 My name is Andrea Burton. I'm the local track chair for the user experience track. I introduced Malmo Park yesterday, the other speaker. For those of you who weren't in the room, this is the first year we have a user experience track at DrupalCon. And it seems after Karen McGrane's keynote, it seems to be pretty relevant. And I've been attending all the user experience tracks and they've been pretty packed out. So, it's obvious that we are all interested in this in the Drupal sphere. I want to introduce Chris Blow. He is the user experience lead director of strategy of Medan. Medan is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that works specifically in Arabic, English translation on the web. They create journalism apps for multilingual. I used to work with Chris at Medan. And he also has a background in user experience, worked for Bolt Peters in San Francisco, doing user experience research and building a user experience app. He's also just a really good friend of mine. We design, nerd out, we share music. He's a great thinker and he's a great speaker and I'm really excited for you guys to get inside his brain a little bit. Medan works in Drupal. I'm not sure exactly what you guys are doing in Drupal these days, but he works with Karim Matee who wrote these bulk operations. Really awesome guy up in Vancouver. So anyway, I'm gonna shut up. I'm gonna let Chris get to it. Thank you for being here. What's all about him, Chris? I'm really excited to be here. I'm totally set up here. It's gonna be perfect. I have just a few things to disagree with her about. I'm terribly sad I don't go together very often. So this is probably one of the, it's pretty simple, you just can digest this slide real quick. Talking about design ops, it's just a buzzword I invented. Sorry to get that through the issues about deals. About shame, about fear, all kinds of things I know which are painless. Science fiction, comics, say my ass. I would be hella cheap, remote usability research, cost methods, while simultaneously recommending more than $600 of textbooks and other subjects include PHP, CSS, SAS, Ruby, wire frames, prototyping, how to lie with UX maps, how to lie with personas, how to lie with behavior modeling, how to build a robot, a giant eddy murky bed on a trailer and why writing is the most important tool for UX and why ultimately the basis of the story starts in 1898. Talk it back. This is a technical talk. This is a design talk, the organization of the team structure. We're trying to get our heads around that. It's not necessarily going to be pretty. So how many people here are designers who came out considering themselves like technical when they're into ops, right? How are we possibly going to talk about this stuff? I'm going to address the designers first, but this goes both ways, right? The technical people like Karen was saying need to be clearly used to get it. Sorry, using markdown, starting to demonstrate a very clear advantage is efficiency. So yeah, seriously, just write it. You probably know where I've been for five, six, maybe almost seven years now. It's awesome if you follow them, you'll get a stream of stuff. Talking about UX, right? This is a world of industry terms, buzzwords. I invented one just to get you guys in here who knows what design ops means. It tells you, why aren't you doing this already? You know, way behind it. So we live in this kind of technocratic deterministic world where we're in a future language that I see. So I'm going to go straight to some examples now of this previous little concrete thing here. Start with terminator 2 as usual. So the mentality that I see a lot of times is something like this. I will mirror in the UX world, you know there's a lot of controversy about prescience. Some pithy blurbs, and that's supposed to guide you're on a controversy about that because that's supposed to work. Like Arnold put it into the bar, he's sizing them up, taking out the guy who fits your model exactly, right? So here's Eddie Murphy put it. That's another example of some bullshit. Just use a retrospective, right? This is a particularly agile flair, which is a retrospective, it's a very useful technique for teens. So a retrospective is held up as some kind of thing that's going to solve your problems. The problem is, maybe you're too young, it doesn't really work out all starry eyes like this. So this is the kind of scenario that we imagine when we're writing these books that sell for however much money, you know, that's a Silicon Valley thing, I don't know if that's an agile or a lean, people who are saying just, often just made to, Silicon Valley talks about their stories, might look easy, but it's a good valley lore, it says, can you imagine what it was like to work at OU and never fail? That's probably one of the most painful failures that you can probably feel pretty bad. User experience research is it, it never really analyzes itself. You talk to your users and it motivates this kind of thing and how we get ourselves into this kind of predicament as they talk about the fear. It makes us feel all kind of, that we are actually, you're actually lazy, then sorry I can't really help you, but most of the people I know who feel the most lazy are the ones who are sitting around at the computer for 18 hours a day, destroying their bodies, working their brains out. So I'm not sure how lazy this fits in or why it feels so compelling. Just to talk about shame, not just fear that we need to internalize or that we feel afraid to take confidence in our design decisions, get us over the company. We really love John DeLis and the source of inspiration, he says that there's no greater way to get into the creative spirit, the space that was closed, so that he can kind of sketch. So I think that's what it's like a lot of times when you feel like you're, doesn't get it and the designers are often in. So the context of this is DevOps, which if you're not familiar with that terminology, Dev means development, Ops means operations. And traditionally there was a world of people who managed the servers and the world of people who wrote the code that went on. And recently we're seeing a movement to bring those two things together. Those two worlds can work together so the developers can deploy and operations, it's