Olga Werby

Olga Werby, Ed.D., has a Doctorate from U.C. Berkeley with a focus on designing online learning experiences. She has a Master's degree from U.C. Berkeley in Education of Math, Science, and Technology. She has been creating computer-based projects since 1981 with organizations such as NASA (where she worked on the Pioneer Venus project), Addison-Wesley, and the Princeton Review. She conceived, designed, and illustrated the award-winning "Field Trips" series of programs distributed by Sunburst Communications. Olga has a B.A. degree in Mathematics and Astrophysics from Columbia University. Olga currently teaches interaction design and cognitive theory at the American University in Paris and the University of California at Berkeley Extension Program. She was part of the faculty of San Francisco State University's Multimedia Studies Program, the Bay Area Video Coalition, and the campus of Apple Computers. Olga is a member of the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education. She also holds a California teaching credential and is part of the San Francisco Unified School District where she often tests science-related curriculum materials in public elementary and middle schools.

Flow, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Review: Gamification at Work: Designing Engaging Business Software

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gamification at work book cover

Interaction Design Foundation is about to publish Janaki Mythily Kumar’s and Mario Herger’s 2013 book: “Gamification at Work: Designing Engaging Business Software.” [reference: Kumar, Janaki Mythily and Herger, Mario (2013): Gamification at Work: Designing Engaging Business Software. Aarhus, Denmark, The Interaction Design Foundation. ISBN: 978-87-92964-06-9.] Kumar and Herger put together history and background of gamification among a broad spectrum of ventures and included a quick guide for how to apply some of the ideas and key concepts to the design of corporate dynamics for your company! Here are a few gems from the book: Figure 2.1: Player Centered Design Process. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported). Figure 3.3: Bartle Player Types. Courtesy of Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger. Copyright: CC-Att-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported). If you think of these as user-types, then Kumar and Herger provide a set of ideas of how to design to meet the needs of these different player groups. They provide a great Player Persona Template. In Chapter 4, they explain how to gather the data for a particular company and develop user personas based on actual ethnographic information. Chapter 5 explores the motivational drivers and even…

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Conceptual Design, Featured, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Users

User Roles and Governance

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2013-06-09 Role vs Governance Diagram for NIH Citizen Engagement Think Tank

One of the areas of discussion at the NIH Citizen Science Engagement Think Tank meeting last month was how to categorize the roles (and thus rules of engagement) for citizen scientists. There was a continuous pressure to call individuals who “donate” their medical data to scientific research patients. Let me start by saying that I find that unacceptable — aside from the fact that every human being on Earth has been or will be a patient at some point in their lives; the label patient implies a lower level on the hierarchy than doctor or scientist. The whole point of citizen science initiative is to break down the barriers to entry — we are ALL scientists! Being a scientist is not measured by the number of years in school or diplomas on the wall. It is the willingness to do science that is key. Thus we can all be scientists. With that said, what follows is the discussion on group dynamics — how do people work in groups and how we can support productive scientific endeavors through good design and social engineering. Think Different Collective Groups of people are not made up of homogeneous people — we are all idiosyncratically…

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Mirroring Errors, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding

The WHY Question

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The “Why” questions are important part of design: Why are we building this product? Why would users want it? Why us? Why now? Why this technology? The value of any question asked during the design process is in how the answer to that question helps advance the project; or help the design group bond; or reveal a significant insight into the problem that the group is trying to solve; or help clarify the use scenario; etc. All such questions are about moving the project forward. But it is easy to get sidetracked here, and I saw just that at the NIH biomedical research design brainstorming meeting. Before I proceed, let me describe a bit of background research and give a concrete example when the wrong answer to the Why question jeopardizes the design solution. About ten years ago now, we were asked to design a set education materials for the San Francisco Zoo. The problem was lack of structure for school visits. San Francisco public schools allow all elementary school children to visit the city zoo once a year. That’s a lot of school children…and a lot of visits per kid. But do these students learn anything during these visits?…

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Anchoring Errors, Cognitive Blindness, Conceptual Design, Mental Model Traps, Misapplication of Problem Solving Strategies, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Build It and They Will Come…NOT!

