I gave a “5 minutes, 5 slides” lightning talk on paper prototyping at UX Café. In short, I have been experimenting with how far one can go in paper, before moving in to omnigraffle and photoshop etc. I argued that paper is the quickest and cheapest way of hashing out designs, allowing you to test a plethora of possible solutions while steering clear of users being blinded by CSS and javascript magic. Along the way I showed a couple of examples of how paper can help you in the design process – from formative interviews with “dumb” props, to knowledge sharing with stakeholders, to finally working out most of your user interface before committing to pixel and code.

Slides and my notes after the jump.

 

Slide 1:
Hi Im Ulrik, Im a UX designer with the BBC and want to talk about some experiments I have been doing in paper prototyping. And as you can see by the random doodle there, it’s not like im a great artist or that paper is in any way a natural medium for me.

Slide 2:
But anyway, I have been trying to see how far I can push doing things in paper – versus getting in to omnigraffle or photoshop

The reason I started experimenting with paper prototyping is that I have beef with this thing that I see occurring quite often – here on the left hand side of this sketch.

And this is sort of the classic approach – there is an idea, the team comes up with a solution, designs get made through weeks, if not months of fiddling in omgraffle and photoshop – and then it gets coded – and then tadaa, you have this super slick prototype which you test.

The issue I have with this, is that what goes in to test is usually one possible solution of potentially many – but we never tested those.

And I think we have to realise that to most users the web is fundamentally magic. And when we present users with something that is super slick – well, that is equivalent to saying to them “do you like rainbows?”. And most people will say “yes I like your rainbow” never mind if the rainbow is useful to them or not. Because we are good designers. And we can make things look good. It’s part of what we do.

So we end up testing the magic that the solution is wrapped in and not the solution itself. And at this point – even if the user was to say “well, your rainbow is not that great” – we have spent so much resource that what we tend to do is increment UI, rather than change the solution.

Because do-overs in this scenario are expensive and time consuming.

But with paper I think we can sketch and test many solutions quickly and cheaply – and bring the best ones forward through paper – all the way from formative research to validating our interface.

Slide 3:
So talking about formative research – I’ve been using really lo-fi paper prototypes to jumpstart my own process. So in this example, I am giving users a prop – in this case, a really dumb prop – my phone wrapped in paper. But I think by giving people a prop, it changes the quality of the conversation. Because I am giving them a familiar frame of reference, a blank canvas to project their memories and imaginations on to. And this makes it slightly easier for people to recall all the annoyances or moments of delight they have with using – in this case, a mobile solution. And people become animated and start poking at the thing and point to imaginary menus and so on.

And in this way, really low level prototypes like this, can be great in formative research – just to start understanding the ins and outs of designing for something.

Slide 4:
I also think paper prototyping with users is a great way of culling ideas when you have to many of them. Or too many requirements to deal with. Without having to commit to code or pixel first.

So this is a session I ran recently where I was trying to work out what was actually useful in terms of features. In this exercise I first asked users to group different bits of content into groups that were meaningful to them – which turned out to differ a lot from the way I thought of them – and then asked them to assemble a page that would be useful to them using their groups.

And through how they positioned things, I started to get an idea of what was important to them. And it was amazing how people’s answers got a lot more nuanced than in the pre-interview I did, because all of a sudden I think they had something that was just detailed enough for them to be able to place themselves in the situation – without being overwhelmed with all the bells and whistles of CSS and javascript.

Paper is also a really useful tool when you are just hashing out design.

Slide 5:
This is a colleague of mine from Editorial. When we sit down and do stuff together – effectively designing the website together, it allows us a common ground. And by sitting there with me and rocking out scissors and markers, we are building to think, together – sharing knowledge in an extremely tangible way.

And on a slightly different note, taking stakeholders along the ride like this, also means you have to less defending of your designs later on. Because it’s not just your designs anymore, it’s “our designs”.

Slide 5:
And finally, I am experimenting with doing this stuff all the way through to UI testing. I like to look at how pop-up books are constructed – and you will see that you can make almost any kind of interactive interface solely using paper, scissors and tape.

And you can work out most of the major navigation and structure of a site, without ever having to go in to photoshop. And then when you have worked out where everything sits and what everything does – then you can fire up photoshop and colour in all the boxes so to speak.

And I’d like to show you two examples of that (demo prototypes)

Images courtesy of @grinblo. Special thanks to @spookstudio for inviting me to speak.

I was invited to do a 45 minute talk titled “Beyond Broadcast – New Challenges in a Shifting Multimedia Landscape” for the London division of the University of Copenhagen Alumni Association (I studied Visual Culture at their hallowed halls back in the day). The talk centered around the shift from the broadcast “one-to-many, one size fits all” model to the deeply personalised model that is looming on the horizon. With the web and it’s host of connected devices offering tons of user data, charting everything from a user’s taste, location, history and context of use, the opportunity to make informed decisions as to the type of content one delivers (and even creates) is immense. I argue that this form of personalisation, harnessed correctly, can have an enormous and beneficial impact on the way we consume and engage with content on the web, with ramifications that extend in to learning, entertainment and information seeking in general – and indeed that the cure for “sameness”, paradoxically lies in knowing what people know and what they want – and hence where you might augment, differentiate and ultimately delight.

