got tired of design falling at the end of the process, with insufficient attention paid to it. Jerome developed a method, inspired by several areas: parallel design (multiple designs), Six Hats (de Bono), and Conative preferences (your doing style: generator, implementor, conceptualizer, optimizer).

Parallel design is at the heart of the method - and is a technique that comes from Bill Buxton. The intention is to saturate the design space. It involves having several developers independently propose designs, and combining them. The process as a whole starts with a discussion of the problem, and defining the problem. After this each developer sketches 5 ideas, and the sketches are presented. Ideas from the sketches are then mashed up, analysis conducted, and a sketch written.

Some of the benefits realized by employing this '5 designs-or-else" have included increasing and improving creativity fitness levels, changing corporate culture, increasing the engagement of employees and saving time and money. Jerome has also found use of the technique influences future design.

Show and Tell Reception

     

The show-and-tell reception was fun. From data visualization and artistic work, to a cartoon creation site for kids, through the IA redesign of a government city website, through swim lanes that were used as the backbone of a coporate presentation that utilized photo-based cartoons. 

Sketchboards: Good Design Faster - Brandon Schauer

  

Brandon extended the emerging theme of the conference - of sketching, getting stuff done quickly, and exploring multiple ideas. In contrast to using wireframes, he'd been looking for a method that avoids unnecessary details, reveals the best of multiple solutions, & gets everyones input and buy-in.                       

The solution incolves plenty of sketching, creating sketchboards, sharing and incorporating feedback, bringing it altogether and working in a sprint. The process involves both exploratory sketching for getting initial ideas out - which involves getting out lots of rough and varied ideas, and refinement sketching.

Exploratory Sketching

So, we had a go - first with exploratory sketching - using a 6-up template - and filling the page with multiple ideas in 6 minutes. The project that we were given was to engage with some aspect of 'Facebook for the Intranet'. The ideas here is just to free up your mind and get some ideas out. Here's mine:

Brendon provided some techniques and resources to help with exploratory sketching:

• Word Play: Consult lists of words, (e.g. autocomplete, booklist, quicklook, tabes, steps, starts, drag & drop, tags and tag clouds, trees, work areas, etc.).
• Inspiration libraries: use a good screen capturing tool, and photo tool and build your own huge inventory of different things that you can do.
• Conceptual models: any idea that you have is just a point in space, so you need to find out the rest of the space - use spectrums, 2x2's, grids. e.g. 2x2 Active to Passive, Anonymous to Familiar.
• Presentation, Leah Buley: How to be a UX team of one (presentation on slideshare). 
  

Refinement sketching

After exploratory sketching comes refinement sketching, where you move into one or two of those ideas, and focus on those better ideas. This sketch should be on the 1-up page. 

In order to get people to focus where you want them to:

• use designer markers: - cool and warm gray
• Switch out line weight
• double trace
• Using cross-hatching to take the focus away from certain areas. 
  

Also at this stage, take time to create call-outs; but not to the level of wireframes, and even here do multiple sketches where beneficial.

Sketchboard

The sketchboard stage usess a very large sheet of paper, and you'll get input from the whole team. The board should be filled with sketches. On this board requirements and personas can be added, steps and processes should be laid out. Bradon also had a handy tip - to use drafting dots to reposition pages, which are more flexible than tape, and can be repositioned on the fly.

Facilitation stage

The facilitation stage is where, ideas are shared, and a discussion is facilitated. At this stage there can be a lot of drawing going on, on top of the sketchboard. It becomes this annotated living document, that everyone can draw on. Pass the pen - if you don't like how this is drawn - then pass the pen to them. Lot's of standing. You can also assess who is engaged, and who is not.

Sprint

Bringing this all together, and making it work typically involves a 5-day sprint:

Monday: Brain dump, start sketches

Tuesday: Assemble sketchboard, Share and review sketchboard

Wednesday: Create higher fidelity designs

Thursday: Share higher fidelity designs, Refine designs

Friday: Keep refining designs, complete designs

Sprints are exhausting, and need to be scoped. Brandon commented, that he'd once worked on a week long sprint that was only about the left-hand nav.

