Why I think Ryan Carson doesn't believe in UX Professionals, and why I do 5 Sep 2010

In a fantastically timed bit of linkbait, Ryan Carson called bullshit on the title of “UX Professional” while attending the dConstruct conference we organise in Brighton. At the conference we announced that we were hiring a Senior User Experience Designer so it would be easy to put two and two together and assume that he was calling us out. However I actually understand where he’s coming from. I don’t agree with him mind, but I do understand.

Back in the early days of the web you just had web designers. These multi-disciplined individuals would design the pages, code up the table based layouts, set up the database and program the CMS. They were able to do all these jobs because the field of knowledge back then was fairly limited and hence the outputs were fairly basic. You could also argue that websites were basic precisely because they were designed and built by a single person, but that’s probably for another article.

As the field of knowledge grew and sites got bigger and more complex, distinct roles started to emerge. First the roles split into designer and developer. Then as sites demanded more off their back-ends you’d have database architects, systems administrators, systems architects and a whole slew of sub roles. Similarly on the front end you would find people who specialised in interface design, front end development, motion design and, more recently, user experience design.

Now user experience design is an interesting one as it’s both a series of activities (research, information architecture, interaction design etc.) as well as a job title in it’s own right. For smaller projects it’s perfectly feasible for a single person to plan the architecture, sketch the wireframes, design the interface and even code up the pages; just in the same way that it would be perfectly feasible for a single builder to plan and build an extension to your house. However as a project becomes more complicated you need more people with deeper expertise. So just as large building projects require quantity surveyors, draftsmen, architects, interior designers, wayfinding designers and a whole host of other experts, so do websites.

I think the reason Ryan thinks that “‘UX professional’ is a bullshit job title” designed to “over-charge naive clients” is because he’s never actually been in the position to need one. If you look at Ryans’ background, he worked for agencies in the late nineties and early noughties when the field of user experience was still in it’s infancy. As such I suspect that he’s never worked with a team of dedicated UX people.

In more recent years Ryan has become a conference organiser and content publisher, producing relatively straightforward websites which really don’t need a dedicated UX person. He’s also dabbled as a start-up entrepreneur, although sadly none have been a huge commercial success as of yet. In fact, Ryan is very much embedded in the bootstrapped start-up culture where all you need is a smart designer and developer to see your ideas come to life. So in early stage start-ups where you’re designing for people like yourselves, you can definitely get away without a dedicated UX person if you’ve got a talented team with enough overlap. However once the project grows, you’ll probably benefit from the help of a dedicated UX professional.

10 years ago I thought much the same way as Ryan. I couldn’t understand how companies could spend millions on a website when a designer and developer could knock something together in a weekend. Similarly why would anybody need a pretentious title like Information Architect when I’m perfectly capable of putting together the site map for the brochureware site I was working on myself?

Of course I quickly learned how naive I was being. There’s a huge difference between knocking together the site-map for a piece of brochureware and developing a complete ontology, taxonomy and controlled vocabulary for a site with hundreds of thousands of data-points. Similarly there a big difference spending a couple of days working out wireframes in balsamiq for that shopify project you’re working on and spending months prototyping and testing a complex application with hundreds of interactions.

Sadly I do think Ryan has accidentally hit on something here, and it’s a trend I’m seeing more and more of; web designers with an interest in user experience re-branding themselves as UX professionals. So there are an increasing number of people out there who are calling themselves UX designers because they’ve sketched out some wireframes and sat in on a couple of usability tests.

By contrast a typical UX person will have a much deeper understanding of cognitive psychology, human computer interaction and design research than their graphically focused colleagues. They will have more experience running stake-holder interviews, usability evaluations and ethnographic studies. They will be more versed in the creation of personas, concept models, scenarios, user-flows and storyboards. They will be able to create wireframes and experience prototypes using a wide range of tools and to differing levels of fidelity depending on the questions being asked and the intended audience. In fact there are a whole host of skills that differentiate a UX designer from a more general web designer. So if this sounds like you why don’t you check out our job for a user experience designer at Clearleft

As far as Ryan is concerned, I suspect he isn’t as naive as he sounds. After all, he’s been in the industry for a long time and even ran an online UX conference a few months back which Clearleft spoke at. So I can’t believe Ryan would put something on he didn’t believe in just for the money. If he did, that would show a real contempt for his customers. Instead I suspect it’s just a way to stir up controversy and drive traffic to his site. However if Ryan really believes there’s no difference between a web designer and a user experience designer I’m sure we can supply him a big list of books to read and conferences to attend in order to change his mind.