not really quite said this way so frequently, but the expectation is that everyone can do more than everything. So I was into that, I have some ads. Recently I've been trying to stay more in a design role and to be able to have confidence about decisions and find ways to advance the experience, which is not that scary anymore. It's not like it was five years ago when to deploy a server, you had to have cessation and you can pull and make sure you did. So I don't think it's a matter of, because as much as just being able to acknowledge the kind of layer by layer of abstraction, it's not encouraging to look around and I really take a lot of inspiration from the Ruby community personally, who is a world of practitioners, it's not a relation to databases, it moves the thread, so if all you're thinking about is speed, and I might appreciate that with the page loads first, I'd like to stick around and have a really durable user experience to build a relationship with you, based on the flow. So it's a kind of marginal perspective, thought about techniques, I'm gonna take it weighed out though, because design hops is not the same thing as push and buttons, if they all stand by, you can use concept diagrams, because if I do my nice paper and I write it slowly, five years I didn't come back, conversation of a team, what the hell you sketching for then, just write it and code it then, I mean, it's not that valuable then, I think it's something valuable, right? No little straight lines come out of my circles, right? That's made with a half a freaking million years, I got it, it's not that easy, and those little arrows, they're meaningful. Recently, I like to label the connectors a little bit more so you agree, by consensus you don't have to kind of guess, you don't want it to be fuzzy later, you want it to actually be statements, words, compositions, I think the manual stuff is better, I think there's a general principle, these are really long and kind of awkward, if you look weird, I think that's perfectly fine. The main point is that harder years, all the supplies are to steal, the longer they'll stick around, so yeah, I'm actually totally serious about that. There's some weird stuff in the office that will make you feel just one great marker, so I said just right, I just told you just, here I am, telling you my secrets and I can still come straight, great. Seriously, it's cool, it's however you want to roll, you do not need archival quality stuff if you have your iPhone, camera, it's documentation, I'm trying to tell you that we don't have solutions which are universally applicable to them, so in the read a book that says, this is universally applicable, you should have that red light going about principles at the bottom, right, so user experience, bullshit detectors, user experience, people are pretty good bullshit detectors, so good principles I think is a foundation of something, you can choose your clients, please choose your client principles, like while we're here, other books will call them, assumptions that you can validate with metrics, that all sounds like a lot of business rhetoric to me, so options sitting between what you think you want to do or what you decided your business is going to do or your mission is, remember that the result is not user experience, that is skill to be determined, unless of course your users are scary, right, I mean people are pretty insane, you never know what somebody's going to do, if you've actually gotten on a phone or asked people what they think, sometimes they will tell you the most crazy statement, so if your users are scary, I think designer ops still has a role, you can still do other stretches, and you can still work on yourself, anyway the point is the real source of what's holding you back, right, we had this idea of the dream team sitting in this dark with some kind of bioluminescent, SCD, seriously this is the scary part, you come out of your weird design cabra, from your weird design planet, and then there's them, of course, you look scary as hell, I mean how are they supposed to deal with you, they're looking at the clock, trying to make the page load under 200 milliseconds, and you're talking about some crazy, ass module configurations, they can use you, you can read them, it comes with them versus us, so I think that's what our Karen's advice was, right, this is pretty good idea of the designer's role, let's make it more about facilitation and help each other see, we all are actually using, we're starting a new summer project, so they're writing after years of not writing, that's a great way to cut out this feedback loop, which can take a week or so, and you end up getting much more actionable results, the point is really about couple to accept your design, I mean, wishes, you know, just roll with it, persuasion comes very easily once you get into the logic of research, research, I'm kidding me, you talk to one person, this past IRB, research, I say at the time those terms will stick to them, think about the terms that you're using, or anything else, the words aren't critical, version control has failure, your hard drive is gonna fail, actually I have two drives in my laptop, you can take out the SSD, it's brilliant, so version control here doesn't just need to get it or whatever, great, you're super wet, here's ours, just a matter of organizing some kind of structure here, I'm not trying to tell you that you need to do this, we do have some software to go to, this was born out of frustration with Google Docs, and CSS written for it, and you take that long, I was saying project architecture, notice the blue, those little tags there that we used, key codes for each section, it's a very typical site, which is broken out, exploding at that diagram, I'm gonna show you the beginning, and then the key is, you put the little labels on there, and they don't change, they tend to show different iterations of each of those sections, the navigation and sub navigation, each of those that come to the URL, you can see why I'm gone with this, it's not necessarily any pure all solution, just a matter of having a link to HAA, your architectures and guide your whole project in every conversation, every meeting, once you've got those links, with those dad boys all together, we got them linked