Final thoughts

Its been a very good conference. I wish you all could have been here to get this information. It reawakens some of the things I harp on about but get filed under "tomorrow..."

One big thing I've noticed is the message is clear in all the case studies...people achieve things because they do it their way - ways they know that work. The library redesign - they ploughed in and acted things out and built scenarios...all in the face of a very hostile environment. they managed to persuade librarians that they have customers not patrons. ..that's HUGE.

Yesterday we had a case study about Princess cruises. Very interesting again. The web dev team came to adaptive Path and asked them to research "should we implement an online booking engine?". Interesting in itself - that would normally be the Marketing guys and they would go to a market research agency...I'll bet you they'd come up with a different result. Adaptive Path actually found out that no, it wasn't something they should do. but the amazing thing with this whole project was what happened afterwards...because they'd segmented the market by users - it was different from their "usual" perception of customers. Long story short - this bit of research was a catalyst for several cans of worms around the organisation.

They were talking about the products differently in different sections of the company. On the in house systems. AND their pricing model which is nicely hidden fromthe public would be exposed once it was online. And that was a huge problem. They had support from the top but they took some painful steps to sort out their internal issues before they conitnued with design. But again - because they'd pushed and used the HCI techniques and tools....it really helped ...and they didn't take the traditional path.

So here's my thoughts that we need to think about as a team for the future:
1) I'd like to see our UCL research be as powerful about experience that we can make it - let UCL do the gadgets but we need to use that information that you're all getting form trailing lawyers and making it into something tangible for storyboarding
2) personas and scenarios...I'm coming back in again with this....HFers you should all be writing these...more on this when I get back
3) RSS - we didn't talk about it here but its right there in my head - especially with our Factiva stuff and our Alerts. I think its more pertienent to us than blogs etc.
4) Wiki's and blogs - we need to be on the same page and able to sell.educate the product people where and if there is value
5) interactive techniques - take Steve's drag & drop and lets look at it in the Ajax world but also lets continue pushing this front-end specialist theme - lets kick them out of the water for how to achieve their products
6) metrics...mainly influenced by Adaptive Path's beta product for chasing blogs...its nice interface...it inspires me!
7) everyone who goes to a conference will now have to write a blog. That's going to be a law.

And Tech Comm and Multimedia - if you're sitting there thinking "pah... its all about HF...and web dev..." Is it? what about the new help system? what about the potential for how we do tutorials?

And so its been a very good week - what I'm liking is the latent affect of this for me...every day I re-think something from the day before...and think..'ah yes'.... Its been highly valuable.