This process is therefore about enabling the right ideas at the right time, having a lot of ideas, and making a design activity that everyone can get involved with.

Session: Visual Thinking in Practice (Dave Gray)

David Gray is all about making very simple visuals of things that are complex or very confusing. One of the points that he made that resonated with me, was that we ground children in reading, writing and arithmetic; but not drawing - and we loose the freedom that we have to draw, and we very quickly wind up thinking that we can't. This session - about how to draw - followed well from Brandon's, which encouraged us to draw as part of the creative process.

David taught us symbols - the visual alphabet [insert picture].

The visuals on the left are all pretty much linear, and next comes the creation of contours and shapes - shown on the right.

David impressed upon us that by using these shapes, we can draw anything that we can imagine. We need to calm the inner critic that teaches us that we can not draw.

Next David got us to draw stick people. Here are mine:

One reason that poeple have an inner critic, saying that they can't draw is that they think that they really need to make it look real.

Next we drew a person on a bike. Here's mine:

A useful prinicple applied here was to think about the big shapes first, and move to the little, and to start with how something is connected to the ground.

Next we tried to tell a story, and draw how we would make toast. Here's mine

In story-telling, David got us to recognize the nodes and the links, that help tell that story.

Sometimes, by making a story visual - you can expose problems, or breakdowns not recognized beforehand.

The final excercise had us drawing after conducting an affinity excercise:

Step 1: take a pad of stickies and write all your ideas down on stickies - one-by-one as you go. Ask them to write down ideas first, and ask them to bring them up later. Taking the social out of it at first, and then getting them socialized later, in order to inhibit inhibitions, and enable flow.

Step 2: one at time, each person come up, read their sticky notes, and put them up - unorganized - on the board.

Step 3: affinity diagram - putting questions as headings.

Step 4: take one question - and draw the solution.

References for David (who is also the author of "VP of No")

http://www.squidoo.com/davegray

http://www.xplane.com/

In Conclusion

I recommend CanUX. Don't go with colleagues - then it's easy to make friends with new people that you meet there, and the small numbers of attendees encourages a feeling of friendship. I liked the fact that many of the sessions incorporated activities, and were very hands-on.

Flight Patterns

Astronomy picture of the day is awesome today. It's a movie showing the flights taken over the US over a few days in 2005. It's nice to be able to figure out the cities for yourself without the mark-up. Interesting to think about discoverability being satisfying.

Small movies for screen capture

There is a small Magnolia shared bookmark site that is a step towards a repository of UI webclips.

They use Jing to capture small screen movies.

These kinds of tools allow you to automatically upload movie files to the internet and auto-capture them.

Skitch is another option.

If you're using a Mac you might try iShowU.

With all these tools - take a careful look at where your files are being stored if you're doing company confidential work.

iPhone out-of-the-box

I purchased an iPhone on Friday, and so far I'm really liking it. The ease at which I'm getting up-to-speed with it way surpasses my typical OOTB experience with consumer technology. I'm starting to feel that it probably lacks the ability to customize and personalize that I'm beginning to look for; but after only 2 days with this gadget my jury is currently out as to whether keeping the ability to customize minimal (or maybe hidden - I've yet to to find out) has greatly contributed to making the product so user friendly for initial use.

Image by Rugby 471


Here are a few of the things I've loved so far:

o I didn't have to activate the phone in the store
This improved my user / customer experience immensely! And the activation once I got the phone home was easy.

o Using my iPhone is fun
It's bright, interactive, fun - a pleasure to use this phone - I keep getting it out to play with it. That's such a change from my past experience of cell phones (my most recent prior to this being the T-mobile Wing), which I eventually just wanted to hide back in the box and hit with a big hammer.

o It has an unlimited dataplan
How cool is that! I love that it never needs to inform me and make me feel guilty about how many megabytes I've downloaded :-)

o Google Maps
It comes with Google maps and is partly GPS, as it picks up my location. That was a really fun thing to first see on my phone and successfully use (I found Green's restaurant in SF with it, and got some great lunch there).

o Google Apps
It works with various Google apps well - I have put Google Reader, Google Docs, Picassa Web Albums, and Google Calendar to be accessible from my 'home' screen.

o Email accounts
Setting it up to receive email from my 3 accounts was a breeze.

o Interaction
The interaction style is mostly intuitive, e.g. turning the screen, sliding my finger over the screen to see my additional web pages etc.

o Security passcode
It was easy for me to create a passcode for data security.


