Last Wednesday I gave a talk on "UX as the 'project glue' in product development projects" at the Zürich World Usability Day 2010 to an audience of approx. 120 people! My central statement was: Usability Professionals are in a unique position to becoming the "project glue" within product development processes because two layers we operate on: our deliverables serve as a focus point for business requirements and technical implementation, and our methods help structure internal communciation within the team as well as drive user-centered innovation. The talk was very well received – got lots of great questions afterwards, and there are a couple really nice comments on Twitter and in the blogosphere as well. Here are some pictures (thanks to @swissupa)
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Last Thursday I attended the monthly SwissCHI meeting. That evening's topic was "Prototyping of Rich Internet Applications" – Andreas Binggeli, Marc Blume and Yuan-Yuan Sun presented their Master's thesis (from their MASHCID studies). Interestingly, but not surprisingly, paper prototypes compared really well to more elaborate prototypes done in Axure RP Pro or realized using Ajax-y technology, and users didn't really pay much attention to the paper prototypes lower fidelity. (I wrote up a piece on which prototyping tool to use in which case earlier.)
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On March 26, 09, the monthly SwissCHI event focused on "Interaction Design Patters in the real world". A panel of six experts plus an advocatus diaboli came together to exchange opinions and experiences on design patterns, but it quickly became clear that they weren't talking about the same thing at all: They were arguing on very different levels of abstraction, from controls to actual design patterns.
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At this year's "Vielmehr" conference (what was formerly known as "Mensch & Computer") in Lübeck, Germany, my colleage Iris Niedermann and I presented a paper and a tutorial. The paper (called "Usability Professionals – a role playing game") was targeted at young professionals and experienced people looking for a change of jobs; the tutorial (called "Form Usability for dummies") covered the basics of form usability and design and included a long team exercise redesigning a couple of difficult forms. Even if we had hoped to win the Best Session Award, guess how surprised and delighted we were to learn we had actually won it for our tutorial!
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Earlier this month, I had the chance to go to Florence to attend the 2008 CHI conference. I had been looking forward to CHI for several reasons: After being disappointed by HCII last year, I was hoping for a more practitioner-oriented conference; I knew that a lot of people I knew would be going; I had been involved in the review process; and I wanted to (finally) go to Italy. Speaking of Italy: I've still got that "Florence, Idddallly" sound in my ears, and it'll take a while to wear off.
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Yesterday I got an email telling me that I was invited to an acquaintance's birthday party, together with some 30-odd people, most of which I didn't know. The email contained an .ics invitation as an attachment, one of these little files created by, for example, MS Outlook or Apple iCal. The .ics file carries information on a calendar entry in it, like time, location, sender, attendees etc.
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This year's CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) conference will take place from 5 to 10 April 08 in Florence, Italy. They are expecting ~2000 attendees from 38 countries. I've always enjoyed going to CHI conferences – they offer a unique blend of current research and topics that are more geared towards practitioners. You can still get the early bird rate if you sign up before Feb 10! For me, there was one big disappointment with this year's CHI, even before the conference started: I was asked to be on the program committee for a workshop: "Now Let's Do it in Practice: User Experience Evaluation Methods in Product Development". I reviewed four papers in my spare time. Now it turns out that the CHI organizers assigned so small a room to the workshop that a maximum of two authors per paper can attend – and the reviewers cannot take part in the workshop. Quite frustrating. 
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