Blogs

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.

I love it when pieces of classic hypertext systems make their way onto the web. Now we have Douglas Engelbart's NLS/Augment making an appearance as HyperScope.

You can learn more about Augment/NLS here:

• Pages 36-37 in Jakob Nielsen's Multimedia and Hypertext book (if you have it on your bookshelf like I do)
• The augmented knowledge workshop (you need an ACM Digital Library account or you can buy it for $5)
• Bootstrap Institute version of The Augmented Knowledge Workshop
• NLS on wikipedia

I was only 3, so I missed the mother of all demos in 1968 where Douglas kicked off interactive computing with NLS.

IBM's stance on blogs is getting more attention. One of the lead space items on the US home page is Blogs go to work which talks about how blogging helps IBM connect with its customers.

This is tied to the launch of the new IBMers' blogs page to make it easier to find blogs by IBMers. I was a small part in making the directory happen and am listed as one of the bloggers.

I will be attending CASCON in Toronto in the middle of October. An IBM-sponsored conference and a trip to my favorite Canadian city (home of the greatest hall of fame ever).

I am part of the Humane agile workshop and might help out with the Social computing workshop. Not sure if I will have time to attend any other sessions, but I hope I do.

If you are going and want to meet up with me, leave a comment here - I won't publish the comment but will contact you.

Here is my Technorati tag [cascon2006] to get this added to the CASCON blog.

My ibm.com colleague Will Smith and I presented at NEOUPA on September 20th: ibm.com - Experiences of the User Experience Design team. An update to our Internet User Experience presentation from earlier in the year.

We told lots of stories about what it is like working on the IBM web site, from year-long re-designs to day-to-day maintenance and everything in between. Great questions from the audience - hard to remember all of the topics but some where accessibility, search log analysis, standards vs. guidelines, Web 2.0, politics.

I am presenting Wednesday evening in Cleveland, Ohio, at the local UPA chapter, Northeast Ohio Usability Professionals Association (NEOUPA).

• ibm.com - Experiences of the User Experience Design team

My colleague on the ibm.com User Experience Design team Will Smith is joining me. I am driving 2 hours from Toledo and he is driving 4 hours from Cincinnati.

This will be similar to the talk at IUE earlier this year with updates since February. We will keep it very informal and discussion-oriented. I have found people like to hear how IBM manages its web site and tell us stories how things work at their companies.

The official blurb:

How did one of the world's largest corporate web sites get where it is today? Where is it headed next?

ibm.com has millions of pages of content, generated by many business units, serving many countries, describing many products and services, and supporting many tasks on its site.

The ibm.com User Experience Design team is the group that manages the design standards, works on strategic projects like personalization and new navigation schemes, and guides day-to-day improvements to the user experience.

Hear stories from Keith and Will on what it is like working in this environment. Find out what works (and does not work) for IBM.

Keith and Will look forward to hearing you share your stories of what works (and does not work) within your company to compare with their experiences at ibm.com.

If you are in the area, hope you can attend.

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.

The Taxonomy Boot Camp (November 2-3, 2006, San Jose, CA, USA) includes 2 back-to-back sessions on faceted navigation.

Semi-Automated Creation of Faceted Hierarchies, Marti Hearst, Professor, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley

Faceted navigation for information collections is gaining wide acceptance. However, a considerable impediment to the wider adoption of faceted interfaces is the creation of the faceted hierarchies and the assignments of terms from the hierarchies to the information items. Marti Hearst and her colleague, Emilia Stoica have designed an algorithm called Castanet that semiautomatically generates hierarchical faceted metadata from textual description of items. Using an existing lexical database (such as WordNet), the algorithm carves out a structure that reflects the contents of the target information collection. Learn how the algorithm has been successfully applied to collections as diverse as recipes, biomedical journal titles, and art history image descriptions. The resulting category hierarchies require only small adjustments to achieve intuitive results with good coverage.

Getting the Best of Both: Taxonomies & Faceted Navigation, Tom Reamy, Chief Knowledge Architect, KAPS Group

Faceted navigation has been getting a lot of press, but it is important to understand what facets really are, how facets are different from categories, and how to combine facets and categories to create powerful but easy-to-use information access. The right balance of taxonomies and facets combines the best of browsing and advanced search in ways that users will actually use. This session presents the results of a recent project that combined two standard hierarchical taxonomies and then set up a mechanism for dynamically mapping them across two facet dimensions to enable users to zero in on content faster and easier than with just facets or categories.

I am sure I will not be able to go, but if you do attend, let me know what you learn. It is great to see detailed concepts related to faceted finding, searching and browsing being covered. This is more than just "fun" now.

News of IBM's Plant location engagement with the Regional Growth Partnership, our local economic development organization, has hit the headlines (upper-left story on page 1 of today's Toledo Blade).

• IBM hired to consult on area's economy

I first learned of this in June in the Toledo Business Journal. Good to hear that it has progressed enough to make the Blade. Report due in October.

Note that I have no IBM inside information about this project - I am just a local resident who is excited that his employer will help his children get decent jobs in the area some day.