A new year always brings a combination of excitement and dread, and all the prognosticators in the world telling us what to expect. At The Content Wrangler, they asked Dave Kellogg to predict the technology changes that would affect content management. At Usability News, Katie Greene predicts what might happen to the user interface.

I am going to take the bold step of predicting what will happen in UUX in 2009.

1. UUX will begin holding regular Web seminars.
2. The UUX Web site will add podcasts and videos to its resources.
3. Summit 2009 in Atlanta will feature a progression of all of the UUX managers in the history of UUX.
4. The UUX Manager's Thoughts will be integrated into the UUX Web site.
5. The UUX newsletter editor will become a mother.


6. Five members who do not currently volunteer with UUX will volunteer to coordinate new projects for UUX.
7. The UUX Twitter page will surpass 100 followers.
   

Don't miss out on all the fun!

Labels: conference, interface, Twitter, UUX business

Registration is open for seventeenth annual WritersUA Conference for Software User Assistance. The event takes place March 29-April 1, in Seattle, Washington. The conference goal is to continue to provide an event with the most comprehensive and timely information specifically designed for user assistance professionals. It features over seventy cutting-edge topics from over forty experts, project demonstrations from other user assistance developers, plus an exhibition of products and services, certificate programs, and networking events.

The opening session of the conference features Scott McCloud, creator of the Google Chrome Comic.

For further information, see http://www.writersua.com/ohc/index.html.

The conference topics cover a broad range of key tools, processes, technologies, and techniques.
* DITA, XML, Structured Authoring
* User-centered Design & Usability
* eLearning Tools and Techniques
* Hands-on Computer Tutorials
* Web 2.0 and Interactive UA
* Adobe, Microsoft, Google
* Case Studies

P.S. Your UUX Manager is presenting a half-day workshop on usability testing documentation.

Labels: conference

When you are working on user research that involves people from all over the world, as I am right now, scheduling means you need to know your time zones.

To help with that, I turn to the Meeting Planner page at time and date.com.

Pick a date, enter your own location, and then pick up to four cities in the world, and you get a timetable showing what time it is for everyone you want to contact.

But what if all you have as a phone number? How do you know what country that phone number is in?

Aha! If the phone number begins with the country code (which means you need to remember to ask people to give you that), then you can find out which country using this. Reverse look up for country code 255 That is how I found out this participant is in Tanzania.

Put to two together, and I am going to be conducting a remote usability session at 5 am Pacific Standard Time with a dude in Tanzania who is about ready to go home for the day.

Labels: methods, tools

Usability Matters.org wants UX professionals to vote on entries in its annual competitions for Boycott Bad Design and International Cartoon Content.UsabilityMatters.Org UMO Home

Labels: inspiring

Russ at UserGlue today posted "Do We Really Need Associations, Anyway? Do They Need Us?

He's been pondering just how useful all of these professional associations (UPA, STC, IxDA, etc)and has come down on the side of "yes," with a caveat.

If associations do not provide what people want, people will create what they want without the association. His example is Stephen Bray's holiday weekend campaign to create UX Book Clubs via LinkedIn and other social networking sites.

To quote Russ:

Most of us work in the User Experience space (if you’re reading this blog, at least I think you are)– you/we should all be connecting these boxes and we should all be wanting to solve these problems. We should be taking advantage of this “whatever-point-oh” web/world that we’re in and FIND NEW WAYS to be excited and energized and CREATE SOMETHING BETTER.

Because if we don’t, someone else will.

Is there something STC or UUX should be doing that we are not? Create it. UUX has multiple communication tools, now, designed to help us talk to each other in whatever way works best for you.

You can comment on this blog. You can follow the UUX Twitter, you can start a thread on our mailing list.

UUX is run entirely by volunteers. You elected a leadership and we want our primary task to be enabling you to get what you need out of this organization.
There are 2033 members in UUX as of December 1. Talk to each other; make things happen.

Labels: collaboration, inspiring, UUX business

Some of you may have responded to a survey sent out in May by a research group under Dr. Mark Zachry in the Technical Communication department at the University of Washington (my alma mater). Even if you did not, the results of the survey are quite interesting.

Five years ago we did not have the easily available services, such as Google Docs, that we have today. One of my projects in grad school at the UDub was developing an interface mock-up for collaborative work amongst evening graduate students who could not easily meet between classes.

This research shows that 20% of knowledge workers use some form of publicly-available online services as part of their work. Click the graphic to download a PDF of the poster.


In UUX, we use Google Docs extensively both for the leadership to work together on reports and other documents, and to communicate with members. We also use a blog and Twitter and are working on the launch of a pilot wiki for cooperative creation of Web resource links.

The abstract is quoted below and the abstract PDF is available online:

This(research)presents the preliminary results of a national survey of knowledge workers about their use of publicly available, Web-based application services to support cooperative work. Our aim is to understand how widespread the use of such technologies is, and—further—to develop a
sense of the sorts of activities these technologies support.

Labels: collaboration

UXMatters has launched a new column in which readers can ask questions and UXMatters find experts to answer the question. Note: One of those experts is our very own Whitney Quesenberry.

This first question is about Choosing the Language for a User Interface

And the correct answer? Get the right writer to create the right text.

Describing the role of this writer, Colleen Jones, Partner and Interactive Experience and Communication Consultant at threebrick, says, “The writer needs to be involved throughout your entire development process. First, to write appropriate interface language, the writer needs to understand user needs, business goals, the experience flow, and more. Then, the writer needs time to craft words, in collaboration with the UI designer. The writer needs to be willing to write in a conversational tone. Next, the writer needs time to receive and incorporate feedback from the project team and testing with users. Finally, the writer needs to help ensure the wording gets implemented correctly.

Read the full article for process suggestions, good reads on the subject, and more.

Labels: interface, words

Recruiting and scheduling usability test participants can be the most time-consuming and challenging part of conducting user research. Dana Chisnell suggests that too many of us are forgetting that recruits are doing us a favor, and we ought to be not just thankful, but respectful, too.

Why We Call Them Participants

Labels: recruiting