So I went to SAPO Unplugged 08 in Aveiro.

The day started at 7am but I did manage to miss the bus by the SAPO crew (due to a friend of mine …). And so I drove 250Km…

I have to say that being on the University of Aveiro’s campus brought some memories from my student years but enough about that… after the usual meet and greet we went to lunch and at 2pm we were at the event.

The keynote

Henning Fischer from Adaptive Path did the keynote and he gave a presentation entitled “Stop Designing Products”. It was a really nice presentation (for those who missed it at Shift). Some notes:

• Users know who they are
• Design from the outside in
• You must have an experience strategy
• The experience IS the product

(you can also check the similar presentation at Shift 2006 by Peter Merholz over here).

1st Presentation

Óscar Mealha and Florim from the University of Aveiro showed a very interesting project about analysing the structure of a site. Why is it interesting? You’d have to see it because it does so much that I’ll miss some things. But a few pointers:

• Easy visual interface
• Every page is a node with a visual reference on mouse over.
• Very easy to see and interpret user’s paths within the site
• Many options to customize how you want to see the information
• Very understandable detection of hotspots and interconnections
• On hotspots graphics you have a color slider to define its granularity
• All this from log files

How can this tool be used? In so many ways …

An example… Ask a user to find something and then analyze its behavior: how many times did he return to index (restarted the operation)? how many options he used before he found it? how many levels did he dig into before going to another option?

This can help you to: correct navigation mistakes, reorganize your structure of content, minimize critical paths and so much more …

And all this from logs … (I wish I had a link to it … anyone?)

2nd Presentation

The second presenter was Pedro Branco from the Minho University and it was about facial expression usage as a form of human-machine interaction. I found it interesting enough and it IKEA’s online assistant come to mind. This is surely one area that will have major development in the near future.

3rd Presentation

Bruno Figueiredo (President of APPU) did a very cool presentation about his work as a usability expert on the latest redesign of the SAPO main page.

It was very cool to understand how it was done, what were the main problems with the previous version and how they solve them… just a slight flavor:

• they moved from 72 channel to more or less 30 by integrating similar channels and killing some unused ones
• they completely reorganized the publicity display. In the previous version it was (almost) all on one side which led people to believe that all that column was publicity (it wasn’t) and so all of it was basically ignored
• they created connections between “similar” channels. Ex: channel for babies with channels for women, etc.

4rd Presentation

Ivo Gomes did a presentation on paper prototyping for normal sites and also RIAs (Rich Internet Applications).

The idea is to design every screen in paper and have little bits of paper to simulate the interactions. It’s a little like “puzzle meets story”. You put the homepage in front of the testing user/client and he uses his finger to simulate the mouse (starting the story). When he touches a link something happens: either you move to a new screen (a new paper continue the story) or something happens in the same page (you put a new paper over to simulate the animation – a little piece of the puzzle).

I really could relate to some of the conclusions and objectives of that kind of aproach:

• easy to detect mistakes on the early stages before development in navigation/usability/etc
• hence a decrease of designer and programmer hours
• hence a decrease in cost
• it’s both user and programmer “friendly”
• it makes it easier to get to the clients’ objectives
• it makes the communication from client to end designers and developers crystal clear

Bottom line … I have to test it

(You can check a post from Ivo regarding this here)

Last presenter

(There was a funny moment from this presenter… But I’ll get to that later …)

Pedro Custódio was the last presenter at SAPO Unplugged 08. Nowadays he is responsible for the implementation of quality and usability on all of SAPO‘s projects. It was almost the same presentation given at the Usability Seminar 2008 (you can check it here). Nothing new for me here (as I already had seen it) but here are a few pointers:

• They redesigned the way they do their kick-off meetings so that everyone in the project has the same “view” of the objective
• They used a faster alternative to extensive focus group testing
• It’s a never ending cycle that implements usability and quality issues on all stages

Bottom line

It was a good event and I really hope that SAPO continues to do some more of those on other issues: UX, OAuth, microformats, creating APIs, just to name a few I would like to hear about.

The funny (depending on the perspective) moment

As promised before here it is… the funny moment. When Florin was presenting his tool, Pedro Custódio went to get some microphones (I think) and coming down the stairs he “decided” to stumble upon himself. Everything stopped. It was funny from the audience’s perspective because it was a noisy and quite awkward fall but he did hurt himself. Hope you’re feeling better dude…

Related Posts

You can check the “falling star” aka Pedro Custódio notes here.