Hasta La Ideas

One of the more exciting manifestations of Interaction09‘s variable-length schedule this year was the inclusion of “Lightning Rounds” – 20 minute sessions led by working IxD professionals on some of the finer points of their trade. By running these sessions concurrently in four different rooms, conference planners give attendees the ability to customize the professional development aspect to their own personal needs — a nice counterpoint to the more general, call-to-action tone of the several longer keynote talks, and for many participants, a chance to hear a minor rock star of the discipline speak in person for the first time.

For the visiting blogger, the sessions are both a joy and a pain in the ass, offering some fascinating diversity, and a certainty that another even better session is going on, and you’re missing it. They also present a more finely detailed glimpse into the ongoing attempt being made by the IxD community to define its core competencies; here’s a sampling from the 28 rounds (9 of which we actually got to see in some part):

-Jennifer Tidwell (above), an Interaction Designer at Google, presented a rapid, focused list of directives for good interface design for mobile device touchscreens. Standout suggestions: infinite lists, minimal headers (to avoid the “layer cake effect” of all header and no content), aggressive autocompletion (“because typing on a touchscreen pretty much always sucks”), and Share buttons everywhere (“mobile device use is inherently social”). Also, a commonly voiced concern: “What I worry about is the ghettoization of mobile design practices. We’re all going to be mobile designers soon enough. If you’re a web designer, chances aren’t bad you’re already doing it.”

–Visual Complexity, led by Manuel Lima, the Parsons professor who founded and still runs the website of the same name. As visualization of massively interconnected networks become more commonplace, a standardized set of charts is getting established — a sort of Complexity equivalent to the Bar, Pie and Scatter charts of old — but utilizing time and zoom capabilities to show more information in less space. Check the site for more.

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