up to our bug tracker, we show where it appears in the live site, you can link that to your QA routine, optimization routine on the shelf script, or spreadsheets that really matured in the last few years, as much as I would love to tell you to put it down, but our whole stack, you have all the solutions, you know, that is, you consult and do shit, sorry, just to find a cheaper, better solution that lets you out here with multiple accounts, and go to yourself, so you can put actual CSS in it, do it, timelines, do it, put that stuck in this spreadsheet, best teams in the world, and I thought it would work out this way, and I used to hit people with bugs, and that was why we looked down, so the push sink is kind of, all your stuff on your phone, you can say, okay, that's our kind of, you close them up, you move it over here, everything gets synced up, lists, and you will drive. So, that's test plan, but just stream all that stuff into a write, why should you have to bounce around? Is your executive spending time loading up 20 different bookmarks? That's a pretty extensive, it no longer exists, but I preserved the screenshot, I pre-read it up eventually before any of our stakeholders looked at it, but really that was just kind of like, oh shit, the boss is coming, this just shows some simple RSS parsing, you can see the architectural emphasis, this was a little older than the wireframe site we built in Drupal, and then on the right-hand side, it has things to do with the site kind of the first day, so you might as well articulate it right here in the background, in case you are a crazy ego-listened. So an experienced map is a hugely ego-listened thing, because first of all, you get this awesome, you go, oh shit, I mean, that could be a lie there, a lie there, the text is so small, who's gonna tell? It's got a nice spiral, anytime you see a very complete spiral, you just think about a toilet, you're plush-packing yourself, you know, kind of like, I'm in a riker and he's in a war failure, and seriously, it really does help. The key is understanding that the bullshit is already there, and your job as an experienced person is something like the bullshit detector, right? Just like it ever was. The ability to see the bullshit and accept the bullshit as a way of life is when it's there, and you're gonna knock the things that are intrinsically simple, right? It's not the damn map either, it just holds it there so that you look cool when the stakeholders come around, and here's one that actually is more concrete. Here's one that I made to represent check desk, which is a fact-checking workflow versus journalists, right? So we try to model a person's experience, that's a model, as they go through these things. So here at the bottom, this person is an athlete, the link on Facebook, which is gonna get it. Research results, I really like remote research, into phone calls, talking to people, digest the stuff, and you know, kind of, I think a great way to do research, by the way, is the way me first, and they talk about being a whole team, and you know, this is not something that you're prior consulting to do, and there's a form of consulting, it's usability research, and it's not a unit. So you do research, right? You're making a nice panel, I mean, about this day, right? So how did that work out for you? What was the result? That obviously is not really that complicated. There's many other things that can fit into this framework, right? Templates are pretty good, like stencils, so I think the best stencil for that one, at times this advice is gonna come to you. So here's the ULiPattern, right? These kids are designing at a superficial level, what the hell did you do to my markup? That's the thing, I agree with you. Twitter Bootstrap is great, if you did it from the beginning. All these ideas of pattern libraries, the stuff that can get really walkish, and you'll find all books, I totally recommend them, check them out. I mean, Shay, you can just, here's a good example. You know, they do, in your SAS or CSS, you know, do CSS. They actually allow you to do the spirit of design ops, and you get cool things like this. You get to see different button states, drop down stuff, all taken out because of database migrations and focus, just to brief aside here on how this works, to conclude, you would write CSS, and then load, and behold, the browser gets CSS. So SAS, by contrast, is defining the modules, so you can encapsulate them in these little files. Anyway, there's this thing in the middle that takes over your CSS, and you're becoming more expressive, killer design technique. If you're not a designer who's used to working in CSS, then I really recommend it. And now you can then share them, figure out some kind of backbone for your system. Make sure you have the energy in the world to sit around and expel, and every point is the basics. Let's get back to labels and words. Your expressiveness is really the key aspect of what we're working on. We really inspired by some of the colors that I saw, and I was reminded of the profound contradiction of this talk. I saw that it's a little overturned gaze and the crazy life in epiphytes and turquoise wood. And it reminded me that OX is just a kind of extra-skeletal way to externalize and clarify what we're working on, because whatever it takes to do it facilitates staying in that role where you really respect the input of the other people and you may not want to pick up the pen, they may not want just as valuable as they're talking in a relatively good contrast to the previous keynote talk, I do think the future is by us, because you have to design them before they design you. And also, I told you, what the fuck are shell scripts? So yeah, I'm serious man, here we go. You ready for this? Here's a little shell script that I write to help me write. And I know just that I'm shell scripting to get through this kind of thing. I set up some variables at the top and I had to find some sounds. Sound design is part of the view. I have a little short press there. Three of them. One is undot write, I want to predict things that a person would not, that's what I'm going to go on Twitter, I'm thinking weeks in, which just kind of works. So this is an alias that lets me just say I want to start writing. And instead of