Consulting, Publishing, Engineering

Category Archives: Usability

Big D 2015

I’ve often said this event is the best value in our industry, and this year was no exception. And apparently it’s no secret anymore either – there were over 1,000 attendees.

From a personal point of view, I was delighted to give my updated talk “Digging Deep: Leadership Lessons from Eleanor Roosevelt“.  I think it went over really well, even though I forgot to bring the props I had (a giant copy of the Declaration of Human Rights and some postage stamps).  I am also really grateful to Adam Polansky who spent an hour reviewing the talk with me – and to the BigD team for setting up this kind of mentor session opportunity.  I really hope I get to continue with this topic and this talk next year!

Of course, as always, the entire program was a powerhouse of great topics and great speakers. We started the event with Ann Rockley talking about… wait for it… Intelligent Content!  She’s always engaging and entertaining. There was a terrific talk from Brian Sullivan – this year he presented Dante’s 7 deadly sins as a framework for leadership advice in his talk “Leadership Lessons from Design Hell“.  And Karen Bachmann talked about listening skills and awareness – something we can ALL work on.

But the big news from this event was international – they’re going to start up Big Design Latin America!  The first conference should be sometime in 2016 in Quito, Ecuador.  Keep an eye on the Big Design Latin America site for details.

Tech Comm, Usability, Publishing, and More – all at South by Southwest

I truly believe that we in the Tech Comm field have spent way too much time and effort talking to ourselves. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE the STC Annual Summit, where the point is to network with other tech comm professionals. But if we want to grow as a profession, if we want… Continue Reading

SouthBySouthwest PanelPicker is open!

I had a great time at South by Southwest last spring, and I’m very excited about attending again next March. This year, I even submitted a proposal called “All About Audience: Improving User Experience”. The event organizers have posted my submission (along with over 2,000 other proposals) to the Panel Picker at http://panelpicker.sxsw.com. The idea… Continue Reading

Arizona UPA Meeting – Thursday, June 18, 2009

This week, the Usability Professionals Association is having their annual conference up in Portland, OR. This year’s theme is “Bringing Usability to Life.” It looks like there’ll be lots of great sessions and terrific networking opportunities, and I’m disappointed that I can’t make it. They’re expecting something like 600 people! Luckily for Arizona UPA folks,… Continue Reading

Usability Professionals in Arizona

Here’s the announcement about the First-Ever Arizona UPA Meeting – Thursday, April 30, 2009. Not sure if I’ll make it up there – a 2-hour commute each way on a weeknight is a lot (unless I can convince some other Tucson UX people to rideshare!) Please join us for the first-ever Arizona Usability Professionals Association… Continue Reading

World Usability Day 2009 in review

I drove up to Phoenix for the 4th Annual World Usability Day event last week. Normally, we hold an event here in Tucson, but our generous facility sponsor had a client-conflict and couldn’t host this year. Luckily, Dr. Theo Mandel is in town and stepped up to help! He put together a team of volunteers,… Continue Reading

World Usability Day – a big success!

We held our World Usability Day event here in Tucson during hours 27-29 of the world-wide event. It was great! It was at the IBM facility, and we ran concurrent activities for the afternoon. They included: creating personas paper prototyping activity of stove-top design out-of-box design activity (including writing wordless instructions) using Legos screen reader… Continue Reading