UMCP HCIL Symposium

The University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab is hosting a symposium on May 31 and June 1.

Check out the event!

Tags: [UMCP, HCI, UXperience, ontology, folksonomy, social networks, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman]

IA Summit Redux - DC Style

Is anyone going to the recap of the IA Summit 2007? Unfortunately, I will be unable to but I’d highly recommend going. Here’s the announcement:

If you missed the IA Summit in Vegas this year, fear not! DCIA will be holding a redux on Saturday, May 12 at 9am. We have commitments from several speakers to recap their talks.

Details:

Where: BCC Services Center
When: Saturday, May 12, 9am - 1pm
What: Mini-sessions, panel discussions, five-minute madness, networking, and bagels — lots and lots of bagels.
How much: $5 to cover the cost of food and venue

Speaker	Detail	Presentation File
Celeste Lyn Paul on card-sorting	description	PDF (519 KB)
Hallie Wilfert on her grandmother as IA	description	PPT (10.8 MB)
Stacy Surla on Second Life	description	PPT (6 MB)
Thom Haller on clear and useful content	description	PPT (8.5 MB)
Dan Brown on IA documentation	description	PPT (3.5 MB)
Austin Govella on IA’s impact on business	description	PPT (1.3 MB)
Lorelei Brown on lessons from failures	description	SlideShare (online)

We’ll be breaking into small groups to talk about several of the themes that emerged during the Summit, including: documentation for rich internet applications, management issues, and design processes.

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED: If you attended the Summit and would like to talk about your experience or lead a small group discussion, please drop me [Dan Brown] a line at brownorama@gmail.com.

Tags: [IASummit, IASummit2007, IASummit07, DC-IA, information architecture, interaction design, usability, experience design, UXperience]

Creating the Adaptive Interface

Stephen Anderson offered an inspiring presentation from the IA Summit in light of our CALMS vision.

[Runtime: 136 slides | Please make sure you have the latest version of Adobe Flash installed on your computer to watch this slideshow. To download it, please visit: http://www.adobe.com/ ]

Tags: [adaptive, adaptive interface, interaction design, information architecture, IA Summit 2007, UXperience, Stephen Anderson]

Storyboard Templates - Customer Service Style

A new storyboard template was released by Martin Hardee last week. This templates focuses on phone conversations. Click the image below to access the file.

Conversation Mary/Pravin/Galina

Tags: [Martin Hardee, Sun Microsystems, design, comics, design comics, storyboard, HCI, usability, task analysis, information architecture, UXperience]

Storyboard Templates

In a recent post I prematurely touted a template that could be used to storyboard user experiences using a computer-based product. Martin Hardee had provided slides depicting a specific scenario. However, I am pleased to pass along news that Martin has graciously offered 3 templates that user experience professionals might use for communicating design to a variety if audiences.

Below are the 3 templates that you can use. Please be sure to give Sun Microsystems credit for the use of the template (hat tip to Martin Hardee). I have taken the liberty of converting the Open Office file format to the MS PowerPoint file format.

Mary 1.0

Pravin 1.0

Galina 1.0

Tags: [Martin Hardee, Sun Microsystems, design, comics, design comics, storyboard, HCI, usability, task analysis, information architecture, UXperience]

Design Comics

Other than Calvin and Hobbes, I’m not much of a comic guy. There’s been a number of contributors in the web design arena who have advocated using comics to communicate a user’s experience interacting with an information system (web or client). Typically, I think of the folks over at OK/Cancel, but I know others, such as Dan Brown, are influenced by Scott McCloud.

Today I came across a post by Martin Hardee of the Sun Design Team. His team has been using comics to convey user experiences with the sun.com site. Interestingly, he has provided a template that is freely available to use, provided you have access to Sun’s Office suite (OpenOffice is freely available). Unfortunately, I am unable to install OpenOffice on my work machine, so I’ll have to look at the template when I get home.

As I mentioned to Martin, since I’m an information architect without the gift of artistic design, I am eager to use any existing templates. I’m a visual learner by nature, so having the ability to succinctly depict user experience issues to technical teams or end users alike in a visual (versus text) format is something I hope to do more of in the future. I truly hope that the template will provide some good images like that seen below. Thanks to Martin and Sun for graciously allowing me to copy content from his blog and repost it here.

Click here to see an example of the comic template in action.

Tags: [Sun Microsystems, Martin Hardee, web design, storyboard, comic, Uxperience, task analysis, Scott McCloud, Brownorama]

Super Smart Whiteboard Application

I had a very unique yet welcome happening the other day. My namesake, “Rob Fay” - a 16 year old living in Nottingham, England, decided to contact me. I had “Googled” my own name before to see if there were other “Rob Fays,” but I never decided to track them down. Well, I’m delighted that Rob contacted me.

Today I decided to check out his site and found an interesting find. I’m surprised I hadn’t stumbled across it sooner, but I believe it can inspire a company such as ours since we leverage whiteboard technologies with our learning curriculum. Check it out.

[Runtime: 04:43 | Please make sure you have the latest version of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer to watch this video. To download it, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com ]

Tags: [k12, MIT, whiteboard, smartboard, educational technology, education]

nanoLearning

Although it isn’t our competition, it’s interesting to see a free tool that can allow anyone to create educational content using Flash templates. According to its site, “NanoLearning is a marketplace for user-created learning media. It also contains a simple tool for creating NanoLearning.” See this example.

Tags: [nanoLearning, flash, education, learning]

UX in DC Week

I know, I know. I’m late to the game. I was not able to attend Adaptive Path’s UX week in DC last month. Fortunately, there’s a wiki containing great sessions notes.

Tags: [wiki, Adaptive Path, ux, user experience, conference, usability, information architecture, interaction design]

Links from BLC Presentation

Building Learning Communities Conference

http://www.novemberlearning.com/

http://www.novemberlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=29

Marco Torres

http://homepage.mac.com/torres21/torres21.html

http://www.edutopia.org/php/people.php?id=C517568

Darren Kuropatwa

http://oletango.blogspot.com

http://pc20s.blogspot.com/

http://pc40s.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_pc40s_archive.html

http://thescribepost.pbwiki.com/HallOfFame

MIT MEDIA LAB - Lifelong Kindergarten

http://www.media.mit.edu/

http://llk.media.mit.edu/

http://llk.media.mit.edu/people.php?id=mres

http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/mres-wef.pdf