Here are some things that are have caused me some issues over the last two days, and which mostly continue to do so:

o Interaction
Some parts of the interaction don't seem all that easy, for example, after 2 days I'm still having difficultly zooming in on some web pages - they just don't seem to want to zoom, and some websites are so heavily embedded with links I keep navigating to new pages, rather than zooming.

o Volume
I'm disappointed that I need to turn the volume fully to the top for calls. This seems to be a common thing that people are disgruntled about.

o Contacts
From reading around a bit I've learned that it's impossible / pretty difficult - I'm not sure which yet - to take contacts from an old SIM card to get them on the iPhone. I have a set of 350 (completely different) contacts in the old Palm Desktop app on our Windows machine at home. By reading on the web I realized that I could export these in vCard format, and import them into the Apple Address Book on my Macbook. That all worked surprisingly well - but this was a long contact list, and many of these contacts are not required on my iPhone, so I created a new group in Address Book called iPhone. Then I plugged my iPhone into my Macbook in order to get the interface up that lets me edit my syncing options. I was looking to uncheck the box 'automatically sync', and also edit the info on the Info. tab to only import my 'iPhone' group from Address Book. ... But too late - the good rule-following computer did what it was supposed to do and downloaded everything. So now I have 'All' contacts and a subset of these called in a group called 'iPhone'. I want to delete the 'All' group from my iPhone; but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that. This person has the same problem.

To fix this I tried to delete the 'All' group in Address Book (a pain; but I reasoned that I could reinstall it afterwards); however, deleting it I found out, also deletes those duplicated addressed in my 'iPhone' group. 'Edit-undo'. So my planned work-around doesn't do the job either. Anyone?

Update: I decided to delete all my contacts in my Address Book in my MacBook, then sync my iPhone taking me back to square one - no contacts. I de-selected automatic syncing on the iTunes syncing 'summary' tab, and selected to sync only the iPhone group on the 'info' tab. Then I imported the vCard contacts into Address Book again, and re-created my iPhone group, and then did a sync with the iPhone. It's better - I now have two groups on my 'iPhone': 'All and 'iPhone' which seem to contain the same addresses. It's a waste of space to have this duplicate set though, and again I'm wondering how to delete a group.

o iPod
All our (i.e mine and my husbands joint) music is on our Windows machine on my husband's drive. He has it all in iTunes on that machine and there's a lot of music that we've accumulated over the years. It's a non-obvious procedure how to get any of this music on to my iPhone. I've been syncing my iPhone with iTunes on my MacBook. My iTunes on my MacBook has only 1 album in it. I can get to our complete set of music via the 'shared' folder in my iTunes app, that my husband has made available. It won't sync. stuff that's shared - which is quite reasonable though frustrating for me. It seems that Apple doesn't really cater to people who, in every other way but legally presumably, jointly own music.

o Transfer of Financial Responsibility
This is not an iPhone technology issue; but an AT&T customer service (and therefore user experience) issue. So far I've been given three phone numbers and have spoken to two reps... here we go...

Update: Latest phone call with customer care rep told me I have to return to the store, where I complete a form, and then make another call to customer care to tell them I've done so. ... this is starting to negate Apple's good work in enabling online activation...

o Sound defaults
It came with sound for email delivery enabled, and so succeeded in annoying my husband through the first night while I slept peacefully through!

o It's a gadget cool enough for my eight year old son to be envious
That should be on the 'good' list right? Well yes - but it's hard to keep his hands off it. Still, he was pretty disappointed to learn it doesn't come shipped with games - although I didn't tell him about the nicely bookmarked 'kids' websites that are provided.


