Welcome

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.