We’re pleased as punch to partner with our good friend Lou Rosenfeld at Rosenfeld Media to offer you Future Practice Webinars. Our first two events are Modern Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski and Using Mental Models for Tactics and Strategy with Indi Young.

When we created them we wanted to accomplish two things:

1. Provide a forum for advanced practitioners in the field of user experience design to share with us their best thinking on topics that have immediate practical value and to show us where the practice is going in the long-term to help us prepare. Hence the series title, Future Practice
2. Enable practitioners like yourself to benefit from this education at a lower price than in-person seminars and conferences, without having to travel and emit all that nasty carbon.

For more information and registration, go to the Rosenfeld Media webinar page. For 20% off, use discount code NBSWBNR

That’s right, Alex Osborn started popularizing brainstorming in the late 1930′s. It’s a classic tool I still use, but I have to wonder if there’s something better.

Brainstorming is simple, and I would bet this simplicity is the key to its popularity. Yet even the basic rules that Osborn set out aren’t very common. Brainstorming is too often reduced to sitting around a conference table discussing a topic rather than storming an objective.

I tried a little experiment with my Business & Design students tonight, introducing them to three different idea generation tools: brainstorming, “yes, and…,” and question the brief. Brainstorming and Yes, and… were slow and stiff. Part of this is probably due to my skill as a facilitator, but I also think these tools require some experience to use proficiently. I liken it to building muscles; it takes some time doing it to see results.

Question the brief, on the other hand, more easily generated plenty of usable ideas, and there were even some explicit comments preferring this method, so that we returned to it. My theory is that it’s simple enough to remember but has just enough structure to produce specific kinds of ideas. That’s a balance I’m going to seek with my other concept design tools.

See also my concept design page at Smart Experience.

There was a New York City IxDA event at Roundarch last night that challenged 10 teams of designers to invent the portable electronic ink magic paper of the future. In addition to the usual functional stuff, fun ideas emerged like using it as a yoga mat, a DDR mat, or modules that could be connected together to make various sizes.

There wasn’t enough time to do a lot of critique of the designs, but it was fascinating to see how each group of 3-4 people self-organized. One group compared their process to speed chess — each person took a short time to iterate on the design and then ‘hit the clock’ passing the baton to the next person. Two groups talked about working together to define the problem and environment, then working independently on separate tasks. One of these groups actually moved apart physically.

The composition of the groups of course was pivotal. One father of a 3-year old was inspired by his son’s toys. A business analyst on another team ensured specific requirements were achieved.

And the methods varied too. Most accepted the advice in the brief to prescribe and describe scenarios, but others just picked a strong theme like “magic” and riffed on this pleasingly, having the device learn your gestures and automatically load images from a camera. It was a great reminder to me that the questions you ask determine the conclusions you reach.

Designers often ask this question. Sometimes I think the question arises from a genuine desire to be doing something else which is more strategic in nature, and sometimes I think what is being asked is, how can I convince or influence others to do things my way?

The answer might be the same or it might not. I’ve started to keep track of the answers I hear to shed some light here.

1. Change your title, brand identity, clothing, etc. in order to change perceptions of what you offer.
2. Charge more money so that only the people who have real strategic influence can afford you.
3. Bootstrap your way into different work.
4. Be strategic. In Porter’s definition, strategic is long-term planning. Avail yourself of strategic tools both simple (e.g. roadmaps) and complex (futures analysis and design).
5. Illustrate the strategic implications of seemingly tactical efforts. If strategic = long-term, show the long-term effects.
6. Be more thoughtful, for example go beyond providing expertise to providing decision-making frameworks.
7. Educate yourself. Strategy may be harder than finance, operations, and other business topics. Take the time to learn what strategists really do.
8. Don’t be strategic in the usual sense. Instead, elevate your craft and expand its boundaries. See the influence and flexibility of a breakout designer like Joshua Davis.

What else have you heard?

A friend is contracting with a design firm for work that will include web analytics, so I asked my colleague and expert Marko Hurst for resources that would provide a gentle introduction, mostly from a marketing perspective. He recommends:

1. Web Analytics Demystified — A bit more technical, but not a tech book geared for someone who wants to learn analytics
2. Call To Action — Good mix of marketing & analytics
3. Waiting For Your Cat To Bark — More of a marketing first, then analytics, but a fantastic read that everyone should read regardless. Introduces Persuasion Architecture, very cool stuff.

btw, congratulations to Marko and Lou Rosenfeld who are teaming up to write the Search Analytics book.

The nice folks at Digital Web Magazine published my new article on Concept Design Tools. It’s already received some nice reviews in the Twitterverse…

For those of you who haven’t seen Victor Lombardi’s new article on concept design tools, it’s a must read…

…it’s brilliant stuff and super accessible. It’s great to see solid thinking around the topic. There isn’t enough of it.

…great article on concept design!!!!

Here’s some reactions from bloggers I keep hearing over and over, confirming why I think this topic is important for digital designers. Steven Clark asks, Where is the breadth of our design?…

where is our design process preceding the implementation phase? The moment we receive the brief we’re practically falling over ourselves to push forward, and implementation seems to go on at the same time that we’re figuring out what the product should do. This is as applicable to web solutions as to applications, we jump in boots and all with predetermined assumptions.

And Martin Belam writes…

One strong theme that came out of it for me personally though was that, unlike industrial designers, when we make web applications and sites we tend to rush to wireframes and ‘colouring in’ before we have explored multiple potential solutions. Victor’s championing of questioning the brief looked like a good way to try and break out of that vice.

Since writing it I’ve already discovered similar work that’s been done over the past several decades. My approach is different in that the tools are simple and fast enough for any designer to use without having to learn a lot about method, but I will be spending some time with the masters to learn how I can climb onto their shoulders.