I am helping put together the Connected Studio event for the BBC’s User Experience and Design department. You can read about the whole thing in detail via the homepage here, but in short; the Connected Studio is a open innovation event, where internals and externals pitch ideas for features and experiences for the BBC’s online portfolio. I wrote a blog post that goes in to some of the detail of the event itself – you can find the original post here – or read it here after the jump.

Hi, my name is Ulrik and I’m a Senior User Experience Designer working in Personalisation and Social Platform, a service division of UX&D that works across the BBC online portfolio. I’m helping to organise the UX&D Connected Studio workshops scheduled for the 4 October, 30 October and 31 October 2012.

I’d like to give you a preview into some of the thinking that has gone into the brief for the UX&D events – as well as a little bit of wider context for the work we currently do in UX&D.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest you take a peek at the Connected Studio brief then return to this post for more on what we’re trying to achieve and how.

A BBC that is bigger than the sum of its parts

The BBC online portfolio is split into 10 different products: Sport, News, iPlayer, Knowledge and Learning, CBBC and Cbeebies, Radio and Music, Homepage and Search, and Weather. While each product has a unique value for different audience sectors, we’re increasingly thinking of them as components of ‘One Service’, a coherent and connected whole that delivers 360º value for our audience – on any device – wherever and whenever the user wants access.

As designers and innovators who hope to get involved, this means your challenge gets bigger but potentially much more fun. We’re asking you to come up with ideas that build connections across BBC products, linking digital content so that users can roam freely, without a sense of disruption. We’re asking you to consider how to optimise the power of online to drive experiences that are personal, social and participatory, extending the reach of our talent and amplifying the voice and engagement of our audience.

We’d like you to give special consideration to the 4-screen (TV, mobile, tablet and desktop) environment and its fit with BBC content: not an easy task, by any measure, but one that does give you the entire ecology of the BBC to play with and innovate around.

How does it work?

The Connected Studio as a whole is split into two events: Creative Studio, a rapid-fire pitch day held in London on 4 October, and a two-day Build Studio on 20 October and 31 October.

In the Creative Studio we aim to inform and inspire you with a speaker or two in the morning; the rest of the day is given over to brainstorming the best ideas you can develop with your team. At the end of Creative Studio, you will have a chance to pitch your idea to our judges, who intend to select a handful of the best pitches for further refinement in the 2-day Build Studio. Creative Studio is intended to be a fun, high-intensity event that gives you a chance to hang out with other designers and innovators, bandy ideas around the room and generally don your creative hat.

If selected by the judges, you will continue to the Build Studio where you will have a chance to extend and refine your ideas by accessing internal BBC expertise from the different product areas to help inform your decisions.

In this workshop, we will put much more emphasis on the ‘One Service’ concept and at the end of the two days you will be asked to present a prototype that conveys a core experience for the user, along with visuals and wireframes to convince us of the value and feasibility of your proposal. It’s up to you how you wish to convey the experience, whether it be as a short film, a clickable .pdf or a quick-and-dirty prototype: we hope you discover where the strengths of your team lie in this respect. It’s important to note, that since this is a two-day event, the BBC will compensate you for your time.

Is Connected Studio a tech or a design challenge?

We believe that tech and design go hand in hand, although these events are necessarily skewed toward the concept and design side of things. However, if you do have technical skills, there will be ample opportunity to showcase these during Creative Studio and, should you go through to the Build Studio, we will match you with design expertise to supplement your skills.

What if I win the Build Studio?

If you are part of one of the teams that win the Build Studio, we have committed money and resources for you to develop a pilot in cooperation with the BBC. The pilot will be used to pitch for investment and will pin your idea on the BBC roadmap, which means that it should eventually go live, just like any project that originates within UX&D and gets the green light. Ultimately, this means you could see your idea become a reality enjoyed by millions of users across the UK.

Ulrik Hogrebe is Senior User Experience Designer, Personalisation and Social Platform, User Experience and Design, BBC Future Media

A while back, I was charged with looking at Brand Engagement from a BBC Online perspective – looking at how the BBC wants to engage with our audiences online. After a period of research involving users and internal stakeholders, we settled upon a number of principles which we compounded into a manifesto of sorts. A manifesto which we then turned into a script for a little stop motion video that has since been presented internally as well as at a number of key industry events. The film was conceived as a sort of cultural artefact meant to set direction in a more efficient manner than the ol’ powerpoint which we all know and love – but sadly also often gets forgotten, doomed to live out their lives on some remote corner of peoples hard disks.

The whole thing was conceived and executed by my very talented colleagues Karolina Kret and Jacek Barcikowski (and myself of course), with much glueing, cutting, painting, fretting and fidgeting over three weeks, with the very cool guys at Clapham Road Studios and animator extraordinaire Mole Hill to help us get it all in the box (*snigger*) on the final week.

You can see the BBC’s Ralph Rivera (Director of Future Media) present the film at the BBC Industry Briefing at BAFTA in London here from roughly 00.25 to 2.05.

