UXer's blog

I think it was coincidence: Parade magazine published John Maeda's How to keep it simple the same week as World Usability Day. John's article was based on his 10 Laws of Simplicity.

This weekend is a usability sprint with several open source projects in Mountain View. This is the third time they have put usability people and open source developers in the same room to collaborate. It does appear to be a movement.

Drupal is one of the projects participating. Kieran is doing remote usability testing this weekend. Another goal is to "explore how to recruit User Experience professionals to the Drupal project". I'd suggest doing the next sprint in June in Austin if you really want a lot of usability professionals to show up.

Also, Hyperscope is another open source project that is at the sprint.

Five events I would have loved to have attended, all today, October 24th:

• IDEA (Information: Design, Experience, Acces), Seattle
• User Experience 2006 Conference (Nielsen Norman Group), also in Seattle
• ASSETS 2006 (Eighth International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility), Portland
• The Market Research Event, Los Angeles
• Design Leadership in Action, Measuring and Building Design's Role in Achieving Business Success, Vermont

Two in Seattle, a third also in the Pacific Northwest, a fourth also on the west coast.

And then at least 3 local meetings I would have attended if I was there (New York City, San Diego and Cleveland). Am sure there were more good local meetings that happened today around the world.

A few more today that I would not have attended but were still pretty easy to find: MexIHC and ACM Multimedia 2006.

I wonder if this is a record for 1 day.

The web site for World Usability Day was down for a few hours this week to put the next version in place. With 2 months to go, they are switching from "save the date" mode to "here are the events" mode. The next big switch will be "here is what is happening right now" (on November 14th).

Some of the new things (maybe they were online before but I just noticed them):

• Video interviews with local leaders
• Tools for planning your event such as how to get local media coverage, how to webcast, and an introductory video you can use
• Forum for online discussion, replacing the mailing list and the "local leader blog" that I built last year
• For a short period of time, the MAP and a list of events were online. It was not working, so it has been taken down. Look for it soon.

The site looks awesome this year.

I was catching up on news about CivicSpace by reading Zach Rosen's blog and found him sitting next to Jesse James Garrett in a roundtable discussion with a Senator.

Jesse's face seems to be everywhere.

Yes, I got an award from UPA last week at the annual conference. Thanks for all of your kind words and congratulations. A few people missed the ceremony and later said they would have showed up for it - I did not tell very many people, just the way I am. For all of you that missed it, here are some pictures.

Waiting to get the award from UPA President (and fellow IBMer) Thyra Rauch, with conference chair DeeDee DeMulling seated.

Celebrating the award! (a bit blurry, I think Whitney the photographer was laughing too hard to hold the camera still).

And here is the award itself:

"UPA Usability Service Award is awarded to Keith Instone...for your leadership and tireless work in creating the first World Usability Day, and your innovative work on the event web sites. 2006"

There you have it - nice to get the recognition, but it was all worth doing without any award. Even better than the award was seeing long-time friends and making new ones at the conference. Oh yea,I actually attended a few sessions while I was at the conference - I will blog those later.