Here are some of the things that at first glance haven't seemed completely obvious to me; but are on my list to find out how to do over the next few days:

o Choose / create icons for the pages / apps I've added to my 'home' screen - currently the images of webpages all look pretty much the same.

o Customize the home screen - arrange the order, hide to a 'second level' some of the default apps that appear there.

o Work out what 'favorites' is all about and the best way to use 'favorites'.

o Sort out the 'contacts' issues detailed above.

o Sort out the iPod / iTunes issue detailed above.


This journey of getting to know my iPhone has been an enjoyable experience so far - that's how getting any new gadget should be; but rarely turns out to be. More interestingly the iPhone puts people in a position where, for the most part, they should be able to understand the issues that they are running into, and have the language to go investigate them - for example "How do I delete a group in mt contacts?" All too often in getting new gadgets like this the issues encountered have turn very technical all too quickly, rather than containing themselves in the space of some sort of logical problem-solving that non-geeks can understand and work through. Technical issues that loose people in jargon and geek-speak also cause interest to wither very rapidly, as well as the desire to spend time making the gadget at hand actually work. And so they get relegated to the 'cables and crap' draw. So this time as a consumer I'm thrilled, and I'm looking forwarded to being able to do more and more with my iPhone over the coming weeks.

More blogs about out-of-the-box, Apple, user experience, iPhone.

Websites as Graphs & 1000 Paintings

These graphical visualizations of web pages are so unbelievably cool looking and a particularly nice way to vizualize complexity and simplicity in web design.

Sala has released the applet so you can put any web address in and look at the structure visually. So I follow the link to the flickr collection of these graphs, and immediately see graphs uploaded by Phil Gyford - whom I know, a bit. Hmm - seeing the same names as I traverse around the web, maybe the internet world isn't that big after all.

Sala is a very busy guy - he's also getting famous with the selling of 1000 paintings. Have you bought your number yet?

And for fun, here's the graph of this blog:



More blogs about Websitesasgraphs, onethousandpaintings.com.

The DCamp experience

So DCamp was definately worth attending, (check out the photos - Dcamp put a smile on my face!) and I'm certainly going to be looking out for other unconferences in the future. The event was well attended, had a great level of participation, well supported in the offices of Socialtext, and well sponsored (BayCHI, Socialtext, O'Reilly, Intuit, eBay, Yahoo, Google, IFTF, AOL, Enthiosys, Embyra & Uzanto). Rashmi and Stacie did a great job of pulling the whole thing together. There are a number of things that of course need to be organized before an unconference - such as location, food, and sponsorship ...and t-shirts (as modeled here by Rashmi). The t-shirts were just great - cool design and all that, yeah yeah... but the best part was that women were identified as a target market (!!! shock and awe !!!) and I was able to pick up a T that I wasn't for once, going to pass on to my husband. This one is mine!!

On to the sessions: I was able to be at DCamp Friday evening and Saturday from midday, and attended the following sessions (links go to the 'official wiki notes'):

* Open Source and Usability
* Remote Methods
* Agile Design, Development and Usability

Some of the interesting take-aways from the sessions:

• Open Source and Usability

Kguzik has created a great set of notes out of the discussion in this session, that mainly are suggestions, tips for how usability can be promoted in the world of open source. (see Kguzik's notes at the bottom of the 'official' notes for this session).

• Remote Methods
• Provided an overview of Ethnio and The Mind Canvas
• Ethnio:
• Ethnio is cool because you can do "live recruiting" on a website and aside from that extra is seems to have all the benefits of the other remote usability technologies.
• Live recruiting works through intercepting people after they have just performed or tried to perform an action. It's very targetted recruiting.
• The participant only needs to install a small plug-in, and they haven't had any trouble with participants doing that. It uninstalls afterwards.
• The audio and video is merged into a FLASH file for later use (smaller size than avi). The resulting recording is whatever the full screen resolution of your participants screen is.
• Currently runs with IE and Firefox (but is currently not Mac compatible.
  
• All connections are encrypted under SSL.
  
• Currently not a lot of opportunity to do collaborative notes - but they're working on that.
  
• Ethnio records all the click-stream data and notes can be tied to this data.
  
• Custom tags can be created in the fly.
  
• The Mind Canvas:
• One intention is to make user research activities more fun!
  