ASHA created by Anders Højmose, Martina Pagura and my self is up for an INDEX. Long way to go yet, but you can give it a “like” and nudge over at INDEX´page. Amazing!

ASHA is – in short – an experimental application for the iPhone, that uses simple bluetooth technology and human relay-based interaction to gather information about survivors in a disaster situation. There is a longer description and a concept description of what it does on on the INDEX link above + one here if they eventually pull down the link.

Following my final exam at CIID, I was asked by Mike Albers, Head of Service Design & Delivery at BBC if I could be interested in joining the Beebs. Long story short, I accepted (obviously!) and can now call myself Senior Service Designer at Future Media & Technology, BBC. Exciting times ahead!

Sadly this also marks the end of roughly 5 years of employment at e-Types. There is no doubt in my mind, that I owe an enormous amount of my skill-set and outlook to my extremely smart and able colleagues at e-Types. Colleagues who over the years became friends and something very akin to family. So a heartfelt and slightly soppy and bleary-eyed thanks from me, even as I struggle with the move to London, figuring out how to cope with a gi-normous and utterly amazing new organizations, new colleagues and general dazed-and-confusedness:)

In connection with the revamp and launch of our online type foundry “playtype.com” e-Types decided to open a typographic concept store – Playtype proper or simply “Playtype” – located in the heart of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Basically we love typography – It’s what founded our company. It’s what we work with day in, day out and it’s what continues to make us geek out long into the night. We wanted to create a space where we could share that passion for ligatures and baselines, tracking, kerning and all the other (admittedly slightly nerdy) joys of type.

We´ll be releasing over 100 new fonts by e-Types as well as longtime friends and partners – the prolific London-based typographers A2/SW/HK run by Scott Williams and Henrik Kubel. Also we´ll feature a number of products and editions – some by our own hand, some with a little help from our friends in the design and art world. So if you stop by Copenhagen, do come by for a chat at what we are proudly calling the worlds first brick and mortar type shop. And if your not, go have a gander at the fonts over at playtype.com.

Check out the little “viral” promo we did for the shop here

Playtype (the store) has been featured far and wide – notable mentions are Monocle, Dezeen and PSFK

I was nominated as one of 38 bourgeoning new media up-and-comings by New Media Days, one of the largest New Media conferences in the north. Quite an honor! Thanks go out to the jury who nominated me – you can check out the rest of the nominees here, including Anders Højmose and Sebastian Rønde Thielke, who I studied with at CIID.

There’s an interview up with our Art Curator on the e-Types website, that explains the motivations behind our art habit here. More pics after the jump:

Hoodr is a hyper-local community platform developed specifically to strengthen the social fabric of low-income immigrant neighbourhoods, providing its denizens a means to debate and express local events and opinions while combating the often one-sided picture portrayed by the media. Users snap pictures, upload stories and geo-tag events in their neighbourhoods, uploading them to a common site accessible by locals, outsiders, media, municipality and other stakeholders.

Neighbourhoods with a high percentage of immigrants in Denmark are often stigmatised in the media and by society – portrayed as violent slums and examples of integration policies gone wrong, with it’s citizens often bearing the brunt of a political debate that has become increasingly xenophobic. A stigma that often results in a number of negative results: from poor self-perception amongst it’s citizens, to low property values and other factors that often serve to sustain social ills and prevent positive growth.

However, in truth these areas often sustain complex and thriving local communities and street life, far from the bleak portrayal one sees in the news and the papers. Hoodr posits, that bringing these communities to the surface, we can combat negative perceptions both internally and externally and ultimately empower and de-stigmatise these neighbourhoods and their citizens.

Hoodr was born from the hypothesis, that there is true strength to be found in the local – and that local integration and empowerment are far stronger tools for creating positive and reciprocal integration than attempting to force people into contrived notions of “Danishness” – a concept that even Danes have difficulty agreeing upon.

Through interviews and co-creation sessions, the concept has gone though a number of different iterations – from personal stories dealing with softer issues, to classic citizen journalism to the current community platform that enables the low-level chatter that makes communities vibrant and vital – offline and online.

Process – creating a design framework

Hoodr is an open platform capable of sustaining any number and type of users, but is developed specifically to involve local youth from immigrant backgrounds, since they often are the most stigmatised while also being potentially one of the strongest and most vocal resources.

The backbone of Hoodr is a design framework consisting of 5 principles gleaned through interviews, co-creation sessions and prototyping with 3 sets of users: extreme, expert and core. The framework is an engine; a system and a set of guidelines for setting up projects that deal with youth from immigrant or refugee backgrounds that is free of political agendas and inadvertent discrimination, while sidestepping some of the inherent flaws that the political and municipal system bears now.

There is a prototype available at www.ulrikhogrebe.com/proto. Please contact me for further details and access (the prototype has restricted access in order to respect some of my users request for privacy and anonymity.)

Hoodr and especially the analysis and process work behind it was very well received by examinators Mike Albers, Golan Levin and Matt Cottam at my final exams at CIID.