The third Open Source usability sprint is being held at Google this weekend. Rick Boardman has the details. If you care about such issues, then go to the wiki and sign up.
I am glad to see this event again and hope that there will be many more like this – in other geographical locations, with totally different project participants.
Posted in Design, Google, Open Source
Some of us are putting together an informal half-day conference focused on what’s new and innovative with user research methods. The idea is to find out what cool ideas and methods others have been trying out, and share what we have been upto ourselves. Its a free half-day conference. We chose a Friday afternoon to make it easy for you to come by. The location is Bolt & Peters office in downtown San Francisco. The setting will be informal (there will be food and drinks!). And this will be followed by a cocktail hour at 5.30 PM.
Talks are 20 minutes long and will cover a wide range of topics related to trends in User Research. Speakers include Wendy Castleman from Intuit, Ravit Lichtenberg from HP, Lane Becker from Adaptive Path and more. Go to the User Research Wiki if you want to learn more or want to sign up.
It should be a fun afternoon. Look forward to seeing you there!
Posted in Design, HCI Methods, Market Research, MindCanvas
We are looking for a few good hackers to work on Slideshare. You can find out more about the positions on the Slideshare blog. The Uzanto team is a tightly knit team of developers & designers in US (Mountain View & New Delhi). Slideshare is built with Ruby on Rails – Setup consists of Ruby, Rails, MySQL, lighttpd/mongrel, Pound, FreeBSD, and Debian. We are looking for Developers and a Sys Admin. We are looking for bright, enthusiastic people who get the web. We care less about your formal schooling – we care more about your being great at what you do, and being passionate about it. We are a small team and each team member is responsible for core parts of the application.
We just launched SlideShare last week and are blown away by the response! We have a lot planned ahead, so be prepared for a fun, wild ride. Apply if enjoy excitement! Interested? Email me at rashmi AT uzanto.com.
(If you know someone else who might fit into these roles, please forward the information).
Posted in Slideshare
There is an exciting panel at BayCHI tomorrow (Tues, Oct 10th) with a discussion about the design of sites with emergent behavior. How does the process of design/design research change (or does not change) in the case of sites like Facebook, MySpace and Yahoo Answers where you are designing not just the interaction of the system with the individual users, but also how users will interact with each other, the group at large. Such social systems display behavior which is not something that was “designed” in the traditional sense of the word. What role does the designer play for such systems? How can you anticipate what consequences a relatively minor change on the individual level will have on the group as a whole? For example, Facebook’s recent decision to offer a feed of all your friend’s actions on your front page. And other related issues…
Panelists are Tim Brown from Ideo; Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path and Larry Cornett from Yahoo.
I will be moderating the panel and will make sure there is plenty of time for questions. So come by to PARC, Palo Alto at 7.30 PM. If you want to let the world know that you will be there (and find out who else will be there), then go to Upcoming. Note, BayCHI events are free to open to the public.
Posted in BayCHI, Design, Social Software