So I suggest that the UX community bear in mind where Ryan’s coming from and realise that for some people UX is just a quality attribute or set of activities. After all, not everybody on the web is building the kind of large scale projects that benefit from a dedicated UX resource. Sometimes a UX savvy web designer is just enough.

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The digital economy act to kill start-up culture in the UK 17 Apr 2010

The recent passing of the UK Digital Economy Act has generated outrage amongst the web community. Large media business have effectively lobbied government under the spurious claim that without protection the future of the digital economy in the UK is at threat. However the future of digital isn’t locked inside a few big content companies distributing their goods electronically. The future of the digital economy is in empowering a creative class to produce new and as yet unheard of business opportunities on the web. So rather than protecting the digital economy, the Digital Economy Act will have the effect of protecting outdated business models and harming innovation in the UK and handing over initiative to more liberal and less restrictive countries.

One potentially damaging aspect facing UK start-ups and freelancers is the one makes the owners of open wifi networks responsible for the traffic that passes over the network. This three strikes and your out process that requires no proof and provides no real means of defence will have a damming effect on the coffee shop culture in the UK. Bars, cafes, public libraries and any other wifi provider will now be responsible for the traffic on their network. As such, many will stop providing open access for fear of disconnection, and the cafe working culture so important to the start-up community is at risk of coming to a crashing end.

Considering it’s taken so long to foster this culture, I think it’s going to be a huge loss to the digital economy and a terrible shame. How many potential Dopplers, Moos LastFMs are we going lose because of this? I wonder?

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The Internets Never Forget 27 Feb 2010

5 Years ago somebody wrote something stupid on the Internet that annoyed a bunch of bloggers enough to write about it, including myself. Yesterday I received a contrite email from this person saying that the incident had ruined their life and asking if I’d remove the post. It turns out that my blog post ranked in the top 20 results for this guys name and he was wondering if I’d remove the article. I considered it, as to be honest I’d completely forgotten about the event (as had most people 2 weeks after it happen) and I didn’t really care that much anyway. However it got me thinking about two different things.

On the one hand, the Internet can freeze youthful folly and a small transgressions can stick with you for life. So that picture of you drunk and passed out in a skip, or that heated argument you had on a mailing list when you were twenty can come back and haunt you. This is something that the Facebook generation is beginning to discover as they enter the job market only to have their potential boss Google their antics. Surely everybody deserves the anonymity of youth; to screw up a few times and not have it haunt you for life for ever. I’m a pretty decent chap and felt sorry for the guy, so was definitely tempted to strike his transgressions from the history books. I know that I’d want somebody to show me some compassion if the position was reversed.

On the other hand, by removing this information aren’t we effectively rewriting history? I’m sure we’ve all written dumb things on the Internet in the past, yet we don’t all go around asking for this information to be doctored. Shouldn’t people be forced to standby their mistakes and carry them with honour and dignity? Isn’t it important to know that the MP now campaigning for family values once smoked pot and screwed around? Similarly isn’t it useful to know that somebody who now makes their living writing standards based code once said…

“Standards cronies have now latched on to the disabled ‘the starving African children of high technology’ for leverage. Spend time reading A List Apart, and you’ll soon get the impression that accessibility is bigger than cancer, and we’re all about to go blind and lose our mouse-bearing limbs. The solution? Web standards!”

So what do you folks think? Should youthful folly be let to rest or is ther a moral obligation to keep this information around?

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My response to the question of speculative pitches 11 Feb 2010

A few nights ago I attended a UX-Bri session where one of the speakers floated the idea of doing free usability testing in order to win projects. I asked about the moral implications of this and was surprised by the response. While the audience largely disagreed with the idea of speculative design work, it seemed that speculative UX work was somehow more acceptable. The speaker later cc’d me into an email question from one of the audience members querying my negative reaction to speculative pitching so here was my response…

“Dear XXXX,

There has been a debate over the subject of speculative work running within the design community for some time now, so I thought it was worth raising the issue.

One side of the argument states that helping a client solve their problems for free, before being awarded a contact is bad practice. This camp feels that speculative work of any kind devalues the work that we do by the very fact that we’re giving it away at no cost. This helps solidify the notion that thinking about a problem is free and that designers should only get paid for production work. However many designers feel that it is in-fact their problems solving abilities that give them their competitive edge and that the production work is just a by-product of this. The fear is that if designers continue to do work for free, this may become expected practice, as it is in other creative industries. This puts the power squarely in the hands of the client, forcing all designer to capitulate and therefor suffer large amounts of outlay in order to secure relatively modest contracts.

