Chris Khalil’s Musings

Just got back from a fantastic week in Melbourne attending the agIdeas International Design Week conference.  I met with some fantastic new friends and was happy that my talk on UX and Design seemed to resonate with people.

There is a great review of the week here, and I’m pleased to say they put me down as one of the 6 best speakers.  I’d highly recommend anybody with a passion for design (of any kind) to attend next years event, it really is very special and you’ll come back inspired and enlightened.

Was thrilled to get a call recently from a journalist who wanted to interview me about my thoughts on digital design and UX for a supplement in The Age newspaper – in preparation for agIdeas Melbourne International Design Week 2013. Click to expand.

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I’m proud to have been invited to talk at agIdeas International Design Week in Melbourne late April – it’s one of the largest and most well respected design festivals in the world. Some of the greatest design talents from around the world will be in attendance from a diverse range of backgrounds from graphic design, product design, motion graphics, film and television, new media, animation, illustration, typography, architecture, fashion, sound design, performance art and advertising. Especially looking forward to hearing Vince Frost, David Nobay & Rafael Bonachela. 

I was recently interviewed by Iain Barker, Principal of Meld Studios on the role of User Experience and Design in big business.  For those that are interested here is the full post;

http://www.meldstudios.com.au/2012/11/05/business-design-chris-khalil-news-limited/

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve been invited again this year to be a judge on the online panel for the Interaction Design Association Student Challenge 2013.

I’m in esteemed company with industry folks such as Peter Boersma, Elizabeth Churchill, Rod Farmer , Rachel Hinman, Dave Malouf, Shane Morris and Christina Wodtke.

This year the topic is ‘Playful Technology’ which is an exciting area so I’m looking forward to seeing what the students will come up with.

Mike Kuniavsky’s seminal book on design research ‘Observing the User Experience’ is being re-released as second edition.  I was privileged enough to be a reviewer for Mike and Elizabeth.  It’s a really great book, with around 75% of the content being  new.  Unlike most UX books it’s highly pragmatic and easy to consume.

I should mention, from an open disclosure perspective, that the work I did on digital ethnography is referenced in the chapter on Diary Studies.

I’ve was really pleased to be asked by Jeremy Yuille and Steve Portigal to be a judge on the ‘Interaction Design Associations 2012 Student Challenge’ on ‘Designing the Future of News’.

I’ll be joined from my colleague at the Wall Street Journal, Laura Holder (Deputy Design Director) as well as UX luminaries such as Elizabeth Churchill (Principal Research Scientists, Yahoo!) and Jenny Blackburn (Principle, Usability & User Research, Amazon.com).

I’m hopeful we’ll see some good fresh idea come through.

Late last year I was approached by Zafer Bilda (of Bienalto Consulting) to be interviewed for a white paper he was writing.  His aim was to approach several experts in the field in both the USA and Australia and uncover their views on best practice.

I was amongst good company that included Indi Young, Elizabeth Churchill (Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!), Steve Cotterill (UX designer at Apple), Charles Yiu (UX designer at Microsoft) as well as some leading local lights in Stephen Cox (WestPac), Suze Ingram and Elizabeth Pek.

Zafer presented his findings as a presentation and white paper.  Well worth a read.

I was pleased to be asked by AIMIA to be involved in a forum on ‘Creature a Customer Centered Culture’ alongside:

• Rod Farmer, Director – Research & Strategy, Mobile Experience (prev of Hutchison Telecoms)
• Ian Muir, Chief Experience Officer, Westpac
• Faruk Avdi, Online Communication Manager, NSW Dept of Education and Training

and hosted by James Breeze (CXO Objective Digital).

It was a great event and I was interesting to hear other Peer’s view on this subject.

You can find a review of it on the Objective Digital Blog (containing the presentations).

About a year ago I was delighted to receive an invite from Jan Jursa to contribute a chapter to a book he was compiling entitled ‘UX Storytellers’. The book describes itself as ‘42 UX masterminds tell personal stories of their exciting lives as User Experience professionals.’

After some thought, I decided to use the opportunity to follow up on a presentation I gave at UX Australia on Culutural Probes.  This chapter would give me more scope to really delve into the detail of the methods I used and outcomes we achieved.

UX Storytellers has now been published as a free PDF download with other formats and a print edition to follow.  My chapter was imaginatively titled ‘How to love and understand your audience by probing them’.

You can see a free preview below.
UX Storytellers

I had the pleasure of participating in the inaugural AIMIA Customer Experience Forum today along with James Breeze (Objective Digital), Stuart Edwards (Profero), Yuri Narciss (Google) and Klaus Kaasgard (Telstra).

As a new group it’s not looking to compete in the same space as the UPA or CHISIG as it’s aimed less at practitioners and more squarely at the broader online business community.

My presentation was on ‘Innovation through Design Research’ which I’ve embeded below.

Finally got around to putting my presentation from UX Australia up on Slideshare. Take a look, would love to hear any feedback you might have.  For a more detailed description of the background on this topic, please check out my previous post on the rationale to use digital cultural probes.

Last week saw the launch of a project I’ve been working on called “The Punch”.  It was a great project to work on with some really talented people.

The Punch is an Australian opinion-driven news and current affairs site, that aims to engage its audience in discussion on the topics of the day.  I won’t dwell too long on its raison d’être as David Penberthy has already given a very eloquant explanation for this.

However, I thought it would be worthwhile briefly outlining some of the user experience/ interaction design and visual design decisions we made:

• The site is about discussion and opinion, so a simple blog format was the obvious direction to take.
• The classic blog format is one that clearly, in most peoples minds, communicates the fact that the content is opinion based rather than, say, news.
• It has the virtue of giving the homepage a certain dynamism, as it’s constantly in a state of flux as new posts very prominently replace older ones.
• It gives the reader a chance to explore, and find out more about, the content of a post on the homepage itself.  This is due to the the introductory paragraphs of the post being visible on the homepage.  The aim here, then, is to help the reader decide whether they wish to read more based on what they’ve read, and consequently give great content the best chance to shine. This is as opposed to, say, a classic news site design in which a brief headline link performs the job of communicating the content.  Furthermore, it’s less apparent change is happening on a site when simple textual, headline links change.   They are less strong, visually, than the large headline/images/content format of a blog post segment.
• A blog format allows large, engaging images, media (video) etc to be shown on the homepage, further driving engagement.  Again, this provision allows the reader to experience these elements rather than hide them behind a link.
• The stripped back visual design was very deliberate.  We have a great team of journalists and contributors with really interesting things to say, and we wanted to provide them with the best possible platform with which to have a voice.  Content is King, and we didn’t want lots of unnecessary visual elements compete or detracting from it.
• Comments were showcased on the homepage, allowing readers to get a feeling for the conversations happening ‘under the bonnet’.
• Most Commented and Recent Posts modules on the post pages provide an alternative navigation for those reader entering from search etc.
• The Hot Topics bar is another form of navigation.  It’s an adaptive nav that aims to surface the zeitgeist topics of the day and is an alternative to the standard static global navigation

There is plenty more that could be said, but I think that’s enough to be going on.  I’d suggest taking a look around the site itself.

I’d really welcome any comment or feedback you have on the design, so please feel free to leave a comment.

Oh, and by the way, the editorial team humoured me by putting up a post I wrote on how Google Maps allows you to plot a route from Australia to the US and suggests you kayak over the pacific ocean to get there!

It wasn’t really possible, in the Punch post itself, to give credit to the person who actually discovered this.  Dianne Knott, a friend of mine, was looking this up with me and came across it, so huge credit to her!