Now that the blog is working (and on the new server, I might add), it’s time to recap the first day of User Experience Week. It started at about 3:00 AM yesterday morning, when I left for the airport. Fortunately at that hour, there was no traffic, and the lines for American Airlines weren’t too long. When I finally landed in DC it was 5 PM (I lost three hours). A harrowing shuttle ride later I was checked in at the hotel, and looking forward to a cold beverage at the reception.
The welcome reception was around the corner from the hotel at a pub called the Brickskeller Saloon. They have a very extensive beer list, and I sampled a couple pints. Steven Johnson was signing his latest book at the reception — Everything Bad is Good for You. I discussed how his ideas seemed to be taking hold, as confirmed by the recent research from the University of Toronto which says that the IM lingo popular among teens is not dumbing them down, but is actually “an expansive new linguistic renaissance.” We debated the relative merits of first person shooters such as Quake (I miss playing CTF) and mingled with the other attendees.
Which brings me to Day One. Steven Johnson was the keynote, discussing concepts from one of his first books, Interface Culture. Written at the end of the dot-bomb, he got a few things right and missed others. He nailed blogging right on the head. An insightful opening for the conference. I’m going to have to check out some of his earlier books.
Most of the sessions followed two tracks, meant I had to make some choices. I chose wisely.
Chiara Fox of Adaptive Path presented a really good nuts-and-bolts session titled “Understanding Your Content.” She provided three tools for the process: a content inventory; a content audit; and a content map. All three are used, and all have different purposes. I was struck by the similarities with the content collection process I use for our knowledge management activities. I thank Chiara for introducing a new acronym to my personal vocabulary: ROT. It describes what any content system accumulates over time; stuff that’s redundant, outdated or trivial.
Next, Dan Macaulay of Business Objects (“the Crystal Reports people”) talked about enterprise tagging. I have a passion for tagging, and a vested interest in the topic as I’m in the process of redesigning our current, highly-structured (and somewhat cumbersome) tagging system in our KM environment. There was an interesting concept for presenting information through a tag-based index, inspired by the Flamenco Search Interface Project developed at UC Berkeley, but I found myself wanting the visual cues of depth found in tag clouds. It was also interesting to note that they used Google’s search appliance, and found that it fell short, mainly because of the lack of meta data. Hmmm… could it be that documents need more that a file? Could context really be helpful?
The afternoon session, I attended Brandon Schauer and Steven Toomey’s two-part session titled “Creating Tangible Value with Design.” It could have easily been titled “Creating Tangible Value with Knowledge Management” — the concepts would apply equally well. It all comes back to identifying business goals and finding creative ways to meet them. In their case, they used design. But you could just as easily apply it to KM. And they covered all the bases, from establishing the potential value, measuring success and making decisions.
The final session went way outside the box. The speaker, Kathan Brown, founded Crown Point Press, a special studio that works with artists to create and publish etchings. Brown has authored a book titled Magical Secrets about Thinking Creatively, and provided fascinating look into the creative process. Most of the artists who work with Crown Point are not familiar with the etching process. They generally come for two or three weeks, learn what’s involved, work with the production crew and create their artwork. It was a fascinating business model, and one that has worked for 44 years — as a for-profit enterprise, no less! What was especially interesting was how collaborative the process was. I wonder if knowledge could be created in the manner similar to creating art?
Google earns thanks for sponsoring a pretty decent reception Monday night at Buffalo Billiards. Got a chance to rub elbows with some good folk from the UN (imagine government bureaucracy, multipled!), BT, Xerox, Google, Adaptive Path, the NEA and others in the field. And I learned that geeks like us really aren’t so good with a pool cue.
More to come tomorrow night!
technorati tags: uxweek
The brickskellar is the best bar ever. I spent a couple of nights working my way through the Belgium section of their menu. Buffalo Billiards is not to bad either.
The brickskellar is the best bar ever. I spent a couple of nights working my way through the Belgium section of their menu. Buffalo Billiards is not to bad either.