The other side of the argument states that designers should do whatever they need in order to win a project and that speculative work is a legitimate means of business development. Many of them will count this as part of their new business development spend and will have already accounted for this in their rates. These designers cite that speculative work is already expected in other fields like advertising so is becoming the norm. They will also argue that speculative work is no different from other sales activities like meetings, proposal writing etc.

Personally I feel that this argument is rather reductive. Just because speculative work exists in other industries doesn’t mean that it has a place on the web. With large advertising agencies the contracts can be worth millions of pounds. With these kind of figures at stake it seems worth spending a couple of weeks on a pitch. However very little web work comes close to these figures, so the amount of speculative work needed is disproportionately high.

While it is true that speculative work can help you win projects in the short term, once it becomes the norm it places a large burden on the industry in general. Due to the cost of speculative work and its early place in the buying cycle, it is rare that you will have enough information to do a sufficiently processional job. As such, not only do you wean clients into the idea that the work you do has little value, but that the resulting quality is low.

As with other industries, there is an inherent ‘cost to sale.’ As such lots of free work does go on. My argument is that this work should involve explaining to your customers how you will go about solving their problems and how you have used similar techniques to solve the problems of other clients. I do not believe that helping to solve clients problems in advance of winning the project is a long term sustainable business practice. Furthermore, by devaluing the work that we do, I feel that speculative problem-solving can damage the industry as a whole.”

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Clearleft offers free training to budding conference speakers 3 Feb 2010

In order to get more people in the design scene speaking at events like SillSwap, BarCamp and even dConstruct or UX London, I’ve been toying with the idea of organising a free public speaking course. It would be held on a yet-to-be-determined Saturday at the Clearleft offices in Brighton and would focus on practical, hands-on tuition.

We would start with how to plan, research and design a talk that delights your audience, paying special attention to story telling and narrative. We would then move onto the delivery and performance side of things; teaching people how to project their voice, vary their tone, use the stage and work the audience. It’s all basic stuff, but it’s these rookie errors that can damage an otherwise excellent presentation.

To ensure everybody gets the individual attention they need, the even will be for a limited number of people. I’m not sure how many yet, but probably no more than 12. Everybody will be expected to present a short practice talk and we’ll video each session so the attendees see how they improve over the day. So they’ll be no tourists.

This workshop will be aimed at people who are really keen on breaking into the conference speaking circuit and need some coaching and improvement. So it’s not for folks who want to brush up on their general speaking skills.

In order to select the best candidates I’m asking that people record a short 5 min presentation, post it up on Vimeo and then add the link in the comments below. If you could add a little background info as well, that would be great.

We’re not looking for super slick presentations, or the folks that need the most help. Instead we’re looking for people with an interesting message and a passion for what they do. Oh, and at the risk of being charged with positive discrimination, if there are two equally strong candidates and one comes from an under represented segment in the web community, we’ll invite them first.

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The best products sell them selves 27 Jan 2010

The concept of ‘Pull Marketing’ is all the rage at the moment. In the age of the Mad Men, selling a new product was easy. You’d be handed a commodity product like toothpaste or washing powder and set about building a brand to set it apart from the competition. You would then buy advertising space on a small number of influential marketing channels and wait for the sales to roll in. The growth of multi-channel TV, the commercialisation of radio and the rise of desktop publishing in the 80s fragmented audiences, making it hard to get the message out. However it was the appearance of the Internet that changed marketing for ever.

Attention splintered across thousands of channels and billions of website as web-savvy shoppers began to compare products online and shop in the long tail. In a world where company owners no longer had control over the way their products were presented, power went back to the consumer.

At present only the Super Bowl advertising resembles the marketing to the old days (the ability to get in front of an enormous audience at once) and marketers have been looking to employ alternative tactics to push users towards their sites. As a result, a plethora of companies have begun viewing the web as a new marketing platform and introduced “viral campaigns” and “sticky content” to generate traffic.

The question is, will the spike in traffic generated by push tactics help generate extra sales? Push marketing gimmicks work for a while - just as a free toy inside every cereal used to - but these concepts eventually lose their polish. In this world of decreasing timescales, even social media marketing has become so 2007. Instead of being a marketing platform, the web has become a product and service platform in its own right.

