Opinion wars can get messy. They can stop a team in its tracks. And the worst thing about them is they can’t be won. There is never a winner in an opinion war.

The problem with opinion wars is their foundation. Let’s say you and I are in an opinion war. You strongly think that we should do some thing and I strongly think that thing absolutely the wrong thing to do.

For you to swing me over to agreeing with you that we should do that thing, you’d need to sway my opinion. And, if I’m going to convince you it’s wrong, I’ll need to sway yours.

However, swaying opinions is practically impossible. I’d like to think I’m a smart dude and my opinion is not just some random, unconsidered thought. Instead, I’ve based my opinion on my life’s experiences, which you haven’t had. Similarly, you’re a smart dude or dudette and your opinion is based on your life’s experiences, which I haven’t had.

To sway my opinion, you’d have to convince me to put aside everything my life’s experiences are telling me about this situation and take, completely on faith, your opinions. These are based on your life’s experiences, which I didn’t have. That’s really, really hard for me to do. It’s hard for anyone to do.

Opinion wars can’t be won. The only way to move past them is to subvert them.

Using Data to Subvert Opinion Wars

One way to subvert an opinion war is with data. In a design process, the data usually comes from user research.

If I believe there a right way to design something and your experience tells you that would be a sucky design, we have an opinion war. However, if we can get a prototype of that design in front of users, we’ll get real data to make the decision. We’ll no longer be working off our own opinions and experiences.

In almost every case where I’ve seen an opinion war, data about the users has completely dissipated it. Quite frequently, the data proves that neither side was completely right and that there was a completely different way to think about the problem.

All Hail The Arbitrator

Another approach to solving opinion wars is to appoint an final arbitrator. This person is chartered by the team to make decisions and every decision they make is final, no matter what others think about it.

We use this at UIE a lot. Each project has an owner. The owner makes all the final decisions for their project.

Often the project owner isn’t senior in the organization. In fact, they can be the person with the least seniority. They are not expected to ask permission. However, when they aren’t sure, they should ask advice.

Often the advice is conflicting and, occasionally, it’s strongly held. It’s this arbitrator’s responsibility to listen to all the advice and give it serious consideration. More importantly, it’s their responsibility to make the decision.

We’ve established a culture that says it’s the right thing to do make a decision, even if that decision turns out not to go the way people wanted. Even if that decision turns out, in the long run, to have not been the best approach. This is because a decision that moves us forward is better than getting stalled.

Opinion wars can kill a great project. Care needs to be taken to ensure they don’t get in the way.

We’re frequently approached to sponsor conferences so we came up with a method to determine if the sponsorship is worthwhile. We discovered it works well with choosing conferences to attend too.

The first step is to determine, in order, your 5 most important criteria about a conference (you could use any arbitrary number but we don’t recommend more than 10). List the criteria from highest to lowest importance. Here’s an example.

1. I will learn more about a specific skill (e.g., learn more about mobile web design, data visualization, design patterns etc).
2. I will immediately use what I learn at the conference and make an impact on my designs.
3. I will have networking opportunities to share best practices and success stories with others.
4. The dates of the conference fit for me.
5. The conference price is within my budget.

However you determine this list, you should use it for all the conferences you’re considering, especially when comparing one conference to another. Other factors to consider in your criteria could be location, exhibitor hall, parties, etc. The key is that it’s a factor on whether a conference is going to work well for you or not.

After determining your criteria and learning all you can about the conference, you then score the criteria from 1-5 (5 being the highest score). So it may look like this:

1. I will learn more about a specific skill (e.g.,. learn more about mobile web design, data visualization, design patterns etc).
   Score of 4
2. What I learn will immediately make an impact on my designs.
   Score of 4
3. I will have networking opportunities to share best practices and success stories with others.
   Score of 4
4. The dates of the conference fit for me.
   Score of 5
5. The conference price is within my budget.
   Score of 3

Now comes the math. You multiply the score you gave each criterion by their value. The first criterion’s value, #1 the most important, is worth 5 points, #2 the 2nd most important is worth 4 and so on. If you have seven criterions, then #1 is worth 7 points, #2 is worth 6 points etc. So now the ranking looks like this:

Similar to when we were back in school, we like to grade things as a percentage out of 100. You’ll need to determine your lowest acceptable grade. We go with a grade of 80% or higher. Convert the score to a percentage – ((61/75)*100) and your score is now 81%. So this particular conference meets the minimum grade.

The beauty of this scoring system is that you can compare one conference to another. Of course, you can ignore the score and decide to attend, but the main goal of this exercise is determining if the conference meets your criteria.

I challenge you to try this method with our last tour stop of the Web App Masters Tour. The conference takes place in Minneapolis, June 27-28. And if the conference receives a passing score, and you decide to come, use the promotion code TOURBLOG to get $100 off and pay only $895.

What tools do you use to determine if a conference meets your objectives?

Fast Forward Three Months…

We’d like to thank you for doing a fantastic job as our Digital Media Intern. You’ve doubled the number of podcasts we’ve been publishing, making them sound better than ever. We were stunned at how quickly you learned our production process and the improvements you suggested.

Your editing skills are stunningly sharp. You’ve pulled all the vocal blunders and technical glitches out of our audio interviews—it’s as if they were never there.

You also updated our transcriptions into a new, accessible HTML format, making it easier than ever to find and read the transcripts. Your write-up of our process will make it easier for others to step in and help with the production process.

To top it off, you helped us with our back-end management of our UIE Virtual Seminar Training Library. Our recordings are now safely backed up and your suggestions for our future implementations were spot-on.

Thanks for your energy and enthusiasm during your internship. We know you’re going to succeed at your next venture.

