Am going to try real hard to make it to the Renegade Craft Fair with my son this weekend.

This is the talk I'm hoping to give at DrupalCon in the UX and Design track. Looks like there are lots of very exciting talks already planned for theming and visual design, so I'm excited to focus my discussion around the topic of User Experience. It's great for me, actually, since it's the stuff I do best and I believe there is a lot that might be gleaned from a discussion between both designers and developers alike on both the site building and Drupal development sides of the spectrum.

Looks like it'll be a great conference. I look forward to meeting my tribe--the many people I've been acquainted with for years, but have never met, who've put their sweat into this tool which I love as equally as I do OmniGraffle and Photoshop. See you in Bean Town.

SESSION OVERVIEW

We all want our customers to be satisfied with our products and for them to sustain their use of them. But have you ever wondered if the design of your product is on the right path towards getting that satisified user? The process of crafting successful user experiences that help achieve these goals isn't rocket science, and need not be painful or difficult. What it does require, however, is: 1) empathy for users, 2) the ability focus design discussions around specific problems and the details that matter in those contexts, 3) the willingness to be open to solutions that are unconventional and which may come from anywhere, and 4) the willingness to edit and remove when necessary.

What we can do to ensure we're on the path to usability and satisfaction is to really take a look at how we might support our design efforts by devoting a wee bit of thought on user centered design process and practices. It's simple stuff and anyone can do it.

TRACK

Design and User Experience

AGENDA

This talk will focus on the following:

1) Respect them or they're out the door: How to bring the user into the design process
2) Make 'em beg for more: How to research, craft, and communicate (sell) ideas that are appropriate to the problem
3) Prove your love: How and when to test and iterate designs
4) Staying for breakfast: How to keep user satisfaction in mind after the product's out the door

You'll forgive the cheekiness, Valentine's Day is around the corner. :)

GOALS

You should come away with a sense of how user centered design principles can fit into your product development life cycle, and a plan for developing a strategy for keeping it there.

I'm considering posting a proposal to give a talk at DrupalCon Boston. The UX track looks interesting to me. I've been using Drupal and have been an evangelist of blogs for business for some time now, having done over a dozen projects using Drupal, WordPress, and Movable Type over the years. Each project was not readily recognizable as a site typical of each platform.

What I was thinking might be interesting to do is to talk through my process for creating these sites, using a specific site I'm working on as a case study, and focusing on user experience and design.

The outline below is what I was thinking of presenting. What do you think? Sound like a good session? I'm still kicking the idea around.

Drupal 4 Designers: Giving clients exactly what they want

Visual designers, now is the time to give up your fear of Drupal and use this powerful platform to express your designs exactly the way you want. This talk will begin to show you how. If you've never used Drupal before, you'll be convinced afterward that this is the platform for you.

The evolution of the platform has improved the implementation experience for designers and front-end site developers with each release. After doing your technology assessment, if Drupal is what comes out on top, and very often it will, you can feel assured that you've got a powerful engine under the hood. Now it's your job to connect that power to a usable experience. I'll show you that a high level of understanding of what Drupal will do for you and a methodology for researching how to implement specific user interface needs (i.e. finding recipes) will get you very far.

What we'll cover

• Plan the user experience
  • Information architecture and UI requirements
  • Sketching and schematics (wireframes)
  • Making it simple and usable
  • Scoping out features and matching up with Drupal modules
• Design with CMS agnosticism
  • Introduction to Blueprint CSS framework
  • Comping with the Blueprint Grid
  • Slicing and splicing graphics
• Theme with abandon
  • Embracing PHP Template
  • Leveraging CCK, Views, and Taxonomy
  • Using recipes
  • Busting up blocks and putting things where you want
  • JQuery for that sophisticated feel when you need it
  • CSS tips to keep it tight

Imogen Heap will be playing at Webster Hall in NYC on 11/12. Tickets are on sale now. I've got 2 to go.

I gave a talk at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the use of weblogs for communication and information management. The talk incorporated components of several of the past presentations I've given on this topic. I covered these points:

1) why weblogs are emerging as a viable replacement for Knowledge Management software and as a supplement to an enterprise intranet portal

2) why weblogs are a good idea right now

3) what weblogs are being used for and how

4) strategy for dealing with weblog growth

5) ideas for sustaining use and measuring success.

A large part of my talk is focussed on case studies at Lucent, describing how we've used weblogs for communications, information sharing and knowledge management.

The LANL information ecology is similar in some ways to the Bell Labs ecology of years past. The CIO works at a high level on planning and funding and a decentralized system of IT organizations exists at LANL. It was great to see that the CIO works harmoniously with the diverse web-based systems that are developed and maintained by the individual organizations around LANL. This is exactly the environment that is perfectly suited to the emergence of weblogs. In my talk, I discuss at length the benefits of diverse "information ecologies" -- a concept taken from Bonnie Nardi and Vicki O'Day's literature on the topic -- and how weblogs created out of bottom-up publishing efforts fit into this picture and provide a sensible, low-cost, high-value alternative to web publishing processes mandated from the top down. The concept of diversity as a key component to ecological health is validated in what has evolved at LANL.