To sell products in a networked world, you need to differentiate yourself by more than just brand attributes and a check-list of features. You need to create remarkable products that rise above the competition and get noticed. Products that your users will rate, recommend and tweet about. In fact, what you need to create isn’t a product at all, but an experience.

Hoteliers have known this for a long time, moving up the value chain and transforming themselves from places to sleep into memorable holiday experiences. Gone are the chocolates on the pillow to be replaced by Egyptian cotton sheets, high end toiletries and HD televisions in every room. In fact hotels have a name for these items; they call them ‘delighters’.

Mediocrity just doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead, we need to create products that sell themselves. Does this mean that marketing no longer has a place in the networked society? Far from it. Marketers often understand customer needs and pain points better than anybody. In fact, this can sometimes be the cause of frustration in itself. I know plenty of people (myself included) who’ve been wooed by the notion of integrated phone, TV and Internet services only to find yourself dealing with completely separate business units and billing systems. The marketers were ahead of the curve. It’s the product that was lagging behind.

Companies like Zappos understand the power of delight only too well. Things like complimentary overnight shipping and personalised notes are just the tip of the iceberg for this online shoe retailer from Las Vegas. Zappos have done away with the call-waiting lights and encourage their staff to bond with their customers. They even train their staff to order out-of-stock shoes for their customers on competitor’s sites. The competitors get the sale but Zappos gets the goodwill. I even heard tell of one of their call centre staff helping a clients to order pizza, although this is apocryphal. No wonder they recently got acquired by Amazon for US$1.2 billion.
Marketers have a massive role in shaping new products. They also have an enormous role in shaping people’s opinions on a more personal level. You could even say that customer service is the new marketing. New online services like Get Satisfaction are hoping this will be the case and companies like Zappos would seem to agree.

The secret sauce is simple. We need to take a more customer centred approach to creating products that solve real problems for real people. We need to listen to our customer’s wants, needs and frustrations and create products that solve them. We need to constantly strive to improve our products at their core, rather than hiding their inadequacies with slick marketing campaigns. We need to create experiences that consumers can rally around and talk about, and we need to get out there and engage with the conversation. Not everybody can or will be able to create remarkable products, but the ones that do will flourish and prosper.

So what does this mean for the future of push marketing? I think that it is increasingly becoming clear that the effectiveness of viral campaigns will inevitably dwindle, while clients will begin to question whether their “sticky content” is not just brining them traffic, but the right kind of traffic.

Concepts such as “sticky content” belie the core concepts that are required underneath. Clients are going to need to spend more time learning the needs, wants and desires of their customers when building products, applications and campaigns so that they are pushing the right kind of traffic.

Ultimately, if you spend time creating something that people want, they will do the job of marketing it for you

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Information Anxiety 23 Jan 2010

One of the problems of working in the knowledge economy is the constant need to keep abreast of current trends and thinking. This would be fine if you worked in a mature industry or one with a limited number of books, papers and conferences appearing each year. However in the knowledge economy of the web, more information is being published every day than could be consumed in a year. What’s more, that pace is increasing.

The problem is exacerbated by a number of things. First of all I’m a reasonably prolific speaker, so feel the need to spend time researching my next topic and synthesising the results. I also program two conferences so have to spend a certain amount of time researching potential speakers and reviewing their slides or presentation videos. Oh, and on top of that I’ve got a company to run, clients to satisfy and staff to look after. As such the majority of this research happens at evenings and weekends, outside office hours.

As such, I often find myself in a position of triage; making snap judgements about the value of information I find and then prioritising them accordingly. So I clip articles to Evernote, store audio in Huffduffer and podcasts in iTunes. I subscribe to RSS feeds, capture video presentations on PopScreen and store lists of books to read on Amazon. Oh, and I’ve got a stack of presentations to review on SlideShare at some stage. Every now and then I get chance to chip away at some of these data sources, but it’s rarely enough. Here’s a quick example of what I’m currently dealing with…

• 269 video presentations to watch
• 230 slide decks to review
• 36 books to read
• 542 unread RSS feed posts
• 141 podcast episodes to listen to
• 213 unread articles

It’s a classic case of Information Anxiety. Not enough free time to process all the information I want to. The result is a constant background level of stress. Even when I’m at rest I’m thinking about all the stuff I should, and could, be doing. Now I’ve always been a fairly relaxed person so am comfortable dealing with the stress. But it’s ever-present all the same.

