Welcome

Last week I entered the aSister project into the Google 10^100 project. I really enjoyed working on this project and saw how it could make a difference in the lives of some people.

I created a website to add more information about the project http://www.asister.org. I have posted the video I submitted for the project. I am hoping to be able to build out the website some more in the next few weeks.

Today I accepted a position with Manhattan Associated in Atlanta, GA for a User Interface Designer position. It should be an interesting job in that I'll be part of a new department that currently has two people the supervisor and one other person. We are working on revising the whole Manhattan line of supply chain management products to make them more user friendly. It is going to be a challenge but I am not one to shy away from that.

I leave Bloomington for the last time next week. It will be sad to leave behind the place I have called home for the last two years. I have met many wonderful people and learned so much since walking in the door the first day of orientation.

I am sure I'll be back since I am not that far away. The funny thing is that I am almost half way between the two universities I attended. Gainesville is about 5 hours away and Bloomington 8 hours.

I turned in my capstone paper on Friday. I haven't had a chance to put a write up on it in my portfolio yet but I have uploaded the paper.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/portfolio/papers/capstone.pdf

I really enjoyed working on this project and hope that some of the ideas and recommendations that came out of this project will be implemented in the department.

I hope to post a summary on my portfolio soon but I am currently in the process of finishing interviewing and packing to leave Bloomington next week.

What a month it has been. Between graduation, my job search and working on my capstone presentation I haven't had much time to blog.

I presented my capstone on Friday and it was very well received by faculty and the international students. It looks like someone might be carrying on my research after I leave. I hope to post a video of the presentation before the week is over. I'll have more about that in my capstone blog. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/blog/index.php/capstone

I have updated the design of my portfolio and posted a few new pieces. I now have a final version of the Design Research Society paper that I worked on with Prof. Erik Stolterman, David Royer and Selvan Thandapani. http://www.jamiemcatee.com/port.php?ID=19

I have also added two short papers the first is a design critique of vacuum cleaners and a user evaluation of two potential article designs for a newspaper website.

After I got back from CHI and a small vacation I walked right into the end of the semester and graduation so finding time to post has been difficult until now.

I thought the student design competition poster session went well but unfortunately our team did not make it to the final round. It was really sad because we put so much work into this project. I did get a lot of comments from people after the one minute presentation of our project at the final round saying they thought our project belonged in the finals.

We submitted our project as a note to UbiComp 2008. I won't know anything about the status of our paper until June.

I spent a lot of time working as an Student Volunteer so I didn't get to see many of the things I wanted to see. I have the papers on a DVD from the conference so I'll go through and read those later.

Right now my current concentrations are on finishing up my capstone, presenting on May 22nd and job hunting. For more on my capstone status please see my capstone blog, http://www.jamiemcatee.com/blog/index.php/capstone.

I am excited to be leaving for CHI on Thursday but I have a lot of preparation to do before then. My team is pretty much ready to go. We have our poster printed and we are working on some additional items. We are also submitting our project to the Ubiquitous Computing conference in Korea this year. That paper is due Friday but we finished up the first draft that is 90% where we want it to be.

I have to get a large amount of writing done for a class project and paper that I am working on with some friends. The deadline is before I get back from Italy so I want to make sure I have contributed as much as I can to this project.

It has been a rough last couple of weeks with a bunch of user testing and setting up for a user test going on but things are starting to settle a little now. I feel better about being able to get enough done that I won't feel like I had to work at CHI. I did this last year and it was really difficult.

I am looking forward to meeting the other teams in the Student Design Competition. It should be exciting.

It was really interesting to find out that one of the possible job titles I could have is one Fast Company considers to be a job that people don't realize they want.

I especially liked this part of the article. "Although many interaction designers have advanced degrees in design, such a background isn't a prerequisite, says David Fore, head of consulting services at Cooper, a pioneering interaction design firm. Fore previously worked as a reporter for industry publications -- valuable experience, given that interaction designers' research requires "the skills of a reporter and an anthropologist," according to him."