A few people I spoke with at LANL stated that they are already considering using weblogs and wikis for some internal information management. Everyone in attendence of the conference was already aware of what weblogs are. The controversial public blog, "LANL: The Real Story" was more than likely the site that introduced many LANL staff to blogging.

While my talk emphasized the importance of weblogs as a publishing format, I also touched on some of the issues of giving messaging power to the masses because of its relevance to LANL. I pointed to the recent resignations of Jordan Eason at CNN and the demotion of Dan Rather at CBS following some mob-blogging related to statements made by each of these well-known public figures. The "LANL: The Real Story" blog was created to provide a public, uncensored forum for LANL staff to air their concerns and express their views about how the Labs were being run under director George P. Nanos. Nanos closed the Labs because of security concerns when classified tapes went missing. The report of missing tapes turned out to be a clerical error, but the shut downs cost the country an estimated $850 million. Last week, on May 6th, Director Nanos resigned. The story is covered in the New York Times.

These stories about the movement of messaging power away from centralized control to the masses is fascinating, controversial, and a bit unsettling. At some level, it is phenomenal that a technology can be disruptive enough to create a major shift in the control of power within a social system. Essentially, in the cases of Rather, Eason and Nanos, what we're viewing is the democratization of social systems and organizations, although some people would probably call the open criticism that's been appearing on blogs mob-rule. Blogging is surfacing controversial issues to stakeholders that probably would have been hidden in the past -- swept under the rug. In today's weblogging world, the statements and actions of important public figures can be challenged rather than accepted. In the cases mentioned above, when the statements or actions could not be successfully defended, the public image of the organization was affected to the extent that the organizations feared reprisal in the form of pulled financial backing.

I should mention that while I don't believe this power-shift to be a bad thing, there is, of course, potential for mobs to utilize blogs in malicious ways. The first step in dealing with controversial blogs should therefore be more communication, not less. In the case of Jordan Eason, whom I believe should not have resigned, CNN should have reacted immediately, blogging the issue on their own and allowing conversation to happen between CNN and the public. The lesson in all this is that we live in a world where people believe in democratic rule and in ideas around open communication (like those espoused in John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty"). The right reaction to these types of disruption is to react to it in kind with open debate and conversation. What these individuals and organizations could have done is used weblogging for their counter-message and as a platform for defending statements and actions rather than simply evading the issue. Has the lesson been learned by the media? We'll see the next time this happens.

But to return to the topic of my talk, which is not nearly as provocative as the talk of the Nanos resignation, there is clearly a lot of awareness of the power or blogs, not only as vehicles for unovering hidden issues, but also as a tool for information and project management. There are reports of blogs being used at LANL already, and many of the web developers in the audience had specific questions about how to select from the various technologies offered in the blog publishing space right now. Some individuals were interested in how we at Lucent are approaching the need to publish blogs. I communicated that my organization's role has mainly been to react to the needs expressed around blogging by providing consulting and developing strategies for dealing with weblog growth. I empasized that I believed in the decentralized approach to weblog implementation because such an approach allows content owners to retain control and decision making power related to their needs and the technologies they choose to fill them. That said, I also believe that a centralized solution may also be successful if well-conceived and flexible enough to allow content owners to control their data and the use of the blog.

I provided some ideas for dealing with weblog growth in the near and long term including the RSSification of enterprise databases and the creation of weblog RSS aggregation and archiving services. I also touched on the idea of integrating some of this output with other enterprise information systems and using applications that allow social behaviors. These ideas were outlined in the presentation I gave at Computers in Libraries, 2004.

The conference provided a good opportunity for me to connect with web developers in a community similar to ours at Bell Labs in the hopes of continuing to discuss how we use weblogs to meet key business needs in our respective organizations. As LANL staff move forward with their projects, we hope to share our experiences. Hopefully the outcome of our dialogue will result in best practices over time.

I'm speaking at the IQPC Corporate Weblog and Wiki Summit, which is being held February 1 - 2, 2005 at The Miami Intercontinental Hotel, Miami, FL. The presentation will be talking a bit about utilizing weblogs for project efficiency and will cover projects I've worked on in the past year. The case studies will discuss briefly the process for designing and implementing weblogs for communication and document dissemination within a well defined community.

I don't plan on reiterating too much of what I presented on last year at the CiL conference. What I hope to do this time is to start out by touching on the "whats" and "whys" for using weblogs for grassroots publishing and then show through case studies why weblog software was chosen as the platform for 2 of the projects I discuss and briefly go over how they were implemented. In closing I hope to touch on some of the issues that may be encountered when embarking on these types of projects and begin to develop some best practices for bringing weblog projects from the evangelization and discovery phase to implementation.

If we're acquainted and you're interested in attending the conference, please contact me to let me know. .