What I learned about public speaking at IA Summit 2010

A few weeks back, I attended my first ever IA Summit, in Phoenix, Arizona. My only way to justify and afford overseas conferences is to be a speaker. So, in September last year, I submitted a proposal for IAS 10. I was gobsmacked when it got accepted. Scared. A lot.
What followed were months of research, events, interviews. Reading, writing, procrastinating, panicking. And then there I was, at the Summit, with a mic. You can listen to what I had to say here, and the slides are online here.

The Summit gave me a chance to present at a UX conference for the first time. The feedback I got was invaluable. I will approach preparing and presenting a talk differently next time. So, what did I learn?

Lesson 1:
My biggest take-away were the sketchnotes of people who attended my talk, especially those by Kate Rutter and Jackson Fox. Their visualisations of my talk are stuck in my head, and if I was to give the talk again, I would use some of these images to illustrate my story. (Look at Paul Adam's presentation for a good example). I need to introduce more visual thinking to my talks. Hence, it's not enough to do a dry-run in front of friends and colleagues. Next time, I will ask people in my practice sessions to not only take notes, but get at least one 'black pen' person in the room to take sketchnotes. After I'm done, spend a bit of time collaborating on improving a visualisation of my story.

Lesson 2:
I love the research phase of preparing a talk. For my IAS talk, I applied theory to practical projects. To make clear where I'm coming from, I started the talk with the theory, the research. It would have been better to start with a practical example, then introduce the theoretical ideas as we go along. Supported by a visual representation of the story. (Thanks for the feedback, Peter Merholz)

Lesson 3:
You won't learn how to do it, until you do it. It is scary to present in front of people whose opinion you value highly, who are good presenters themselves. But they won't judge you - they will help you grow by giving you great feedback. I expected myself to be perfect - but there are things you only learn by doing, by standing in front of others - not by practising, thinking, and staring at your slides.

The IA Summit was a good place for a speaking rookie like myself. UX folks are smart, passionate, critical, outspoken - scary. But we are also a friendly and helpful community. If you have something you are passionate about, and you can convey your passion and knowledge, then go and speak. If you forget words, fall off the stage, or make a bad joke - if I can tell that you care, I will listen.

If your dreams don't scare you, they are not big enough. The scary things in life are always worth doing. 

Changing the meaning of normal - Agile UX Retreat #1

Last weekend, I was one of the lucky people attending the first Agile UX Retreat, Anders Ramsay's brainchild, at Cooper Design in San Francisco. About 30 people passionate about agile and UX, working as designers, developers, agile coaches, scrum masters, product owners, project managers and testers, gathered for a barcamp-style workshop.

We started off by collecting and clustering the suggested topics into themes, including: roles and processes, agile in different environments, iteration zero and innovation, agile adoption, quality and value, teams and collaboration, as well as the big question of what comes next. The latter two - working together as a team and evolving post-agile, post-ux  - were at the heart of all discussions and led us to envisioning what a future beyond the 'us and them' mindset could be like. In this summary, I will focus on the 'philosophical' discussions and ideas. However, we also covered practicalities and best practices, and discussed e.g. prototyping, user research and the feedback loop, product backlog planning and prioritisation, or workshop techniques such as the 'design studio'.

Team mindset
What are the values that make teams work, what are the core elements of an agile UX mindset? The group shared experiences from start-ups, small companies, and large organisations. Personally, I compared how agile teams work to the non-profit volunteer teams I have been part of. Some of the concepts and ideas that emerged from the talks and fishbowl panels*:

- Responsibilities and competencies rather than roles
- Flexibility needs transparency
- Trust requires transparency requires trust
- A shared perspective and clarity of vision
- Don't value process over outcome
- Less ego
- Expertise over interest (important for decision-making)
- Team credit trumps individual credit

Teams need to be aligned around a clear vision, a mission statement - UX offers tools to develop, articulate and evolve this vision. Values of good team work are core principles of agile - I wonder if we need team manifestos, an agreement of the values that we commit to when working together.

Business culture
Halfway through, we all felt that we had moved beyond the agile vs. UX discussions. The retreat concluded with a root-cause analysis exercise, exploring the question 'How can we create successful products in a post-agile, post-ux world?". We discussed how to improve and continuously evolve ways of working together, and how a shift in culture and mindset can come about. If agile and UX evolve together into 'the new normal', we are in danger of a new 'us vs. them' - agile ux thinking vs. business thinking. While change can be influenced from the bottom-up, it won't work without support from the top. Values of collaborating and removing barriers on a team level clash with organisational cultures that reward progress rather than quality, in a world of siloed structures and hierarchical decision-making.
As a community, we need to advocate design thinking and agile values, engage with business and prove that our yet unnamed vision works. As Alan Cooper put it: "We have to tell a story of a happy place, where business wants to be."

*A fishbowl is an ad-hoc panel. 5 chairs are on the stage, with 4 of them taken. The fifth chair has to be empty. Discussion happens within the panel. Any audience member with a burning question or comment can join the panel by sitting down, which means that a panel member has to leave, to keep the fifth chair empty. I had not come across this engaging format before, and it was great for managing 30+ opinionated people.

Here are some photos of the happy place

Silverbacking myself: UXCamp London talk

I have been discussing my use of Clearleft's Silverback with a couple of people, so here comes more on that. Silverback is my tool of choice for practicing and sharing presentations. At a rough level - I usually run through my talk once, and that's it. Otherwise you can spend hours being self-critical and tweaking the video. It's my first step of preparing a talk; I then try to do a dry run in front of an audience to get feedback.

As an example, I'm including the two parts of my UXCamp London talk "Back to the roots. If email is the past, is Google Wave the future?".

Part one is the presentation, in which I relate online communication to tribal culture and secondary orality.

Part two is a brief look at my Wave account. I don't even try to explain Wave from scratch - Google put an hour-long video up to do so, and I can't do better than that. I apply my ideas around 'back to the roots of communication' to thinking about Wave and what it could become. I will continue riding the Wave, and I'm curious to see what happens. Right now, it's all a bit much, but very powerful, and I can see where it could be going. Well, I might be completely wrong. Lots more thoughts around Wave, and I realised when watching the video all the things that I intended to mention, but didn't. But hey, it's all about conversations, so get in touch via your preferred communication channel.

If you don't like videos, you can find the slides for my talk on Slideshare, and I might do a slidecast.

Back to the roots. If email is the past, is Google Wave the future?

The slides for my UXCamp London talk are now available on Slideshare (with tweaked font).

The presentation obviously doesn't include the Google Wave demo. I will update the presentation shortly (add Wave screenshots). Watch out for the video on Vimeo (online tomorrow).

http://www.slideshare.net/johannakollmann/back-to-the-roots-if-email-is-the-past-is-google-wave-the-future