A bullet-point recap from the Flashforward conference in Austin, presented by Adobe’s Kevin Lynch:

… then questions and answers with all the presenters.

Gotta run - my session starts in 30 minutes!

Only two days until Flashforward 2006 in Austin, TX!

I’ll be presenting a session about the same sort of topics discussed in my new book, Designing the Obvious (available in October), and I’ll be around for the whole conference to answer questions, meet people, and generally have some fun.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Several times recently, I’ve had the great fortune of watching someone I work with start to “get it”. As in, I’ve watched a couple of people who formerly tried to jam as many features and widgets as humanly possible into every interface, and resisted leveraging the UX team, begin to see the light and embrace the concepts my team puts into practice.

For example, when I first started here, there was a particular developer who would debate every single thing I recommended. “What if the user wants to do this? What about that?” It was all in the interest of making sure every possible option the system could handle was represented in an interface. He was all about control over the system, when users are all about productivity. After a while, he start getting coming up with better and better ideas. He started coming to me for second opinions rather than first ones.

Yesterday, he came to my desk to chat about a pretty complicated new interface. (Complicated because he was making it that way). But over the next few minutes, as we discussed the issues that deemed the new UI necessary, he turned. I watched him go from suggesting we create a whole new interface for managing email addresses to deciding to simply make the already-in-use email address (displayed as a link) editable within a text field, so it could be changed and saved. And he walked away quite pleased with himself for coming up with it.

The same guy who used to cram everything he could into a UI devised the simplest solution possible, for him and for the application’s users. He talked himself out of an overly-complicated interaction and into one that “just works”.

In my workplace, developers are starting to see the light.

Why is this happening? I believe it’s because on my team, we never recommend something without also explaining why it’s being recommended. In other words, we teach as much as we produce. And people are listening.

That’s the design virus in action.

Jared Spool’s latest article “Disciplines and Professionals” posits that it doesn’t matter so much whether your team includes professional interaction designers, usability specialists, or information architects. What does matter is that the team members have some understanding of the core principles that make up each of these professions.

He also speculates about how the professionals in these fields can better dispense their wealth of know-how to the teams that don’t include experts. Spool suggests it’s up to professional support groups. And I think he might be right.

Groups like the Interaction Design Association and others have primarily been focused on facilitating conversation between professionals to help foster growth within the field. That’s a mighty fine mission, but it could certainly be taken further.

Support groups like this could do a lot, not only to evangelize the need for such understanding, but also to spread the practical information that will really help people design great experiences. Things like design principles, information about how to execute usability tests, improve design processes, different design approaches, and so on.

But anyone that knows anything about good design is in a position to do the same thing. If you’re one of them, give it a shot.

Take a look around your office tomorrow and ask yourself how you can spread the design virus. How can you encourage your team to take a closer look at what makes a great user experience? How can your team move towards improving the experiences it creates?

Dan Saffer’s new book, Designing for Interaction, is a little, well, odd.

On the one hand, it evangelizes the practice of interaction design quite well, explaining in great detail what it is people like Saffer (a designer for Adaptive Path) and myself do for a living. It tells the back story of the profession, defines what it means to be an interaction designer, and even goes into some of the details, like interface design basics, the elements of interaction, the principles and laws that are involved, and so on. For these reasons, it’s a book worth having on the shelf.

On the other hand, because it focuses too much on defining the field and craft of interaction design instead of how to put it into practice, it’s basically a 250-page job description and doesn’t quite give readers something to use. It reminds me a bit of those books you read when you’re a kid about what a fireman does and how he puts out fires. Not necessarily a bad thing - as I’ve said, it’s a book worth having on the shelf - but not what I expected at all.

Why didn’t I expect such a simple book? Because Adaptive Path and Dan Saffer have gone to great lengths to promote the hell out of it. In fact, the great promotional effort is the only reason I feel compelled to write about it. If it wasn’t for all the hype, I wouldn’t even care.

The book has received gushing reviews from people like Jesse James Garrett and Jared Spool, has been parlayed into a series of conference sessions and day-long workshops, and is getting a release party thrown for it in San Francisco (hosted by Adaptive Path).

Simply put, I don’t get it. I don’t get why this particular book has earned itself such credibility amongst Saffer’s peers in the profession. Is it simply because he works for Adaptive Path, works with Jesse James Garrett, and knows Jared Spool? In other words, is it just because he knows people in the business who were willing to give it high praise?

Designing for Interaction is poised to be somewhat of a success in academia. People studying to become interaction designers in college will want to read it, and people teaching classess about it will want to cite it. But if you’re out in the real world already, I’m just not sure it can be marketed in a way that appeals to its intended audience.