I noticed that I completely missed to show you where the conference is located - it is a big hotel in the dowtown. Although I live nearby, I would like to share the great interior of the hotel lobby.
The first item that day was the panel "Managing User Experience ... Managing Change" - insanely good when looking at corporate environments. Managers from Google, Cisco, Microsoft and Plaxo.com (...) talked about their experience bring User Experience into the company. The funny thing was, that these people had also worked for Yahoo! or Oracle - so the attendees could greatly benefit from their experience.
As I said yesterday, I tried to attend "Involving Reflective Users in Design" by Paula Bach. I didn't knew that she made a study of the posts on our mailing lists, more precisely how our UX team members (she called them reflective users) describe problems and potential solutions for OpenOffice.org. The thread she cited was the one about "showing or hiding rulers per default in Writer" (sorry, no link). I'll ask her to provide the text (the "real" paper can't be shared, it is copyrighted by the conference organization).
The absolute "wow" came with the hospitality event in the evening. It took place at the Georgia Aquarium: Sharks, Whales, Small Fishes ... similar to the participants in an open-source project (just kidding).
IBM Research provided sweets and coffee - and announced that with a sign. But when the perspective is changed slightly ... see for yourself :-)
As I said, the real "wow" came with the aquariums - here just two examples. You could walk trough a tunnel and look the fishes from below!
Another great thing was the widescreen aquarium with a huge glass front. Unfortunately the time was up already, so we had to go. Chatting with others and watching the fishes are two things which compete too much.
In the late evening I wanted to talk a bit with Paula, but I didn't see her in the masses. Instead, I've met Roshanak Zilouchian and her supervisor - great! Roshanak is an open-source community researcher and we talked about how we develop and how we interact with the corresponding tools (wiki, issue tracker, ...). Maybe you remember - there have been some mails by her on our mailing lists.
However, I was happy to join them and we went to a revolving restaurant with a great view ... enjoy!
As you might guess - I have to hurry up. The last day of the conference is today ... and I don't want to miss that.
Christoph
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