CanUX Forum

 Conference  No Responses »
Nov 192008
 

I’m still recov­er­ing from three intense days at the Ban­ff Centre, tak­ing part in the CanUX For­um. The ori­gin­al motiv­a­tion was to learn more about user exper­i­ence, usab­il­ity, and design. I learned enough about that to fill my brain, and also learned ideas for brain­storm­ing, the rela­tion between cre­ativ­ity and muscle memory, and how some­times com­puters get in the way more than they help when you’re try­ing to fig­ure out the answers to issues.

I’m not going to try to recap the entire time although in future posts I’ll prob­ably come back to spe­cif­ic parts. Some write-ups I’ve seen are from Mack Male (who was on the same design slam team as me on the first day), and teehan+lax. I have lots of pages of scribbled notes that may or may not make sense when I come to tran­scribe them; much of the time was also spent in team work doing exer­cises to really bring those points home. Now I’m won­der­ing how much inter­activ­ity I can put into my own talks, of course, as well as won­der­ing how the “cre­at­ive play” aspects can work in find­ing solu­tions in more tech­nic­al discussions. 

Much to my sur­prise, the room was­n’t full of graph­ic design­ers, or even people with tons of usab­il­ity exper­i­ence. There were quite a few of those of course, people who could draw and sketch, but there were also people who come at things from a more text- or code-based per­spect­ive, like me. Com­ing from that per­spect­ive, I learned, simply means you take a dif­fer­ent path to design. You may not get to the same place as an artist­ic­ally gif­ted per­son, but where you land is not neces­sar­ily worse, either.

And I found lots of people there shar­ing my con­cerns, as well as my require­ments for solu­tions that work for remote design­ers and developers, solu­tions that bring out the cre­ativ­ity in developers and not just those who’ve been to art school. Most of the ideas for cre­at­ing viable designs involved reams of paper and sev­er­al hur­riedly sketched solu­tions that are taken as the basis for dis­cus­sion, with lots of iter­a­tion to get from those quick sketches to real­ist­ic solu­tions. I was aston­ished to learn how long it can take to solve issues, a week on one small menu on a web page is not uncom­mon. Although that thought is mildly fright­en­ing, it’s also reas­sur­ing to learn that even the experts take time to come up with good solu­tions. I’m inspired, as well as tired, and look­ing for­ward to put­ting some of these ideas into practise.

Multi-location brainstorming

 Technology  5 Responses »
Nov 122008
 

In my cur­rent pro­ject at Sun, I’m pro­gram manager/project lead­er for a team that is spread over sev­er­al loc­a­tions. Up till now we’ve man­aged with phone calls and email and wikis and occa­sion­al phys­ic­al meet­ings, but with travel budgets being cut, I’d like to explore oth­er ways of col­lab­or­at­ing that give more of the “group clustered around a white­board” feel when we need it. It is often the case that group dis­cus­sions lead to bet­ter designs and bet­ter ideas than indi­vidu­als alone tend to come up with; how do we make those group dis­cus­sions work bet­ter when we can­’t all attend one phys­ic­al meet­ing? What tools, or books, or best prac­tices exist that I haven’t heard of yet? Wikis have many uses in multi-loc­a­tion soft­ware devel­op­ment, but they don’t give that spark that I’m look­ing for. What does?

EWF 2008

 Conference  1 Response »
Nov 122008
 

The Exec­ut­ive Women’s For­um is a con­fer­ence put on for women involved in inform­a­tion secur­ity at a leadership/executive level, and I had the chance to go for the first time this year. I’ve nev­er been to an all-women con­fer­ence before and although I have mixed feel­ings (it is, after all, inher­ently dis­crim­in­at­ory to exclude men) I found it worth­while. I met some very inter­est­ing people and had a chance to think about some issues that I don’t often run across in my daily pro­ject work, as well as a dif­fer­ent per­spect­ive on some issues such as risk man­age­ment that are rel­ev­ant to my daily work. I also got the chance to try out play­ing golf for the first time as part of a net­work­ing event pre-con­fer­ence, which was an exper­i­ence that left my right upper arm/shoulder sore for a couple of days after­wards! Oh well, all par for the course as a golf new­bie, I expect.