I’ve been thinking about going on a holiday recently. Now with most holidays the point is to go away, relax and re-charge your batteries. However I’ve been toying with the idea of a different, and thoroughly 21st century holiday. Not to relax but to consume. The idea would be to go somewhere for a week or ten days with a stack load of book, articles, presentations and podcasts and get on top of my information overload. I’m not sure if this kind of working vacation common but I know at least a couple of friends who have dome this in the last few months.

Holidays at home are popular at the moment, so it’s something I considered. However I felt that the familiar scenery would force me into learnt patterns of behaviour that would prevent me from getting stuff done. Instead I’m looking for somewhere quiet—but not isolated—where I can spend the day snacking on information. It could be a cottage in the country or a hut on the beach. Just as long as the surroundings have enough variety to keep me interested and prevent me from getting cabin fever. So if you’ve got any ideas, give me a shout.

In the meantime, do you have trouble keep on-top of the wealth of information thrown at you? Have you developed interesting or useful coping strategies? Would love to hear from you.

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Good products are one in a million 20 Jan 2010

1. I have an idea for a thing (1 million people)
2. I tried to build a thing (50,000 people)
3. I built a thing that works (10,000 people)
4. I built a thing that people use (1,000)
5. I built a thing that’s easy to use (50 people)
6. I built a thing that people enjoy using (5 people)
7. I built a thing that people love (1 person)

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7 Ways to Improve your Public Speaking 3 Jan 2010

As a self confirmed conference junkie I speak at a dozen events each year, and attend many more. As such I’ve probably seen close to a thousand talks over the last five years. Because of this I’ve got a pretty good idea what makes for an exciting talk and how you can guarantee your session will suck.

As somebody who also organises two conferences, UX London and dConstruct I’m really keen on getting new talent into the speaking circuit while still maintaining quality. As such I’ve put together a quick guide to help both new and experienced speakers kick arse/ass.

Most of these tips aren’t new, but you’ll be surprised how few people actually follow them. However if you do, you’ll be well on your way to being the next Jeff Veen, Jared Spool or Jason Santa Maria.

It’s all about preparation

Winston Churchill once said that for every minute of a speech he would spend one hour preparing. By those calculations a 45 minute presentation would have taken him around six and a half working days to complete. That may be long enough for a seasoned orator like Winston, but for most people I think you need a lot longer. It usually takes me around two weeks to prepare a new talk, pulling 12 hour days. So that’s easily two or even three hours per minute. If you haven’t done the research or put in the hours, it’ll show in the quality of your slides, the quality of your argument and the quality of your delivery. In short, the more time you put into your talk the more polished and professional it will be.

Craft a strong narrative

Just like a good movie, the best presentations have a strong narrative arc. They have stories that are broken down into logical sections or acts, with one section flowing seamlessly into the next. Concepts will build upon each other, allowing the audience to spot patterns and follow an emerging theme. Good presentations will have highs and lows that are deliberately created to elicit certain reactions from the audience. In stark contrast the worst presentations are ones that jump all over the place, moving from one concept to the next with little narrative glue to hold them together. As such, good speakers aren’t just orators. They’re people can who see the stories hidden inside complex sets of data and are able to expose these relationships in a logical and structured manner. Good speakers are storytellers, plain and simple.

The best way to craft a narrative is to start by doing a brain dump of all the ideas you’ve been having around a particular topic. You could do this by writing your key concepts down on sticky notes and posting them up on your wall, as several of my colleagues do. Or you could start writing discrete blocks of content into your favourite word processor and then move them around in a more linear fashion until they start to fit. The method you choose depends on whether you already have an idea for a narrative or whether you’re hoping for a more emergent story. Either way, the goal is to create a high level overview of your subject matter in order to spot the connections and select the most compelling of several possible story arcs. Once you’ve developed an engaging story with a few key plot points, it’s much easier to fill in the details.

Start strong and finish on a song

As a speaker the moment you get on stage you need to answer the following question going through the mind of every person in the audience, “Is there any value listening to this person or should go back answering my emails and sending messages on Twitter?” A good speaker will start strong and grab peoples attention in an instant. A bad speaker can lose an audience almost immediately and spend the next 45 minutes struggling to get them back.

Unless you’re famous and people have come to explicitly hear about you, the absolute worst way to start a talk is with a condensed version of your life history. Nobody cares what college you went to, who your last seven employers were or what your current job title is. Even If they do, they can check our your speaker profile or the about section of your site for more detail.

