Day 3 has come and gone, and it was a FULL day of information. While the previous two days had booklets with about 140-150 pages of slides, the Interaction Design presentation led by guru Dan Saffer and Kim Lenox was a whopping 300+ pages. But it was worth it Continue reading
Day 2 in Vancouver is coming to a close, and it was another good one. Today’s session at the UX Intensive was on Design Research and speaker Todd Wilkens was an extremely capable and knowledgeable speaker. We delved into the aspects of research, from how to generate the best questions for a research perspective based on the needs of the project, to the actual testing process to the analysis of the user-testing results. We’ve only touched on the surface of this at work, but with us moving forward quickly into doing more user research to inform our designs, this will be valuable information to take back to the team. The only complaint that I might have about today’s session is that we skimmed over some critical areas, but it’s understandable considering both the mass of content we had to cover and the almost infinite number of choices and methods that we could have touched on.
I skipped the happy hour tonight to call Shari and a fellow Flickr photographer Greg7. Hopefully, he and I will be getting together for beers tomorrow and he’s offered to take me around birding Vancouver on Friday, now that I extended my stay by a day to actually see the city in the daylight… In the evening, I was going to work out but there wasn’t time after the phone calls and before dinner – and dinner was WELL worth the skipped workout. We went to a restaurant called Sala Thai and it was delicious. Four of us went to enjoy the night of Thai cuisine and we had a good time – Dan from Knoxville, M.A. from Austin and Scott from Ottawa. We had lots of good conversation (you know, the normal topics – hockey, rattlesnakes, ethnic cuisine in our local towns, hiking), and some excellent food. I would highly recommend the place – the food was delicious and beautifully presented, and the service was friendly and helpful.
I did finally get out and did a little birding today. The weather was beautiful, moderately warm and alternating clouds but sunny overall. The walk was a little further than I expected, and it took me a bit longer to get there than I had anticipated cutting my time down a bit. But it was worth it. I saw a bunch of birds, including 4 new species (bushtit, chestnut-backed chickadee, Northwestern Crow and Spotted Towhee), as well as two new sub-species (“Oregon” Junco and Song Sparrow (ssp. morphna). I also saw a bunch of odd gulls that I can’t seem to figure out – and unfortunately, the work laptop I’m on doesn’t have the tools to open my RAW files… But overall, not too bad a tally for a short walk about the Lost Lagoon.
Well, day 1 of the conference is over and it was damn good – just what I was hoping it would be. The topic was Design Strategy, and host Brandon Schauer did a hell of a job with it. He’s a really nice guy, too; I got to talk to him for a while over lunch and he’s clearly on top of this stuff. I won’t bore you with the details but the content was great and I got a bunch of great tools that will be very helpful in pitching ideas and concepts for both usability and general best ideas.
The attendees are an interesting distribution of disciplines from a wide number of areas. Of course, there are a bunch of locals who get to attend a great conference in their own back yard, but there are also quite a few from all over the U.S. I think I win the farthest traveled award, although I think there might be one or two people from Europe that would have me beat. But it was well worth the price of admission. Especially since they gave us 4-day folks some nice schwag to check out including a copy of Microsoft Expression Web which I’m curious to try once I figure out how to get the frickin’ box open (no, I’m not kidding).
As for Vancouver itself, I’ve not gotten a chance to see much of it yet. It was a dark and stormy night Sunday night with winds locally reaching between 80 – 110kph (that’s 50-68mph) and causing a bunch of damage. So, it was NOT the time to go out and look for birds. The sun did come out later in the afternoon, but I was too hungry to wander off. I was going to head out this morning, but some snafu’s* made that not an option…
My hotel (Sheraton Wall Centre) is pretty nice – and even better, it’s the very hotel where the conference is being held (I love convenience). My room is pretty big, especially for one person, and pretty comfortable. The gym is pretty sweet, too – yes, I finally got off my ever-enlarging ass and worked out for an hour. I think tonight might be a longer one with some weights. Happy hour seems to cut short my workout time somewhat, I’ve found (that is, 2 beers does not lend itself to long workouts).
