Just saw this on LinuxKungFu. I love “how the analyst designed it” nothing like solving the wrong problems by not looking at the bigger picture. Fantastic:-)

13:00 — Lunch

One design direction will do — AMEN

12:38 — Larissa Meek (AgencyNet) Getting your designs approved: 12 Simple Rules
watching a demo of an Aston Martin website and I hate it! Hard to beleive but this agency team is making exactly the same mistakes the boo.com crew. They are trying to replicate a sensual experience using tech and it just doesn’t work :-(

… and at this point, Dug’s battery expired and he switched to iphone mode. I can’t believe I forgot the bloody charger this morning!

Casino is a “feedback engine” (he’s describing what the adiction thing call “near-win experiences” ie gamblers never loose, they just almost win) Vegas master of feedback…

Creating delightful experiences: Innocent’s “stop looking at my bottom”, fun, easter eggs (find it and share)

Andy just said “social object”

11:36 — Andy Budd is doing great things showing examples of great experience curves

[ interview break ]

I just interviewed Steve Pearce, I wanted to ask him the agency questions I posted earlier. How does Poke get clients to focus on the bottom of the iceberg after the pitch was won on the basis of the shiny top of the iceberg.

He reckons Poke has solved this by saying “no”, by never going to the client with a ready-made solution. In ongoing work, he always keeps referring to interaction, thinking about the backend and appserver looking for hooks into the experience. He quotes the example of the Topshop re-skin where his team looked carefully at the appserver and found a number of services that had been disabled, never implemented or under-used. As a result, he was able to use an up-sell module to create a dynamic user-ratings system.

The second question is the Hugh McLeod question about agencies being asked help clients redefine their business and how agencies are going to fit into this new world. Steve’s take on this was

that agencies live the client’s product (use Windows machines to sell Microsoft products) and build deep relationships with clients such that the feedback mechanism from agency to client can be about a lot more that just the current project.

Finally, Steve reckons

that Poke is based on values and that if those are always kept at the core of all projects, the thinking about the project (and by extension the client’s business) will naturally flow back to the client.

11:25 — Andy Budd (Clearleft) is doing “Designing the User Experience Curve”

(Break: back at 11:20)

10:42 — Andy Clarke of Stuff & Nonsense & Steve Pearce are taking questions

Well, I came to see Steve Pearce from Poke and managed to catch the last five minutes of his chat.

He did an interesting presentation on the process of creating user experiences. He uses a great iceberg metaphor (see others on this) to describe the process.

It’s an interesting parallel to Jesse James Garett’s “Elements” in that in the iceberg metaphor you dive under the surface to the bottom of the experience and then float up to the top will in JJG land you float up from abstract to concrete via the stages of strategy, scope, structure, skeleton and surface :-)