End of Adaptive Path UXWeek
Today concludes Adaptive Path’s UXWeek conference in Washington DC. Overall, it’s been an interesting experience for me personally, especially connecting with full time UX practitioners and designers to work out how the design world and software architecture/engineering world could work better together. The sessions themselves have been very polar – I found the good ones *really* good, and the bad ones, well you know…
The top sessions yesterday included a keynote from Jan Chipchase at Nokia, who had a phenomenal talk about his research work around the world. Jan is best described as a professional ethnographer, traveling the world (I believe it was 15 countries last year) to observe and research how different cultures use, and can potentially use, Nokia’s products. An enlightening and super visual talk.
For today, the best session for me was a talk by Bill DeRouchey, a senior interaction designer at Ziba in Portland. Bill’s talk was based on his popular blog, http://www.historyofthebutton.com and focused on… well, the history of the button in interaction design. The talk got everyone in the audience asking questions about devices that they use everyday. For example, I returned to my hotel room after the session and my “Message Waiting” button was blinking.
The question is – how do I receive the messages? Where is the “Messages” button on the phone? After a few seconds I found it, but it’s not intuitive (the button is 4 below the light in case you’re still looking). Why isn’t it next to the light? Why can’t the light be a combination light/button? Why does the label on the button say “Voice Mail/Messages” yet the light says “Message Waiting” – shouldn’t that be “Voice Mail / Message Waiting” to conform? Anyway – go subscribe to Bill’s blog and like me, you too can become addicted.
The final session of the conference was an outing to the National Building Museum. I’m a strong believer that many lessons learned in building/construction architecture can be mapped to software architecture, so the trip was perfect for exploring more of these ideas. The museum itself is located in what used to be the Pension Administration offices, used by the Federal Government. Learning more about the building and it’s history I found an inscription outside, to commemorate the opening of the building:
You may not be able to see it in the picture, but the last words include 994600.80 DOLS - that’s right, the architect of the building actually displayed the final cost of the building to taxpayers on the outside of the building. This got me thinking - wouldn’t it be fascinating to see the same in the software world. For example, open your favorite application or website and see “This application cost $xxx and yyy man hours to build”. I think this type of public disclosure could result in some very interesting conversations!
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