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NEXT logo

There’s a common misconception — a folksy wisdom, a p-prim, if you will — that in our many years of product design led many entrepreneurs astray: Build it and they will come! Oh, if only it was so… While this is a wonderfully optimistic world-view, it just doesn’t work out that way in real world. So rather than just say it isn’t so, I will give a few examples where I was personally involved either in the design of the product or the workings of the company. Please keep in mind that all of these examples were EXTREMELY well-funded, had a lot of design resources, and ALL believed that they were changing the world for the better. NEXT We all remember NEXT, right? If not, let me jug your memory… After leaving (or being forced out of Apple), Steve Jobs started NEXT — a computer hardware company to rival Apple. Even with Jobs’ charisma, talent, deep financial resources, access to the best minds in the business… he couldn’t make this work. Some say that NEXT is now part of Mac DNA, but it still stands that as a company is was a failure… Steve built it, and no one ever…

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Conceptual Design, Cultural Differences, Ethnographic & User Data, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding, Users

Intended and Unintended Consequences of Social Design

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Baby Fresh Air Cage for High-rise Apartment Buildings

Nudging is a form of social engineering — a way of designing system constraints and support structures to encourage the majority of people to behave in accordance with your plan. Here’s a famous-in-my-classroom example of nudging: Opt-in versus Opt-out Consent Solutions There are many examples of such social engineering. During our breakout groups at the NIH think tank on the future of citizen participation in biomedical research, I raised the difference between opt-in versus opt-out option results for organ donation. In some countries in Europe, citizens have to opt-out from donating their organs in a case of a tragic accident — they have to do something to NOT donate their organs. As the result in Austria — which has an opt-out system — the donation rate is 99.98%! While in Germany — which has an opt-in system — only 12% will their organs for transplants. This is a huge difference in consent between very similar populations of people. Unintended Consequences of Social Design Not all social engineering efforts go as well as opt-in/opt-out organ donation systems. To reduce pollution for the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing, the Chinese government established the even/odd license plate law: cars with even license…

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Conceptual Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Long-term Strategy versus Fast Success

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Divergent Road with low hanging fruit

NIH think tank on the future of citizen participation in biomedical research came to a closure on Friday night, and I had many hours in the airport and plane to think about all that was discussed. In the next few days, rather than writing a longish piece of my impressions of the meeting, I hope to get to each of the items that I feel I didn’t get a chance to fully explore while in Washington D.C. in a series of small posts. Low Hanging Fruit There is a strong temptation in any project to achieve success early (and often). The expression Low Hanging Fruit refers to relatively easy to accomplish tasks. But in the desire to get things done, it is easy to lose track of the overarching strategy — the main purpose of the enterprise. By chasing the Low Hanging Fruit, it is easy to get distracted and end up on the wrong path. Two Different Roads We’ve discussed two visions for the future: more of the same and a radical cultural shift. We visualized the first path as “turning the knob to 11” (aka Spinal Tap). More of the same (but with higher intensity) has many tempting…

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Conceptual Design, Featured, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

2013 Think Tank Presentation on Socio-Technical System Design

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I’m about to leave for Washington D.C. for a Think Tank on Citizen Engagement in Biomedical Research. I have only five minutes to talk during the introductory speed geeking event, where all of us get to know about each other and each other’s projects. I’m going there to talk about our lessons learned from designing complex socio-technical systems that required intense participation from their users. I’ve been working on designing such systems for many years now. Some projects were/are very successful, some not so much. I’m not sure I will be able to give a full account of what we’ve learned, so I’m putting up a long(ish) version of my presentation here — if I had 15 minutes, this is what I would say to our very interesting group of participants. I chose these four complex socio-technical systems because all of them were in some measure educational ventures and all required outside users to contribute large amounts of data. I will start with Ushahidi. Ushahidi was born during the 2007 Kenyan election. That election was bloody and the violence, in many cases perpetrated by the government, was not being reported. Ushahidi was a grass-roots effort to tell their countrymen and…

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