• Provides tools for prioritization tasks - the task has the user divide up a pile of money instead of traditional prioritization tasks.
• Card sorting tasks have been implemented.
  
• The Mind Canvas also includes vizulation tools for the data collected.
  

• Agile Design

This session generated far more questions than answers. One of the interesting issues that arose (but that was not resolved) was around timing and the integration of user research. User Research takes time - to what extent can we and should we adapt user research methods to meet the needs of Agile development processes? How can User Research be more active in driving the design process? The issue can be summarized as: Are administrating quick methods - that may be bad - worse than collecting no data?

For those who went to this event and are interested in carrying the conversation on, there are two ways: (i) reunion dinners that are being organized, and (ii) a mailing list.

See you at the next unconference...


More blogs about DCamp, unconference, palo alto, design, user experience.

About Unconferences...

At BayCHI last night Kaliya Hamlin, Identity Woman, gave an insight into the running of unconferences. This was great timing for the DCamp to be help in Palo Alto this coming weekend.

Kaliya defined unconferences as lying between a conference with a structured agenda and a cocktail party - this is where unconferences live. She outlined the important elements of a successful unconference:

The invitation and how it is framed, the wiki where ideas and tentative plans can be posted, as well as a list of who will be there (it has been amazing to see the list grow for DCamp), and the welcoming on the actual day. Kaliya gave examples of having public sign-in lists, big, sometimes illustrated. Name-tags are essential because identity is essential. Activities that have worked in the past have included having attendees represented by their caricature, and having people bring or develop logo's related to their work.

The opening session is an important element too, and have in the past included rapid-fire intros, gathering together in a circle (no matter how many people), and using introductory games.

For agenda creation, Kaliya described how BarCamp, Brain Jams, and Mind Camp have all had folks stick their ideas up on white paper walls. Postit notes have been used at Open Space Technology, Internet Identity Workshop, Recent Changes Camp, and Mashup Camp. Agenda development is often done through public discussion - descriptions of what the agenda topic is and questions and answers around that. At this point topics get added to the agenda, and topics merge, and split etc. Wiki's are used for archiving the schedule and subsequently the content that is generated during the event.

Sessions tend to involve activity, team work, and discussion. People need to be participating and learning, and like being a successful mentee - participants must drive the learning and make sure that they are in the right space to learn. To fuel all this, plenty of food (geek and otherwise) is an essential part of any unconference.

Unconferences do not have traditionally keynotes typically, or typical plenary sessions, though there is usually a closing circle where the highlights are shared etc.

Kaliya talked through lots of other interesting techniques and activities that have been used at these sort of gatherings:

o Interview and Sculpt - for creating an agenda for an unconference of 40 people or less. This is a time-consuming technique that works through the participants being interviewed prior to the event, and then an agenda being developed using the gathered data.

o Speed Geeking - like speed dating; but speed geeking! Essentially moving from project to project.

o Podcasting - to take the conversation outside of the event.

o World Cafe - lots of cafe tables, each table of people has the same question and they work on it with discussions and sketches etc. then after about 20 minutes one person from that table moves to the next. Interesting way that ideas and conversations develop.

o Dynamic Facilitation - where the facilitator supports the flow of conversations and charts concerns, data, problem-solving, and solutions.

o Spectrogram - where a semi-controversial question is asked and participants are instructed to spread (physically / spatially) depending upon their views. Then people are interviewed publicly about their perspective.

(Other techniques include Appreciative Inquiry, Collective Maps....)

During the evening we got a great taster of one of the kinds of activities that can take place at an unconference. Kaliya facilitated an activity where we got together in pairs to interview each other for 5 minutes each about our conference going experience, and when we had felt most alive, inspired, and proud. Subsequently we joined into groups of 6 and retold the stories of our partners to the larger group, pulling out the shared elements of what makes us feel alive, inspired, and proud at conferences. The results of this exercises can be seen on the Dialogue Map that was made using Compendium software.

Now I'm feeling more prepared for DCamp - see you there!

More blogs about DCamp, unconference, BarCamp, Kaliya Hamlin, BayCHI.