I saw one presentation for a Microsoft NUI researcher who literally spent 20 minutes explaining her whole career history for the last 25 years. The sad thing was, once she got onto the meat of her talk it was actually pretty interesting. However by that point most of the audience had given up the will to live, let alone the will to listen. I think quite often it’s a confidence thing. For some reason the speaker doesn’t feel like they deserve to be on stage so spends the first 20 minutes justifying their appearance. The best approach is to get the conference organisers to give you a quick one or two line introductions and then jump straight into the talk.

Not quite as bad are the speakers who spend the first ten minutes of their talk explaining the structure of their presentations and what they are going to cover. This approach is actually recommended by some speaking coaches as it’s supposed to help set expectations. However it also takes away any sense mystery and is akin to starting a live book reading with the table of contents. I saw one speaker spend so long outlining what he was going to say that he didn’t have enough time to cover the conclusion. So don’t bother telling us what you’re going to be talking about, just talk about it.

I think the most effective way to begin a presentation is to start with a story. The story could be an anecdote that helps people empathise with a situation, a moral conundrum that gets people thinking about what they would do in that situation or a complex analogy that primes your audience for the issues you’re going to cover. Some of the best presentations I’ve seen start with a historical story that resonates with a current issue we’re facing. Not only do you learn something new about a topic outside your area of expertise, but you also learn a new way of framing or explaining a problem.

As humans we’re hard-wired to enjoy stories and it’s actually one of the fundamental ways we store information and communicate ideas to each other. So a strong story will engage the emotional part of our brains and make for a much more memorable experience. Stories are also much easier for the speaker to remember. As such, the opening part of your talk will feel more natural, relaxed and practised if you take this approach.

You can do a similar thing with the end of your talk, finishing on a high note and perfectly book-ending your presentation. In fact, if you perfect the beginning and the end, the rest will usually take care of itself.

Practice makes perfect

I start to practice my talks even before I’ve finished writing them; reading blocks of content out loud to see if one concept flows logically into the next. This helps me familiarise myself with the material and internalise the content one piece at a time. Remember, this isn’t about memorising whole sections word for word. Instead it’s about understanding the underlying concepts so you can improvise on them later if needs be.

Once the talk is written, it’s time to do a couple of dry runs. I usually do this on my own, somewhere I know I won’t be disturbed. The first couple of times you run through the talk it’ll be fairly uneven. Your timing will be off, there will be holes in your content and your narrative will be patchy in places. Don’t worry as this is perfectly natural. Just re-jig your presentation and try again. I’ve been known to completely re-order and even rewrite large chunks of a presentation at this stage.

Once you’ve gone through the talk a few times and are sure that the narrative flow is right, it’s time to start practising the delivery. To do this I sometimes set up a webcam to record my presentation so I can play it back to myself later. I’ll run through two or three times, practising my pacing, intonation and how I propose moving around the stage. At this stage you’ll get a good sense of how long the presentation is going to be, so you may need to cut some slides, add some new content or simply expand on some concepts you previously skipped over. Nothing annoys attendees more than getting the timing wrong and having to skip the last 20 slides. Similarly, conference organisers hate it if you go over your allotted time as it impacts on the other speakers.

When you’re happy with the delivery it’s time to try it out on a live audience. At Clearleft, when one of us is preparing a talk we’ll often gather everybody in the conference room and do a dry run in front of the whole team. If you don’t work for a company where this is possible, try practising in front of a few friends and loved ones.

The act of presenting to a live audience really does change the nature and tempo of your talk. With real people in the room you’ll take it a lot more seriously and put more effort into the performance side of the presentation. You’ll probably find that you rush through it a lot faster than you thought, often by as much as 20%. It’s the affect of nerves and is perfectly natural. The more you present in front of a live audience, the more comfortable and relaxed you’ll feel, both with your self and the material. Ask for feedback from your friends and take what they say on board. This is probably the only time where you’ll get genuine face-to-face feedback on your talk so it’s important the make the most of the opportunity.

Before speaking at a big conference, I like to try my talk out at smaller events. This gives me the opportunity to really internalise the material and practice the delivery to a smaller, more forgiving audience. So look for opportunities to talk at local BarCamps, SkillSwaps and other community events. To give you an example, prior to a recent talk for 600 people I practised at a local community event in front of 40 people and then at a smaller conference for 200 people. By the time I spoke at the big event I knew which elements of the talk worked really well and which elements should be dropped. I had a good idea of the pacing and structure of the talk, as well as allowing myself the time to really polish the delivery. The talk was a huge success, but this was as much to do with the amount of practice I’d done as any innate ability. In short, the more you practice, the better your final delivery will be, so don’t skimp on this crucial factor.

