Usability at Yggdrasil

After an amazing weekend in Oslo, comprising massive partying on Friday, an awesome game of squash with Christian and Hans Jakob on Saturday, a calm and social evening at home serving exquisite foie gras de canard with matching Alsacian gewürztraminer to Jan Walter, Gunn and Karl (and Erika), a visit to the Holmenkollen ski museum on Sunday, and finally a nice Sunday dinner with Bente and Arnljot, Monday and Tuesday sported the annual Norwegian conference on usability: Yggdrasil! (Note: "Yggdrasil" is originally the name of a tree in norse mythology, though I don't know why the usability conference bears the tree's name.) The conference takes place in Lillehammer, centrally located in southern Norway.

This year was my first visit to the conference, and I got a really good impression. Luke Wroblewski from Yahoo opened the conference with a plenary session introducing the challenges of today's rich and social applications on the internet. His speech was blazingly efficient and equally difficult to summarize, but my notes disclose at least a few topics: people find your content through different social applications, like accumulators such as del.icio.us and Digg, profile pages on Facebook and mySpace, blogs, and of course various search engines including Google. Content is still king and should get the most space at your page, while adding links to relevant content further enhances the page's value to the user. Luke also mentioned a couple of ways in which you can ensure content quality in social applications: either by making it easier to submit content that is good for your application (the example he used was an online creature design tool that made it easy to design nice looking creatures but difficult to design ugly ones), or by making it a bit more difficult to submit content so that only those who REALLY wants to contribute goes to the effort of clicking through several screens (which by the way reminds me of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of persuasion, which in this context says that an enthusiastic user is less likely to stop an ongoing task when encountering an obstacle, whereas users with cursory interest will drop out unless encouraged to continue the task).

Cher James-Tanny held the second plenary session, talking about how communication has evolved and will continue to evolve. Her main prophecy was that we'll see fewer words and less text, exemplified by reference to the SMS language of abbreviations as well as visual communication such as the LEGO build instructions (small kids can't read, so the instructions are all illustrations).

After the opening plenary sessions, the conference sported three parallel sets of sessions, and a total of four simultaneous workshop sessions on Tuesday morning. I participated in the workshop session about "designing from the inside and out"--design with focus on the most important unit of information, how you get to them and what you can do with them. The prime example here would be Flickr, which is all about pictures, but with various tools for finding and using them in different ways.

Also worth mentioning is the last session I attended, which was about how Fast Search and Transfer has tried to develop a social music service for use on mobile phones. However, various obstacles such as technical incompatibility between mobile phones, slow response (not "instant play" as your current MP3-player), music licensing issues, and expensive network operator pricing models, the concept is not yet operative as the ideal design suggests. Yet, a couple of early examples exists through ezmo and moox. So, look out for your friend's instant recommendation for a song when you're on your way to work sometime in the future!