I have the skills of a reporter because of my background in the field and I have learned a number of things about studying people in my two years as a master's student.

Here is a link to the page with the interaction designer description, http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C2.

The full article
http://www.fastcompany.com/articles/2008/01/ten-jobs.html?page=0%2C0

The abstract for a paper I am working on with Professor Erik Stolterman, classmates David Royer and Selvan Thandapani was accepted to the Design Research Society 2008 conference. The paper is titled Designerly Tools and Theoretical Approaches. In this paper we are looking at the tools that designers use for design. In our case tools are defined as anything from theories to software. We are excited about this and are working on finishing up the paper by the April 1 deadline.

One of my friends is looking into the way people use personas in design. We had a open discussion the other night about our capstones and she asked each of us to talk about how we use personas in design.

After a bit of thinking I have found that I have adapted this concept in a way that I find useful. For my capstone I have an idea of a few people I feel could benefit from what I am designing but I haven't written the details down about this person.

Also thinking about the CHI project we had a persona at one point in time but she didn't really end up being an exact target of our design. In this case we were designing for a group not one person.

Personas are a good way to introduce user centered design. I am not sure if people who have embraced the idea of user centered design and understand who they are designing for need to stick so closely to the persona tool. Does anybody else have thoughts on this?

Since we have wrapped up the intense part of Bloomington Startup Weekend I wanted to do a little wrap up myself. I didn't get much time to blog since I spent most of it running around trying to keep things moving.

I started out with user experience but since we were one of the largest groups there I opted to step back a bit and try to help fill in gaps. I helped find people work when the needed it, work with our tech guy from the city to getting a TV to watch the IU vs Ohio State game today. I helped coordinate and interview a few users thanks to the help of tall Steve and Kevin Makice. I also took care of things that needed to be done. Every group needs someone to do these things. I did come back to UX when I had time to give feedback and see what was going on.

I think we have an interesting idea that I can't talk to much about we are still working out the legal issues. I have volunteered to help with moving forward but didn't choose to become part of the core team since I know I will be leaving Bloomington in May. I don't know where I am going yet but I know I will be relocating somewhere.

We were joking about how the core team is Informatics and tall Steve. As we move to a smaller group and more time I think I will be able to move back into a user experience position. Sometimes you just need to be flexible and fill gaps when you can.

I met a lot of interesting people from the community including a few council members and people from a bunch of local businesses. I also got to talk to the founder of the whole start up weekend concept from Boulder, CO.

All in all it was an interesting experience. Whether it will turn into a real company is up to legal and man power factors. We have set a meeting for a few weeks out to regroup and discuss what is going on.

Right now the challenge for some people is finding something to do. Some of the groups are so large that it is impossible to keep everyone on the same task. I have moved over to sort of a HR/UX role since I had left to do user research and fell out of the loop. This is a very easy thing to do if you are gone for more than a few minutes since things move so quickly.

Right now we have a concept, logo and now we are working on site maps, design and development.

Design and User Experience are working together pretty well.

Last night the user experience team decided to concentrate on the small promoter. We came up with a scenario of Dave wanting to promote his band Captain Underpants and the Seafish. We are trying to make this different from other similar applications since we are concentrating on the promoter and not the person looking for events. We will probably be looking at interfaces for people who want to go to events later.

Our concept is event a central events database that will feed other sites and the primary place for finding events in Bloomington. The user experience team has retreated to the Informatics building to discuss the design of the pages and figure out details. We are somewhat unsure of the exact details since business development is not really sure of how everything should go.

I think we are going to hack on this for a few hours and the regroup tomorrow morning.

The process has been a little frustrating since we have had to move so fast but it will be interesting to see what comes out of it all.

This weekend I am trying out the Bloomington startup weekend. We are going to try and develop a company in one weekend. I am signed up as part of the user experience team and I might drift over to design a bit depending on what we end up doing. It should be an interesting weekend. I am looking forward to the presentations of the concepts tonight. I have seen a few interesting concepts on the ning group.