Repetition, Repetition, Repetition

As a culture we often value freshness and originality over quality and precision. Once information has been released we feel that it’s somehow tainted and no longer holds any value. This is perhaps one reason why novice speakers often prefer to give new talks each time, rather than taking an existing talk and polishing it to perfection.

When I started speaking I know that I always felt an internal pressure to create something brand new and never before seen. Of course, this in itself is a conceit as there is very little in our industry that hasn’t made it onto the web and into the community consciousness in one form or another. In truth a good presentation is as much about the performance as it is about the content, and the only way you can polish the performance is though practice.

To gain mastery over your material and delivery I recommend giving the same talk as many times as you can. Each time you perform you’ll do slightly better. Some speakers will create a new talk every 18 months, retiring their previous one, while others will have a stable of talks with which to draw upon to avoid repetition. Some professional speakers will limit their talks to geographic regions, giving it once in a particular city, country or area while others will let a single talk run and run until the demand subsides. The approach you take is up to you, but very few professional speakers will only do a talk once. The length of time it takes to prepare a good talk just doesn’t justify the expense. Especially when you consider the low or even non-existant fees many conference organisers pay.

Now this is not to say that the talk shouldn’t change over time. The more times you deliver the talk the more ways you think to tweak it. You’ll come across new examples and retire old ones. You’ll switch metaphors and think of better ways to make a particular point or explain a particular concept. So it’s entirely possible that a talk you started presenting a year and a half ago is so different now as to be almost indistinguishable from the original.

Be relaxed and confident

Public speaking can be a nerve racking experience, so you’ll be a lot more relaxed if you know your environment and equipment before hand. As such, it’s always worth getting to the venue before the attendees arrive to have a look around. Plug in your laptop to make sure your screen sharing preferences are set correctly. People always assume it’ll be OK on the day, but I’ve seen far too many talks end in disaster because the speaker didn’t do a proper tech check. There’s nothing that looks less professional or puts you off your stride more than spending 10 minutes aimlessly fiddling with your display settings at the start of your talk.

Plug in your Bluetooth clicker and walk around the stage checking the range. This is as much to do with checking the technology as it is getting comfortable with the space you’ll be using. Introduce yourself to the folks doing the audio and make sure they know if you’ve got any music in your presentations. Make sure you get mic’ed up in advance of your session and that you’re comfortable with how the AV set-up works. Lastly, talk to the person introducing you and make sure they know enough about you to do a proper introduction.

A lot of public speaking is about confidence, so you can increase your confidence in a number of different ways. Some people feel more relaxed if they’ve been to the gym the day of their talk. Personally I’m happy just to get a good nights sleep and feel refreshed in the morning. Jeff Veen recommends dressing slightly smarter than your audience as it’s a good subconscious indicator of status. Looking and feeling sharp is also a great confidence builder, so a smart outfit and a new haircut can do wonders for your self-assurance.

No matter how great a speaker you are, you’ll always get a little nervous before getting on stage. This shot of adrenalin is actually a good things as it works as a performance enhancer. However 15 minutes before going on you probably won’t think this. Some people like to be by themselves before a talk for quiet contemplations. Others like to listen top music to psych themselves up. I like to find a few friendly faces in the audience to help take my mind of the impending performance. Whatever your method, you want to step out on stage feeling relaxed and confident.

Give a confident, articulate and passionate presentation

Talking to some people you’d think that public speaking was the most painful experience possible (and to be fair, for some people it is). However if you’ve put in a good amount of effort planning your talk, had plenty of time to practice and have a good understanding of your source material it can also be a lot of fun.

The best talks are given by people who are really passionate about their topics and can communicate that passion to a room full of people. So pick something you love talking about and let that love shine through. A passionate speaker can make even the most dull subjects come to life, whereas a boring speaker can drown the most engaging subject matter.

Good speakers talk directly to the audience, making eye contact with people in the front few rows to cement that bond. Good speakers also come away from the perceived safety of the lectern and move around the stage, using the physical space to denote transitions in their story arc. One simple but effective technique is to move towards the front of the stage if you want to draw your audience in and make an important point. Good speakers also vary the speed and intonation of their voice, creating a rich aural landscape with which to captivate their listeners. Combine this with open, impassioned hand gestures and you’ve got a powerful arsenal of persuasive tools to draw upon.

Ultimately the best presentations are as much about the performance as the content therein. So if you give yourself permission to enjoy the performance, your audience will undoubtedly reciprocate in kind.

