On the stage

After being on the wedding stage last weekend, we've returned to life as usual. Life around here is both hectic and fun. Looking forward to that honeymoon next month, but for now it's back to reality.

That also means back to life on the professional stage. Monday we gave a big presentation to a client. It was the result of a benchmark usability study for an organization new to user-centered design. It's always hard to give this type of presentation where the bulk of the message is bad news. But at the same time, the message that the current site isn't working helps create a sense of urgency that can bring about the possibility for change. And that change can be brought about through user-centered design. It went well and I'm excited to see what kind of improvements can be made.

Yesterday, I was up in Seattle to talk at an industry event sponsored by the folks at Zaaz. It was great to connect with familiar faces, former students and current members of the TC family. In addition, I met a whole slew of new colleagues and many interesting folks working in the field.

My talk focused on the methodology we used for our study last summer in Kyrgyzstan. It was really fun to talk about ethnography to the UCD community. It's great to get folks excited about qualitative methodology which is definitely my favorite type of work to do. Also, the audience seemed genuinely interested in the Central Asia work and the results. For the talk, we were limited to 15 minutes so it was tough to get to everything I wanted to talk about. I'd definitely like to iterate the presentation, maybe tighten it up and give the talk again sometime.

Ryan, one of the organizers of the event has positive comments about all the presentations on his blog. Also, Minoru Uchida had some nice things to say also at his blog Yummy or crummy.