One blog ain’t enough – for CHI2006

If you’re swinging by CHI2006, in person – or virtually, check out the other chi blog , set up by a few conference attendees including myself. We aim to provide an alternative to the official word (which is of course super-useful, but will it convey all the fun? We aim to …). If you’re interested in becoming a co-conspirator – drop one of us a line.

Instant Messaging meets Agile Usability at CHI2006

I'm attending CHI 2006 next week in Montreal where I'm presenting a user experience report discussing the use of Instant Messaging to provide a dialog between the moderator and the observation room/team members during usability testing. If you are interested, you can read the paper here: No IM Please, We're Testing (PDF). The report includes a survey of moderators (who in general were wary of possible disruption) and observers (who were highly positive). I present some guidelines to try and achieve a balance between these 2 perspectives. Comments/thoughts/critiques appreciated.

If you're at CHI, here's my session info:

Monday Mid-morning 11:30-12:00 EXPERIENCE REPORTS ROOM 511CF
Session: Usability Evaluations: Challenges and Solutions
No IM Please, We’re Testing
Richard Boardman

Since I wrote the report, I've become interested in the field of Agile Usability (the meeting of Usability/UCD and Agile Programming techniques). Traditional Usability and UCD has been criticised in some circles, for encouraging a slow, inflexible, formal waterfall style development process (requirements gathering, design, test, iterate …). Agile Usability is all about speeding things up in usability research so it can keep up with the dynamic, lightweight nature of modern engineering approaches like Extreme Programming (XP) and other Agile techniques.

Now I believe that the approach I discuss in my paper – using IM during Usability tests – can be a useful Agile Usability technique. IM can enable live collaboration for traditionally passive observers. They can ask additional questions, and diagnose (and hopefully fix) prototype bugs. This observer empowerment may thus be useful in promoting attendance behind the one way mirror, and rapid iteration on usability data by teams.

I've just been searching the CHI program and found at least 6 presentations directly related to Agile Usability. Here they are, FYI (did I miss any?)

1. Tuesday 430pm, PANEL ROOM 517C, Agile Development: Opportunity or Fad?
2. Doctoral Consortium (poster) 009 Embracing Agile Development of Usable Software Systems Jason Chong Lee, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State, University, USA
3. Poster 155 The Role of The Interaction Designer in an Agile Software Development Process Matthew A. Lievesley, Joyce S. R. Yee, Northumbria University, UK
4. Poster 185 An Interactive Speech Interface for Summarizing Agile Project Planning Meetings Shelly Park, Jörg Denzinger, Frank Maurer, Ehud Sharlin, University of Calgary, Canada
5. COURSE 14 ROOM 513AB Usability and Product Development: A Usability Course for Management, Tuesday 9:00 – 18:00
6. COURSE 25 ROOM 514ABC How to Collect Field Data and Produce a Tested Design in 1– 8 Weeks, Thursday 11:30 – 13:00

See you in Montreal!

Lost in Los Angeles

I just spent a wonderful weekend in LA with Jon and Rashmi. Unlike my previous 3 visits, this time I really felt like I found "the city in the suburb".
Whats the secret to enjoying LA?

1. Buy a decent street map and skip the freeways. Last time I spent hours on I405 and I10 … this time drives down Wilshire, Western and Sunset stunned me with just how colourful the city is.
2. Have a car (OK, OK, so this is obvious, but you'd be surprised as to how many friends I have who have gone to LA and been p*ssed off that they can't get around easily on public transport)
3. Hang out with locals who know fun places to go and where to park.
4. If you can't hang out with locals, at least do some research before you go.
5. Through a combination of 3. and 4., know where you are going before you start driving (reference "trying to find a cocktail at 4pm in downtown Culver City)

Talking of research, here are some tips on museums, cafes, bars, restaurants and neighbourhoods I would recommend:

Baychi – Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information

Here are my notes from the session:

Beyond Search: Social and Personal Ways of Finding Information

April 11, 2006 – PARC, Palo Alto – Neil Hunt, Netflix; David Porter, Live365; Tom Conrad, Pandora; Kevin Rose, Digg; Joshua Schachter, del.icio.us; Rashmi Sinha, Moderator

Rashmi gave a really nice intro, using del.icio.us tags! (see links below, I will be sure to steal this sometime soon). She also presented a 3-way theoretical framework for discussing the "beyond search space"

Another internet cafe, this time with natural light

I highly recommend Dolores Park cafe at the northeastern corner of Dolores Park. Think Ritual but inverted talk:typing ratio. Views of park. Natural light.  After you've supped, walk up to the southwestern corner of the park for one of the best views over San Francisco.

DCamp – an unconference on user experience, usability and design

If you are interested in the fields of user experience, usability and design, and you'll be in and around the Bay Area on May 12-13, you should swing by DCamp. It promises to be fun, and will be the first barcamp focused on user experience. What is a barcamp? A barcamp is an unconference! What is an unconference? An unconference has no official pre-defined program. The event is fluid and evolves depending on attendees' interests. Expect lots of talk/discussion/debate/bickering on UX methods, design, open source, web2.0 and much much more. I hope to slip in a talk somewhere too. Come and heckle me.

You can find out more via:

• The unconference's un-un-official wiki
• Rashmi's blog (she's a BarCamp veteran – I haven't been before, but she promises it'll be fun)
• Also – here's a link to DCamp at upcoming.org

Dr Watson of DNA fame – cuddly or creepy?

I was lucky enough to see a talk by Dr. James D. Watson of DNA fame this morning. It was a real experience … the talk started off with "Jim" in friendly uncle mode reminiscing about his DNA discovery days when he appeared to be just another dorky postdoc (who originally wanted to be an ornithologist).

He then moved on to some much more challenging, controversial, almost <i>creepy</i> discussion of his work on autism. The creepiest point was when he used Rosalind Franklin as an example of the poor empathy skills exhibited by people with autism. Why was this creepy? Rosalind's work was critical to the discovery of DNA, and there is some controversy regarding Watson and Crick's use of her X-ray data when it was still unpublished. Furthermore, Rosalind died from cancer before the Nobel prize was awarded. Either way – the use of her as an example in his current research seems tasteless.

Read on for my snippets from the talk:

Personal Information Management at CHI2006

I've just been perusing the CHI2006 advance program, and since Personal Information Management (PIM) is a particular interest of mine, I paid special attention to this area.

Its a busy year for PIM, just go back 3 years and there was barely anything presented at CHI on this field. Here are the PIM papers (PIMPs?) which caught my eye … plus links to researchers' homepages. Descriptions are from the CHI website. I plan to fill in more commentary on these papers at the conference itself. Did I miss any?