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More on the sorry state of web design education 2 Dec 2009

Yesterday I documented my thoughts and observations on the standard of digital design education. From talking to current and recent students I’ve shared their frustrations as they bemoan being taught out-of-date technologies by lecturers far removed from the daily practices of design. Through visiting degree show I’ve witnessed a slew of substandard work caused by an over reliance of tool based education and a lack of design thinking ( If I witness one more Flash portfolio in the shape of a designers studio I think I’m going to cry.) So where does this problem arise from and what can be done?

It’s true that the web is still in it’s infancy and the profession doesn’t have the heritage of architecture or product design. However the web isn’t as young as it used to be and change happens a lot slower than we’d like to think. I’ve been pushing web standards for nearly a decade, yet we’re only now starting to see wide spread adoption. Sure, HTML5 and CSS3 are bleeding edge at the moment, but it’s going to take a good 3-5 years before they gain widespread adoption in the industry, so there’s plenty of time for Universities and Colleges to adapt.

I think one of the biggest problems stems from the faculty members themselves. In the early days people didn’t know what to do with web courses so gave them to the departments that resembled them best; computer science, graphic design, library sciences or HCI. Each department bought their own spin and their own set of prejudices and pre-conceptions. If you want to teach front end development, don’t give the course to a Java developer. Similarly, if you want to teach web design, don’t run the course out of the graphic design department. They may share similar DNA, but the differences are a lot stronger than they may first appear.

We need design courses to be taught by web designers. It’s as simple as that. So we need to remove these courses from the auspices of other departments and give them the room they need to breath. Much like architecture or product design, It’s a multi-disciplinary subject that needs to be taught my multi-disciplinary teams; interaction designer, front end developers and usability specialists.

For this to work we need buy-in from the Universities and a strong, charismatic course director to drive their vision through. A fantastic example of such a person is Liz Dansico, the force behind the new Interaction Design MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. I had the honour of speaking to some of Liz’s students last week and I have to say that I was truly impressed. Liz has managed to pull together an amazing faculty which includes Jeffrey Zeldman, Robert Fabricant, Jason Santa Maria, Christopher Fahey and Khoi Vinh to name just a few. The week I was there she had Matt Mullenweg and Scott Berkin present to her class while the week before Jason Fried gave a talk. This is a line-up worthy of any industry conference. To have these people as your lecturers is outstanding.

What we need to do is encourage more practitioners into design education and encourage more design educators to continue their practice. Rather than having their own education stall at the point they enter the teaching profession, we need to encourage lecturers to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and techniques. This can be done by keeping abreast of books and blogs, by going to community events and by securing enough budget to attend industry conferences. We also need to encourage some of the great designers in our industry to take up teaching posts. In short, we need educators who are leaders rather than followers.

A great example of this are Web Standardistas Christopher Murphy and Nicklas Persson. These guys lecture on interaction design at the University of Ulster in Belfast. As well as writing a best selling book on standards based design they speak at conferences, organise community events and generally act as part of the glue that keeps our web community together.

Similar inspirational educators do exist, but they’re often poorly supported by their institutions and fairly thin on the ground. People I know doing good work include Dan Dixon at the Bristol Institute of Technology who I first met at London BarCamp and who regularly organises a web design conference for the students on his course. Or you have people like Leslie Jensen Inman from the University of Tennessee who is one of the driving forces behind the WASP Educational Task Force. We even have a few people from the school system like David Smith from St Paul’s School, London, who we first met at Reboot and who teaches his 14 year olds how to hardware hack on Arduino.

So what can be done?

In the medium term (2-3years) what I’d like to see is an inspirational course director get the backing of a respected University and given the remit (and budget) to put together a world leading curriculum. I’d like to see them assemble an amazing faculty passionate lecturers and industry experts in an amazing location and attract some of the most promising students around. Due to the density of local talent I think London is a logical place, although Brighton and Bristol run a close second. With a model to follow and something to strive for I imagine this would encourage other establishments to follow, in order to gain the respect and kudos this kind of excellence brings.

In the shorter term, I think we need to bring together some of these pockets of excellence and open up a discussion on the subject. It’s early days yet but I’ve already starting talking to the web standardistas about the possibility of arranging some kind of meet-up. We’d need facilities and preferably some sponsorship. But most of all we’d need a small but passionate group of people who are interested in changing the quality of design education in the UK for the better. I’d be interested to hear what you think and whether you feel that you fall into this category.

Over to you!

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