getting all this crap in the way, where am I going to write? I mean, I do excessively carry notebooks and I kind of get, I like to do handwritten stuff, getting things straight into the computer. There's a few things that I use to blind text. So that's this, to blind text, I open my draft folder and see a scene that's cold. So I'll review something that's just the words undot review as a part of that shell script. I scrolled. When I do something, I like to have a little sense of reward, right? Why not? So if I do undot write, I'm sorry, you can't see this, I'm just typing undot write. Then that opens my folder, gives me a little sense of reward and it's created, which is the directory structure for my day. So here's some random notes that I just opened. I have a public file, a private file and an infant file, which is my job, right? So I have to create each one of those files because I know that I'm going to be working into that kind of structure. So then I can talk about when I'm going to eat for dinner or how I'm planning my wedding in my private file and I can easily put my thoughts that on my blog about it. I don't care if I put them on a talk, you know, please don't read that. It's really about externalizing problems. You can think about this as bots. Let your computer talk to you and you can encourage them. It's just you inside. And the whole idea of these checklists and stuff can just fall away. And engineering creativity, I think, is the biggest contradiction. The engineers are living in a world of abstractions which are completely of their own making, floating, and that is a total passive. If you're a US person, your job is to break out of that. You do not want to look like this dude if you're a lawnmower man. I've been dreaming of the 29's. Orlandia Joe, come on, come on. You do not want to look like this guy in the 80's. You are high and you are Canadian. Get out. It's a very good term. Go, get out of the building. I'm too cute to respect that. And when you see something that fits neatly into an hexagonal diagram, please understand you need to get out of that. Memorize it. Yes, learn it. You need to be able to recite this stuff if you want to sell contracts, right? Useful, usable, desirable. You can't argue with these things. That's the problem. Memorize it, but don't internalize them. Use the grid, but use it to break it. Think about your architecture as something that can be very dangerous. A prison, which would allow total surveillance, not unlike some of the things we build around here. Learn it to critique it. Learn to seed your architecture as something that can support you, but something that can help you break out. I'll be coming around to some of the industry stuff. At WX is a very new term. And this book blew my mind when I read it, because after all these years of Agile, I realized I had never seen an interaction designer working with these people. Agile Experience Design is a fantastic book. I highly recommend it. Lean UX, it's also another buzzword. I hope you're getting a sense of where I've gone with this. Use it, but break out of it. When you read Lean UX, notice that it's all about business strategy. It's all still client-driven, which I think is one of the classic problems of Agile in the first place. You could read that manifesto when you hear that language about being revolutionaries, but then it still comes down to something that is not quite as fundamental as your principles, which I think this is the whole point of Drupal UX, which is rescuing dogs. We work with vats all over the world, and that's a classic Drupal set, right? We're doing colonoscopy research. Those are things that have specific topics that are interested in the world, and try to do things. That is a compelling UX. If that colonoscopy research finds the right person, it's going to be much more compelling than something that just loads fast. Business needs are not real. Business needs should be user experience, should be, and principles, I think, not of like Robocop. So let your users see those, and things will come together. I promise, not fortunate enough. Use your words, write the truth. Let your principles trap your UX. The future of user experience is ops, and the future of user experience is precisely on time. So any questions, really, can I give some answers? Wait, can you get me answers? Can somebody please get up there? I got a sticker for the first person who gets up there and me the answer to it. It's pretty awesome, actually. This is the last one. The saps are less. So there's a fire starter thing, and I'll be on the mailing list late tonight. It's saps are less. I would say go to the GitHub page for each one. Just check out the bug reports, right? The differences that the community used. I was kind of curious how you did iterations with art files or graphic assets with Git. Do you actually sort of commit changes and go back to this? I'm so glad you said that. If you're working in SDG because you use Inkscape, more power to you, that's hardcore, that's a plain text format. If you're creating gigantic 50 megabyte blocks, please do not put your assets in Git. I should totally weigh my hands while I'm saying this. That will create a massive file that offers you very little value. So that's Google Docs. Google Docs is awesome for that. Thank you. With all the notes that I can make with your shell scripts there, how do you refer back to those notes later or find them or do you often refer back to them? I do, yeah. I was actually able to generate 3,000 lines of notes for this talk, actually just by typing in DrupalCon. Because I hashtag things, basically, I think about the words that I'm using to think about. I don't have a formal strategy for that. You know, hashtag is folksonomic and not the folks. So I just kind of roll with it and then I can more specifically add your sublime text to it. And when I'm working on a project, even when I'm working in the search path, so when I do a search, it will show me any of my own documents that reference that one. There's coffee outside, guys. I would love to talk to any of you who are feeling any of these things and many can use world counseling. I'm happy to give you more power because truly you guys are in the right part to do some hasty research today. So thank you so much.