World Usability Day is Thursday

I'll be speaking at an event this Thursday in honor of World Usability Day - which is sort of the high holy day of our field. Here is what it's all about...

When we practice user-centered design, we’re not just changing the way products are designed but often we’re also trying to change the way our organizations think and work. As UCD practioners, we often struggle to bring about deeper change and make our organizations more user-centered. This talk, presented by Emma J. Rose, will share results from a workshop that she and others conducted at UPA 2007 that focused on this very challenge. In continuing the dialogue with the UCD community, she’ll share the findings from this workshop, provide a framework for exploring organizational change, and expand on these concepts and challenges.

If you are in Seattle on Thursday evening and what to hear me talk about ch-ch-ch-changes....you should check it out.

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.

I made a new friend today

And I have a feeling my new friend and I will be spending lots of time together: Coding, annotating, and building beautiful hypotheses together.

Dropping the jargon

The plain talk movement is gaining hold in state government. Here's an article in the Olympia paper about getting rid of, as they say, the gobbledygook.

The gist of it is:

Talk to the public as you would talk to any other person - simply, and in plain language.

Studying sidewalks and the like

I read about this and thought of Helen, the pedestrian activist, and Matt C (aka the Rooster) and his interests in accessibility and usability.

The PAMELA project:

A research project, where a reconfigurable laboratory is used to simulate existing and proposed pedestrian environments, being carried out by Accessibility Research Group at University College London.

This will allow existing “open space” accessibility issues to be examined rigorously under controlled conditions. It will also enable infrastructure designs to be checked, thereby avoiding the possibility of costly mistakes on site arising from a subsequent accessibility audit