CHI 2010, Day Four

Finally, the last day of the conference CHI ... so what happened?

Conference Stuff

I attended the course "Developing an Effective Prototyping Strategy". As far as I understood, the term "prototyping" comprised everything from idea creation phase until the start of the implementation phase. Personally, I tend to think a bit different about that ... I prefer to distinguish between idea generation, requirements engineering, design proposals. The latter one may be prototyped via paper, computer graphics, ... whatever is available :-) And this is already an important information - use whatever is appropriate for a certain problem.

One of the trainers published the book "Effective Prototyping with Excel". I am not kidding; he presented astonishing results of famous web pages and their Microsoft Excel counterparts. However, they affirmed that they had been using Calc for that purpose, too.

Two nice things popped up in the course: First, they use fidelity matrixes and and mockup expiration dates. I think I'll cover that later until figuring out how to make use of them.

After that, I went to a few presentations and joined a discussion group ... day job related. Finally, the conference ended with the Closing Plenary and "Doing what’s right with robots: an ethical appraisal of robot application". Very interesting.

Open Source User Experience

Later, I had the chance to talk with Paula Bach (Pennsylvania State University, Microsoft; I mentioned her in the previous blog posts) and Alex Faarborg (Principal Designer on Firefox). We went out for dinner and I introduced them the project and our UX team a bit.

Alex asked some very good questions about our goals and the overall strategy ... but since we (whole OpenOffice.org Community) haven't commonly agreed on anything, it became (again!) clear that there are still major issues within the project. At least when it comes - he also asked questions about that - the kind engagement of our volunteering community members. However, we will stay in contact since they (and others) are interested in a general open-source usability / user experience / human-computer interaction / ... activity. Cool!

Sorry for the picture of us three. I mean, not for the picture itself, but for the low quality ... there is always a risk when asking strangers to help out ;-)

So, to sum up the nice guys I've met in the last few days:

• Máirín Duffy (interaction designer, RedHat)
• Paula Bach (open source researcher, also working for Microsoft)
• Roshanak Zilouchian (open source researcher)
• Alex Faaborg (principal designer, Firefox)

Cheerio

Today I will depart - unless the recent activities of the vulcano Eyjafjallajökull will again cause delays or cancellations in the European air traffic. But even if everything wents fine, please don't expect further messages to soon ... I'll cure a bad jet lag ;-)

Bye,
Christoph

PS: By the way, the next conference is the LinuxTag in Berlin. My proposal "Project Renaissance in the year 2010" has been accepted. Great, isn't it?

Merry Open Source!

Now that the busy holiday season is over, I thought I might share what I just discovered: Open Source is like Christmas to me.

In my family, we always get presents from many friends and relatives and some from Santa Claus, too. We write thank you notes to all the people who send us presents, except Santa. In my husband's family, the children think that all the presents they get come from Santa, so there is a lot of exchanging of packages secretly as the relatives and friends give each other the presents that will be discovered under the tree. Nobody in his family writes thank you notes, because every present comes from Santa, who you of course do not know personally. He is a just a magical mystery who only comes by once a year, otherwise living incongnito. This difference in tradition was especially important this year because we had to figure out how Christmas presents would be “defined” for our son.

I like knowing who gave me what and being able to say thanks directly to the person responsible. If I don't like a present, I can ask the person to exchange it or return it. I also want to give presents to people and see their happiness and feel their appreciation.

For me, Christmas is about the joy of giving and receiving! That sounds a lot like working on an open source project, doesn't it? We know who contributed what and can say thanks for that contribution or ask them to change it. In addition, we have fun contributing and are pleased when our "presents" are appreciated.

How did we end up doing Christmas presents for our son? Open source style, of course!