Monday, June 18, 2007

School's in!

This week is full of educational efforts; I hope my brain keeps up. My highlights include the UX Intensive workshop, Day 2 of my IxD class, and the Chi-Netherlands conference.
  • Today is the first day of Adaptive Path's UX Intensive workshop and I will be attending the workshop on Design Strategy by Brandon Schauer.
  • Tomorrow I will be teaching the second day of my 3-day Interaction Design class (in Dutch) through Lectric. Day 2 is traditionally about Design so I will be looking for my black turtleneck shirt ;-) Oh, and in the evening I hope to learn how my fellow local UX practitioners are doing as we're having another Amsterdam UX Cocktail Hour, sponsored by Adaptive Path. This may also be a good way to hear what the attendees of the Design Research workshop have learned.
  • Wednesday is a normal workday; I will be working in Utrecht on structuring the Mortgage-section of a new financial website. I will find out from the design team members what questions people ask when they are in different phases of buying (and using) a mortgage.
  • Thursday is a good day to be in Eindhoven: Chi-Netherlands is organizing its annual conference, this year on HCI-Methods. I heard it is sold out. The tree parallel tracks in the program all look interesting so it will be hard to pick what session to attend. It will be hard to convince people to attend my workshop on deliverables...
  • Friday is a day to learn from co-workers: it is traditionally the day for our UX team meeting where we share our progress in projects. It is also the day for a second interview with a candidate for the 10th spot on our UX team.
I will be soo smart next week :-)

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Accepted for Euro IA!

Another speaking engagement to be added to the calendar: The Euro IA committee accepted my proposal for a presentation about Processes and Patterns (partly based on my two articles on this topic from last August).

Now, I can hear you thinking: "Aren't you part of the Euro IA organizing committee? How objective is that?". Well, yes, obviously I am, but I can say that the blind review process that we applied for the first round of selections assured that the reviews and scoring were as objective as possible. And even in the second and final round, where we had access to the names of presenters, we hardly spoke about people (except to confirm their experience in the field) and instead focussed on the topics and, to a certain extent, geographical distribution. As a committee, we tried to get together a diverse program in as many aspects as possible. Also remember that the committee is comprised of committed, experienced practitioners who, besides organizing conferences, also like to share their knowledge and ideas with fellow practitioners.

I already started planning the trip to Barcelona, and hope to bring a couple of colleagues. I also hope to see readers of this blog in person. Do you plan to attend Euro IA?