–Engage

So this past week, I started the process of organizing UXCampNYC. The idea for this event was inspired by my experiences at BarCampNYC a few weeks ago. I LOVED IT!. My only regret is that I couldn’t go both days. You can read more about my experiences and inspirational moments.

So go to the Wiki for BarCamp learn what it is all about, and then join me in helping to make UXCampNYC happen.

Right now I’m aiming for May ’06 here in NYC. But I’m willing to make it anyplace along the NE Corridor where we can find the appropriate space. Amit Gupta outlines in his BarCamp NYC post mordem really well what we should be thinking about in terms of space and general organizing logistics.

I’m sure more will be here soon. I’m creating a category for UXCampNYC, so you can follow along.

As you might have discerned from my earlier post on Pixar, I’m a total fan, so going to the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) this past weekend to see their exhibit
Each item told the story of their design process. How they took a core idea and expanded in many different directions at various points in the process, as a means of refining that part of the idea till it pushed the story as a whole forward to the next piece that required that level of exploration, play, delight, and precision.

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Google’s search records have been subpoenaed by the US Justice Department as part of their crack down of pornography. (Pornography causes terrorism! Didn’t you hear?) … Attention is a new market theory that relies on company’s abilities to be able to gather data about its users and guarantee that their privacy rights will be preserved. I’m sure you can see where I’m going here ….

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Reported today, Pixar and Disney are in talks regarding Disney buying Pixar. THIS MUST BE STOPPED.

What can be done to stop this? Flood Steve Job’s mailbox, create online petitions. We need to stop this.

Pixar is one of the last great independent and successful story tellers on the planet. What they have done is revolutionary to the movie industry. Setting it on fire again in a genre that was becoming stiffled and uncreative, in the major studios like Disney.

While I know Pixar already has a cozy relationship with Disney, it always had the moxy, threat, and gumption to end that relationship if it wanted to, giving it leverage to do things that no directly owned Disney studio would do.

Katzenberg left for great reasons and was able to do amazing things OUTSIDE of the Princess’ Castle following on the success of Pixar’s innovations. He couldn’t have done Shrek or even the Prince of Egypt inside that studio and thus moved on to a place where he can.

Please for the love of all that is holy and glorious in animated storytelling, let’s do what we can to stop this merger!!!!!

Tell me ideas, give me things to do. I’ll lead it with anyone’s help.

I found this in my wonderings today–The Design Encyclopedia. It even has an Interaction Design topic/category.

A growing, collaborative resource that describes, tracks and explains culture, commerce, politics, media, sports, brands – everything possible, really – through design.

For the technical among us, it is “based on DocuWiki”.

I like it because I really had to search for the DocuWiki reference to be certain that it was using some type of wiki software. I guess, I’m saying that I think it is well designed in that way. It doens’t look like other wiki sites. I didn’t do a further analysis of the total design, but it looks like an interesting resource.

I hav noticed a trend in virtual interfaces that exploits their ephemeral nature, where a single button is used today where two buttons used to be used in the past. The button label is used to both clear a state of the system and the action the button can do. Who else finds they pause slightly in these contexts even after becoming “experts” in these systems?

Of course I’m going to use the covetted champ of design, the iPod, and critique it. I mean it is so easy to nitpick “perfection” b/c it gives us clear lines, with the distractions of too many interrelated mistakes.

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Someone asked this question on Oyogi (check it out). I wrote an answer for them that was interesting and thought it was appropriate for my blog.

The short answer to the short question is definitely.
Let’s break out the components of Web 2.0 (as best as possible).

Web 2.0 is web-based (for the most part) using rich(er) technologies ala AJAX
These can be used to improve existing tools that were previously desktop clients. Speeding deployments.
These can improve user experience and usability concerns both more quickly and more directly reducing help desk costs and improving overall corporate morale

Web 2.0 is about open and fluid and un-incumbered collaboration and participation
By encouraging open communication, this will increase innovation through non-linear thought, decrease help desk support through “self” or “group” help instead of institutional help. Increase corporate knowledge being captured in digital sources that can be accummulated, analyzed and acted upon

Web 2.0 is about mashing up open but still distinct information and process systems.
Connecting information systems and process systems so that there is greater built contexts withing a continuity that makes sense to real-life workflow problems is a huge usability stride, as well as an increase in efficiency.

Those are the big 3 components that I see in Web 2.0 and how they can greatly impact the Enterprise in a positive way. I’m sure there are some negatives as well, but who wants to whine?

Luke W, writes about bringing desktop interactions to the online platform. I don’t want to completely re-iterate the article. The juxt of what I got from it is that there are patterns of interaction that do not translate directly into the web space, but the goals of these interactions are necessary and through some tweaking similar models can be webified.

There were a few examples presented by Luke that I’m not so sure I buy as even being necessary to tweak, or actually they have limitations and ramifactions.

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People are using the tag, “barcampnyc” to place their photos on Flickr.

So, I gave my presentation at BarCamp to a small crowd of about 10. You can read the basics of the presentation.

Following the presentation, there was discussion how does UCD fit (or can it) with agile programming methods. This was an interesting discussion. I tried to highlight that there is nothing contradictory between UCD and agile programming methods and in fact “agile” methods are very similar to a lot of design methods. The problem is that you do have to know something about your users before you begin. How much and how you get that information is going to be different organization to organization.

Please leave a comment if you were at the presentation and remember more than I put in here. Of course you are always free to comment about other parts of this as well.

One of the attendees posted these notes from my presentation. (Hey, I’m really bad with names, so if you can stand up and take a bow in the comments below, I’d appreciate it.)

David Czarneicki of blojsom tells attendees about internationalization of software. Admittedly it was either too technically based for me, or too generic. I also had to leave early to give my presentation.

The short answer is that you better plan for it from the beginning, otherwise it gets expensive.
That to do it now is important b/c the majority and growingly so of users are NOT English speakers.

What to look for:
Formats of dates, currency
Input/Output methods (different keyboards)
Collation or sorting
search
non-latin characters
right > left vs. left > right reading
multi-byte character sets

There is a difference between a language and a locale:
Locale = region/culture + language
Locales can have 3 components English – US – NY, where the third component might be in this case a legal distinction.

Duncan Werner created an HTML rendered Powerpoint creation, collaboration and presentation tool called Thumbstack.com. It is in very early stages and not connected to any business model. It is very slick on the interface side, but more importantly it offers HTML-based functionality for “follow along” that he calls remote control. This feature allows someone to present a presentation and other people using just a browser will be pushed along.

For those of the technical set, it is using an HTTPXMLRequest piece that holds a synchronous connection open (timeouts average 90sec depending on browser).

It also is interesting that he mentioend that CPU and memory requirements for this will not work on lower machines, especially the new $100 MIT machines.

Jakob Lodwick
Social Networks and ways we can improve them by looking at real life social networks. The cruxt of Jakob’s ideas boil down to better representing the ways we think about our relationships.
they are all not equal and we systematically (and not so systematically) choose how we related to each one of them.

It woudl be great if we could empower systems to learn these systems through the way we interact with people on the network (through the clicksteam). It would be good for us to be able to designate scales and types of relationships.

The details of this follow here …

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This is the introduction for the blogging I’m going to do for BarCamp NYC. I’m going to use this space to introduce people to the BarCamp concept as *I* understand it.

To learn about the beginnings of BarCamp and the philosopy about it from those organizing it you can go to the general BarCamp website. But being a wiki it doesn’t have the ideal IA, so I’ll try to point out the crux of their message:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc un-conference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

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