Maximizing Meetings:

Charles Field, Thursday, April 20, 2006 @ 7:11 pm

or 6 blind men and an elephant, in a phone conference..

We had a meeting a few days ago with a senior rep at one of our clients. This client was a trainer for the product we are doing some substantial revisions on - we learned more about it’s capabilities and the histories of use in 20 minutes from him than we could have in months of studying the app.

So what do you do with that information once you have it? What is the best way to cut that iceberg of information into usable pieces ?  Iceberg is the right term, because most of it is still hidden.

We decided to separate & each write our own version of the truth. Then to reconvene and compare/contrast/collect the ideas we heard while brainstorming more. This way we each define our individual perceptions, without the dynamics of personality minimizing contributions. We have tried this numerous times & found it highly effective for maximizing creative ideation.

And it is worth noting that information gathering at this phase is anything but linear. There are snippets of narrative, hard parameters that must be recognized, ideas that immediately strike you as being part of a larger solution. Capturing these, sorting them and keeping them available to the team is an ongoing challenge to which there are both simple & complex solutions. These can range from the utility of having a well designed directory with ongoing and meta class folders to full CMS solutions that enable sophisticated search. The solution most useful is determined by utility, cost & scale.

user experience design

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