<h2>SNAFUs</h2>
Of course, not everything can go well. It turns out that the TSA (i.e. Thieving Stealing Airportworkers) decided to remove my Lunesta from my bag when they inspected it. I hope they fall asleep in the Xray machine, the bastards. And wonderful, lovable Chase – you know all credit card companies are super cuddly, right – decided that when questioning a purchase on my card in which I used the CVV number as verification, they should DECLINE my charge to American Airlines instead of calling and confirming it. I know I haven’t used that card in a while, but that decline almost cost me my flight change, and if it had cost me in fare, THEY would have been eating it. As it was, it cost me a 24-minute phone call (I don’t know WHAT that is going to cost me) to re-do the change to Saturday so that I can go on out on Friday to see the city.
Well, I’m here – the UX Intensive coonference in Vancouver, BC. The trip has been over the horizon for so long, but I finally made it. I’m actually pretty psyched to make it here – I’ve wanted to come to Vancouver for years, but it has never worked out. Heck, I’ve never made it to Canada, so Vancouver would be a stretch. And this conference is a pretty cool event that I’m really looking forward to.
It wasn’t the most direct of flights – I’m not sure HOW it makes sense to go from Philly to Dallas to Vancouver, but somehow the airlines thought it made sense. But even though it took 10 hours to get here, it wasn’t all bad. The Cowboys won and I got to watch a <em>whole 5 minutes</em> of the game, I met a pretty cool woman who made the flight much more bearable (the alternative would have been watching “Hairspray” – no thanks).
I’m also looking forward to getting out to bird at some point, although I might have to rearrange my stay for a bit so that I can get out while it’s daylight – my conference runs most of the day, so short of running out at lunch, I will have little opportunity to get out. Of course, it’s raining tonight so birding in the morning probably isn’t in the cards anyway.
Well, I finally feel like I’ve gotten somewhere with the projects that I have been working on, both at my ‘real’ job and the side projects. A big shout out to VanK, Man of JavaScript Mystery for his work on my UPenn project, aka the Polls from the 7th Level of Hell. Now, I just have to put to bed the Project That Shall Not Be Named, Continue reading
I was doing some research for a Usability/Accessibility Guidelines document I’m developing at work, when I stumbled across a peculiar piece of information while searching for reference sources. In general, the body of work that is presented on the Usability.gov website is pretty good; getting a little dated in spots, but overall very good. Continue reading
It’s been another crazy week at work – both the day job and the side job I’m working on with Van. I can’t seem to get caught up, and I’m exhausted. But there’s a lot more to do – I’ll be working on the UPenn stuff all weekend. It’s a bit depressing how much I’ve forgotten code- and CSS-wise since I have been doing so little of it. I feel like a rank amateur trying to code these pages to make them look nice… *sigh*. Hopefully I’ll have something worthwhile to show on Monday Tuesday.
Back just before I left GSI Commerce, I was working on a project that I put a lot of time and effort into making into the best design I could – PBS Shop. I created the design, debated the methods, worked with developers to come up with some tricks to make it work, worked with business people to push certain ideas when the client had other ideas. After a long struggle, I finally got it the way that I wanted it to be … and then I left for my current job. Continue reading
Recently, a project came up which had a particularly difficult requirement included. Pharma industry sites have a pretty tight set of restrictions to start with but some things take it to a new level. One of these is the so-called “Black Box Warning†that some drugs must display. Continue reading
Well, it’s up – my Jersey Birder sub-site is up on CafePress, or at least the first part of it is. After many delays, I just needed to take an hour and get this thing up and running so that it was at least out there – and so that I could have one of the shirts to wear for my trip to Texas in 11 days. So far, it’s only the white silhouettes up on darker t-shirts, but I’m going to be putting the colored ones, and false-positive backgrounds up so I can do lighter t-shirts, mugs, pens, mufflers, crock pots and 30′s style cigarette filters. Feel free to take a look…
