Sunday, April 10, 2005

Communicating without words Wordless diagrams, a book and an NPR All Things Considered piece. 6:35:16 PM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

OK/Cancel does CHI Kevin and Tom, the OK/Cancel guys, were at CHI, sharing a booth with IxDG, UofW, UXmatters (Pabini's new magazine). Kevin has some thoughts on presenting short papers. 10:25:19 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

Recovering from CHI Survived CHI, barely; feeling rather under the weather now, sniffling and snorfing. Only to be expected after a week of close contact with nearly 2,000 people, plus airplane rides at each end. All in all, I enjoyed the conference. There were lively, engaging keynotes at each end of the technical program, good discussions in the Development Consortium, and some very revealing presentations. And sandwiched in between were meals with the interactions magazine editorial board, conversations with friends old and new, some rockin' parties, and the intangible rewards of volunteering. Highlights: Randy Pausch, who teaches in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon U., talking at length in the opening plenary about how they build and nurture teams. Interviewing Randy Pausch for interactions. Closing plenary "contertante" with Michel Waiswisz from STEIM, demonstrating his custom electronic musical instruments. Michel's playing at Mills College this Monday night. I recommend it. Reconnecting with friends from the ICT&S, University of Salzburg, Austria. Being invited to a VIP lunch with the student volunteers, along with Jared Spool, Aaron Marcus, Jakob Nielsen, Randy Pausch, and others. A kick-butt presentation from a U of Colorado grad student showing a customized PDA to help mentally disabled people perform everyday tasks--complete with an IDE for the caretaker to program the device that requires no programming experience. Another revealing presentation by someone from Unisys showing the development of a kiosk for obtaining fingerprints from all non-citizens entering the U.S. Most interesting was the degree to which they tweaked the video that walks users through the steps to get the desired results. Seeing how many former UXers from PeopleSoft now work for SAP. I will be pulling together a presentation on what I saw and learned and what it might mean to the work I do for my team at IBM. Look for the Pausch interview in a coming issue of interactions. And I'll write more as I digest the experience and more thoughts surface. 10:22:33 AM    Questions? Comments? Flames? []

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