EdUI 2009: Recap
Having finished both days of EdUI, I’m left with a single complaint: I wish I could’ve attended more sessions. For their first foray into conference coordinating and hosting, the EdUI team pulled off no small feat.
Edu-geekdom was well represented: IT pros, developer ninjas, design nerds, library techies, social media mavens and more populated each session un-siloed, curiosity piqued by a line-up of web and usability all-stars. Some highlights:
Jared Spool with a photo of a Julia Childs crop circle.
The In-N-Out School of UX Veritable godfather of usability, Jared Spool, delivered the keynote on “Cooking Up Gourment User Experiences on a Fast-Food Budget” which proposed that a great user experience doesn’t require a huge budget—just meticulous preparation (skillful implementation), quality ingredients (content), and creative approach (smarts).
One of my favorite takeaways from this talk dealt with how successful UX teams tend to view process. To Spool, a process is just a series of steps, any steps used to accomplish a task. It differs from a methodology in that you might never use the same process twice. Methodology, on the other hand, requires refinement and repetition. Successful teams hone the tricks and techniques they employ during a process—they don’t concentrate on constantly re-working their methodology (the possible outcome of which, Spool warns, is a dangerously myopic dogma). Focusing on technique allows a team to improvise when necessary.
When You Stare into the Webcam, the Webcam Stares Back at You For the plenary session, Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University, presented a surprisingly moving look at anthropology through the lens of modern digital culture. He made the point that as information architects, designers and developers, we’re “architects of human relations.” We shape the ways in which people interact. Adding the ability to vote down a particularly vitriolic comment on YouTube, for example, civilizes the overall conversation. Designing and developing communication tools that are intuitive and fun to use encourages people to connect with strangers as well as friends.
As architects we enable what Leisa Reichelt calls “ambient intimacy.” Ambient intimacy is the YouTube vlogger who addresses highly personal secrets to everyone and no one in particular. It’s also us as the unseen but acknowledged crowd that acts as a receptor for that kind of information. Videos on this can be seen at Wesch’s KSU page, or visit his working group site Mediated Cultures for more information.
Finally, a Way to Get Lost in the Virtual Stacks The surprise hit for me came at the end of the conference. Bess Sadler, a Research and Development Librarian at the University of Virginia, did a walk-through of Blacklight, a project created by the University of Virginia Library that has grown into a thriving open source community.
Blacklight attempts, amongst many other things, to “replicate the serendipity of browsing library stacks.” UVA’s newly indexed music catalog demonstrates this well. Prior to the Blacklight implementation, a search through the music library required specific terms like a composer’s name or the exact title of a song in order to return useful results. Now, users can search using broad terms like a work’s era, genre, country of origin or language to get an overview of related works. Additionally, non-traditional assets like coins and works of art can now be cataloged. Play around with the catalog University of Virgina Library.
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