I'll try blog about it more as the weekend goes on.

Indiana University is really putting together a strong showing at CHI in Florence. Tonight we learned of the acceptances of papers by the following IU authors.

alt.chi
Shaowen Bardzell and Jeff Bardzell
Tyler Pace

Research Landscapes
Shaowen Bardzell, Tyler Pace and Jeff Bardzell

Work in Progress
Richie Hazelwood, Kevin Makice, Kay Connelly and Youn-Kyung Lim
Shaowen Bardzell and Shruti Bhandari
Shruti Bhandari and Youn-Kyung Lim

Research Competition
Will Odom
Kayce Reed

This in addition to the design competition finalists and the full paper acceptances below.

Kristin Hanks, Dave Roedl, Will Odom and Eli Blevis
Erik Stolterman and Markus Jakobson

Go IU!

My team is one of the 12 semifinalists in the CHI student design competition. We are one of 4 make that 5 teams from Indiana University.

I am excited to present in Italy in April along with my aSister teammates Kshitij Gupta, Adwait Joshi and Nigel Vaz.

I also congratulate our other Indiana University teams:

Rajasee Rege, Jenny Allen, Eric Drewski
James Pierce, Ashley Engelhardt, Jungyoun Yim
Susan Coleman Morris, Augusto Alves
Hillary Elmore, Eugene Chang, Junyoup Kim, Xi Zhu

When I left the journalism industry two years ago not many people were thinking about the usability of their websites. Within the past few weeks I have seen a few things that make me believe that maybe they are starting to come around.

With the spike in online newspaper readership last year, thinking about the user seems to have started to become a priority.

A few weeks ago the Atlanta Journal Constitution posted a job to the CHI jobs list seeking Usability Engineer/Analyst. I also found it interesting that they posted to the CHI jobs listserv and not the typical places you would post journalism jobs. The CHI jobs listserv is one of the locations for people who are interested in the area of user centered design and usability to look for jobs.

I have seen some papers that have done some usability testing on their own without a position like this. A recent online journalism review article talked about a small paper in Alabama that conducted usability testing on their website. This article reminded me of some of the papers I read from the mid to late 90 that discuss usability testing like this on software and other websites outside of the journalism industry.

This is a very positive step for the industry as a whole. Hopefully usability testing will lead to user centered design techniques throughout the industry.

Today I launched a capstone blog to keep track of where my research is currently. I'll be importing a few posts regarding capstone into that blog.

http://www.jamiemcatee.com/capstone

I have also posted my research competition paper there.

I will still post major capstone updates here but all updates will be found on the capstone blog.

Tonight I posted aSister the CHI 2008 student design competition submission that my team submitted today. This year's topic deals with homelessness.

Earlier this week I posted a final project from the end of last semester, Experience the Buskirk Chumley Theatre. It took me a little while to gather all of the pieces of this submission to put online.

In the next few days I hope to post my research competition entry which deals with my capstone project.

Please visit my portfolio to view these new items.

My team is working our CHI student design competition submission. Once it has been submitted I will post the paper and summary in the portfolio section. I think we have an interesting take on the competition and hope we will be selected.

I am in an analysis/planning of my next steps area of my capstone research. Over break I looked through the results of my international student survey. I found some interesting results and I have an idea for a paper. I have a bit of it written but I am not sure if I will make the CHI deadline with this one due to the concentration on the design competition.

Selvan Thandapani, another HCI student, and I are working on a research paper with Professor Erik Stolterman. The paper looks at tools and models practitioners use. We are waiting to hear back as to whether the abstract has been selected for a conference this summer.

Many of you have probably noticed a slight site revision. For blog readers it is a pretty major change for those of you looking at my portfolio site it is a header change and some content tweaks.

I decided to put my blog as my homepage since it was easier to post updates about my current research and other topics I find important.

I believe I have all of the bugs worked out but if you spot anything please send me a note.