One not­able dif­fer­ence to many oth­er con­fer­ences I’ve atten­ded: the lack of pos­tur­ing. Most people there were genu­inely inter­ested in dis­cuss­ing the issues at hand rather than prov­ing how good they were (yes, there were excep­tions, but they were few). That made the event more valu­able, and a lot more fun.

Dawn and Remembrance

 General  4 Responses »
Nov 112008
 

Although there’s lots in the paper about it, and people wear­ing pop­pies are every­where, Remem­brance Day seems to have less of a hold over Cana­dian life than Anzac Day in either New Zea­l­and or Aus­tralia. Anzac Day com­mem­or­ates the Anzac (Aus­tralia and New Zea­l­and Army Corps) losses at Gal­lipoli in the First World War on April 25th each year. It is extremely import­ant to New Zeal­anders, no mat­ter what their polit­ics — Anzac Day enjoys unusu­al rev­er­ence in a coun­try where emo­tion­al pub­lic rituals are oth­er­wise absent.

As a child, I nev­er went to the Dawn Ser­vice (liv­ing on a dairy farm, the cows are milked at dawn wheth­er it’s Anzac Day or not). Nev­er­the­less, it seems the right time of day to me, the sun slowly rising up the autum­nal sky, her­ald­ing a new day while the liv­ing remem­ber the sac­ri­fices made by so many. I under­stand why the Remem­brance Day ser­vices here start at 11 am, but emo­tion­ally dawn means so much more.

Remem­brance Day and Anzac Day are both days for remem­ber­ing and mourn­ing and won­der­ing what it will take (or, indeed, if it’s even pos­sible) for humans to learn to nego­ti­ate with words rather than muni­tions. The cur­rent news from much of Africa reminds us all how hard that is.

Election Ponderings

 General  2 Responses »
Nov 042008
 

As I write this the res­ults of this year’s U.S. elec­tion are not yet known. There are reports of long lines to vote, of people vot­ing who haven’t voted before, this all adds up to a sense that this year is his­tor­ic. Part of it is prob­ably that blogs and the appar­at­us around them (searches, aggreg­at­ors, microb­logs) are so much more pre­val­ent now that the voices of many dif­fer­ent people are com­ing through in a way far more access­ible to those of us who don’t live in the U.S. than they were four years ago.

And so many of those people sound as if they’re con­vinced that if their side does­n’t win, the U.S. will fall off a cliff and nev­er be able to recov­er, a view some­what at odds with the view that the U.S. is a great and robust coun­try. Maybe it’s just elec­tion­eer­ing, as some Amer­ic­ans have said to me when I raised the issue, maybe not. In Canada the res­ults of elec­tions make the coun­try veer one way or anoth­er, but not change dir­ec­tion rad­ic­ally; there isn’t the fight over who gets to appoint the supreme court judges, for example, that there is in the U.S.

The bit I have found most dis­con­cert­ing in the whole pro­cess, which has been going on for months now, is the demon­isa­tion of each side’s sup­port­ers, the assump­tion they’re not intelligent/patriotic/… enough. The level of vit­ri­ol hurled around is astound­ing, not only at the can­did­ates them­selves, but at their sup­port­ers, and I’ve found myself won­der­ing how the U.S. will cope after this elec­tion, when (or wheth­er) the tribes will talk to each oth­er again, how soon they’ll start up again with the pre­par­a­tions for the next con­test. One of the few writ­ings I’ve seen that have explained it to me is from Chris Lott; read the com­ments as well. I guess I tend to live in coun­tries where the polit­ics mostly fall with­in the realm of what I find reas­on­able; were I to live in anoth­er coun­try, my reac­tions to the machinery of polit­ics might be dif­fer­ent. This elec­tion is show­cas­ing the jost­ling of the fed­er­al and the state, the clash­ing of the world views, and the con­front­a­tion of the tribes with the oth­er tribes. 

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