As part of the Foolproof group, Flow will now specialise in creating practice-leading interaction design. Our mission is to provide our clients with effective, elegant solutions to complex challenges. We plan to set the agenda, and the standard, for interaction design on the world stage.

We build upon fifteen years of heritage and experience, working with some of the world’s leading brands, to provide support and expertise for clients that know they need a fresh approach to design.

Our thinking and way of working is different. At Flow, we use human insight to drive and inspire creative thinking; we embrace co-creation, bringing clients and customers together, with us, on a journey to design interactions that deliver results.

We’ve brought together a team with rare expertise and skills that embody our new offering, and together with Foolproof we can support our clients with a depth and breadth of experience design services that are unrivalled.

If you’re looking for a new approach to design we’d love to hear from you, and we’re open for business right now.

Most experience design agencies are set up to be able to do exactly this. Most experience design agencies do it pretty well. Mostly.

Commoditisation of service offerings

However, as the experience design industry approaches a critical mass, such that it is able to commoditise its service offerings, those services cluster into a set of repeatable, predictable and marketable objects, like practice moths around a service flame. Some agencies might focus on the research cluster. Some might prefer to lead with the design and build cluster. Some might really be able to deliver them all as an integrated experience design offering.

But we’re evolving into digital utilities.

Designing without borders

While those commoditised experience design services help clients and agencies agree on deliverables, costs and timelines, the resulting engagement might be less collaboration, more subscription. If a client really does have an articulated, addressable problem, and the service offerings have evolved to the point that we can deliver great user experiences without too much operational overhead, thank you, then everybody is happy. But what about the client that can’t articulate their problem? What if they don’t even have a problem? What if they just have a feeling that things could be somehow ‘better’?

That’s where we need to take our experience design practice back to designing without service borders. We still gather insights. We still interpret and evolve. We still detail and deliver. But our engagement is based on our excellence in crafting experiences that delight customers and users. We don’t lead with services, we lead with design. Our designers are visionary. They understand the complexities. They’re vibrant, exciting and unique. They don’t shuffle into that workshop with brochureware, they walk in to that workshop self-aware. They boldly glow, and so they should.

Observe others use an iPad "in the wild", take a look at Apple's guided tours or simply use one yourself. You will reach the same conclusion: the iPad is not a table-top device. It is meant to be held in your hands, not lying flat on a surface. Yet this is precisely the way the N/N group conducted their testing: with the device lying on its back under a document camera.

At Flow we understand that this is an unrealistic setup, and have arranged our own lab to match the way people actually hold their iPad.

We recently tested an iPad app for watching videos. We realised that this application was likely to be used while comfortably seated in a sofa. So we brought a sofa to allow this in our lab too.

Then came the question of what should be recorded during the sessions. For a typical website testing session, we use a desktop computer with Morae to record the participant's screen and a picture of their face via a webcam.

There are now options to get the iPad screen replicated on a external monitor for viewing or recording. But these involve plugging a cable in the device, which restricts how the device can be held, so we decided against it.

Instead, we used a camera located behind the sofa to take an over-the-shoulder look at the iPad screen. This also allowed us to also capture how the device is being held, what the user hands are doing, and what the user’s hands hide. These are essential to understand how a touch screen interface is reacting.

To also capture the facial expression of participants, we used another webcam that was positioned on a coffee table in front of the sofa.

By allowing the participants to hold the device how they would at home, we can take away some of the awkwardness of the lab setting, observe a more authentic experience and potentially discover issues that wouldn't have surfaced otherwise.

It’s great to get a fresh perspective on user experience practice once in a while, and my recent trip to Berlin for UX Camp Europe allowed me this opportunity in an international context.

More than four hundred user experience (UX) practitioners and enthusiasts gathered in Berlin last weekend for the second pan-European ‘unconference’ UX Camp Europe 2011. The philosophy of barcamps and unconferences is that all attendees should also participate in one way or another, either by giving a talk or at least by engaging in discussions. Furthermore, these events encourage informal presentation formats as well as open sharing and discussions.

The two days were packed with great talks and workshops, with plenty of partying before and after the event.

Each day there were eight parallel streams, and so there was plenty of choice of sessions to attend. I started the first day by attending two sessions on Agile UX, gave my talk on communicating and selling UX design deliverables, then attended an inspiring afternoon session on change management and content strategy, a workshop on the KJ method (collaborative prioritisation method), and Eric Reiss’s keynote 10 war stories you won't see on Slideshare.

Day two, I chose Actionable Web Analytics, Responsive Designs, a session on researching and prioritising user tasks in design, and two sessions by Tobias Jordans - on Axure specifications and on small interaction design details that make a big impact on the user’s experience.

The number of attendees across the two days and the quality and variety of the presentations suggest that UX is thriving across the whole Europe.

Thanks to all the participants and organisers for making it such a wonderful event. We will hopefully see each other again next year.

...

(Coverage of UX Camp Europe 2011 on Lanyrd.)

For me the most interesting insight was that unless the primary user lives alone, their tablet is likely to be shared with their partner, children and visiting friends. NN/g concludes that "Tablets are shared devices" and that when designing apps for a tablet "you should assume that you're designing for a multi-user device."

Yet few tablet operating systems provide good support for shared use (driven by its need to control access to sensitive business data, the Blackberry Playbook is a rare exception). And this can lead to significant problems for users. Young children accidentally change settings, delete work emails and reset the game scores of older siblings. Teens move apps between folders, access age-inappropriate games and media, and use stored account and payment information to make unauthorised purchases. Partners must frequently log in and out of each other's Facebook, Twitter, Google and other accounts.

Working your way through these sharing problems is hard work for even the geekiest of us. And while some apps do provide simple ways to control access to multiple Facebook, Twitter and eMail accounts, users must learn the sharing features of each app and create a separate profile in each one.

This again demonstrates how important it is to investigate and understand people’s real behaviour and contexts of use when designing for new platforms.

So when we design tablet apps, we must consider carefully, whether and how to support shared use. Will users each want their own settings and data? Will adults need to protect some sensitive data from their children? If your app connects to a website or web service, will different users need to connect to different accounts? If you do need separate user profiles, how will you store and how will your users manage them?

NN/g's research and the multi-user support within many apps, suggest that better support for shared use should be a priority for tablet operating systems. The access experience could be very simple: tap your name and enter a password/code, or even just show your face to the camera. And while each app would still need to decide how it handles multiple users, standard APIs and common interface guidelines would make life easier for designers and developers. And most importantly, make the experience of sharing more simple and more consistent for users.