Now Back To Today…

If you’d like this to be your story, send us your resume with a half-page write up of your most significant digital media accomplishment. While we’re less concerned with your skills and qualifications, we won’t compromise on your ability to deliver team results. We’ll be back to you in 24 hours if you have what it takes to achieve something special.

You might even want to check out our web site for some insight into what we’re doing. (Don’t forget to check out the Podcasts!) We think you’ll be excited by where we are today and the challenge to get us where we’re going.

Send your resume and write-up to: DigitalMediaInternJob@uie.com

For eight years, I’ve been excited and happy to come to the office every day, continually challenged by my work. While my job role has evolved significantly over the years, I’ve enjoyed every moment: conducting usability research, collaborating with the leaders in the world of design, consulting with clients, teaching courses, developing new product lines, and most recently, managing the day to day operations of the company.

I’m extremely grateful for the support I’ve received from everyone at UIE. I would like to thank all of my co-workers for making UIE such a fun and exciting place to work. I would especially like to thank Jared Spool for giving me the opportunity to learn from his brilliance for nearly a decade. Jared: you’ve been a wonderful mentor and friend.

I expect to collaborate with the great folks at UIE in the not-too-distant future. I have full confidence that User Interface Engineering will continue to be a leader in the field for years to come.

This week, UIE turns 19 years old. Over the years, we’ve seen technology come and go, features grow and shrink, and interaction styles dramatically change.

What used to be just a person interacting with a screen has become something more — people interacting with other people, using the computer as a moderator. This has enhanced e-commerce (as seen by Amazon’s reviews), brought families and communities together (with tools like Flickr’s photo sharing and commenting), and enabled new ways to keep in touch with people important to us (as with Facebook and MySpace.)

As with the development of any system, it’s easy to focus on the mechanics of making the technology work. Just allowing people to add reviews or establish connections is the first step.

Yet, perfecting the mechanics won’t get you a service that delights the users. That has to come from something more. Something that takes into account how people interact with each other and how businesses can thrive on that interaction.

In today’s UIEtips, Josh Porter gives us the continuation of his analysis of the common pitfalls of building social web applications. Josh has done a fabulous job looking at what it takes to survive in this new world.

Read today’s UIEtips article.

Are you implementing social web applications into your designs? Have you encountered any of these pitfalls? If so, what you have you done to avoid them? Join the discussion below about this week’s topic below.

This is Josh’s last article as a member of User Interface Engineering, as he has recently left the team to start his own business, Bokardo Design. Over the last 5 years, Josh has contributed tons to our thinking on Search, e-commerce, web apps, and developing social applications. He’s been responsible for our site design, the e-commerce application that funds our research and events, and our blog. Most importantly, he’s been part of the life-blood of what makes UIE what it is. We won’t be the same without him.

Just because Josh is leaving our offices doesn’t mean he’s leaving our life. UIE will be one of his first clients, as he continues to help us with the design of our site. However, he now has the opportunity to help other organizations with their sites. (You can contact him at porter@bokardo.com if you’d like to see if he could help your organization.) He’ll also be presenting at the upcoming UI12 conference and as part of our upcoming podcasts. It’s likely you’ll hear more of his thoughts in UIE Virtual Seminars and articles. Of course, you can follow his thinking on his blog, Bokardo.

Everyone else puts up a sign saying how they don’t want solicitors to randomly walk into their offices and sell them stuff.

But not us.

We like solicitors. In fact, we tell them so in a sign we’ve put outside our offices:

Here’s what the sign says:

So far, a few solicitors have wandered in, fairly confused. A couple have brought gifts. Not an iPod or a Prius, mind you. A can of cashews and a baguette. Not what we were expecting, but a good start.

Today, one came in asking for a copy of the sign. They didn’t actually solicit anything, except the sign. I printed it off and they left.

I guess that’s progress.

You can see more of Brian’s pictures on Flickr.

Who am I, and why am I here?

Excellent questions all. I’ll start by telling you that I’m a new UIE employee, joining the company one month ago. But from there, it gets cloudy.

Since I’m filling a new role here at UIE, they’ve asked me to suggest a title for myself. It seems that CEO is taken, and I’ve never been really great with math so CFO might not be such a good idea. That’s why I need your help.

Help me choose a title for my role at UIE.

What do I do here, anyhow? For the past few weeks I’ve done a little bit of everything, and that is my mandate. I’ve been editing podcasts, designing marketing materials for the UIE WebAppSummit, and spearheading the (85%) company-wide switch to Mac. Going forward I will be doing more of those things, maintaining IT, contributing to marketing, and working with the design and development of the website. I will be producing virtual seminars and as with everyone here at UIE, doing plenty of heavy lifting for our conferences and events.

Some ideas for a title include the pedestrian but descriptive “Content Developer,” or perhaps “Communication Designer?” “Chair of the Lunch Committee,” anyone?

Think about it and let me know in the comments. I look forward to hearing your suggestions, serious or fun…

Since this is an introduction post, you may also be interested in some third-person, biographical stuff…

Brian Christiansen has worked previously for Apple Computer, the University of Connecticut, and on his own as a freelance web developer. Brian is a graduate of the University of Connecticut with a BA in Visual Communications. He focused on digital media with courses in graphic design, communications science and journalism.

He currently makes his home in Medford, Mass with his lovely wife Amanda and their overly-cute miniature schnauzer puppy, Greta. When he’s not on his Mac at work or home, you might find him riding one of his bicycles. Or banging on something. Brian is a percussionist of 20 years and has performed for crowds of thousands. They weren’t specifically there to see him, but they were there…