UI13

I’m getting excited for UI13 next week! Jared Spool’s reminder email this week prepped me with a nice timeline of events that are now nicely displayed on my trusty (at times) calendar. The seminars I selected for Monday and Wednesday are:

Visual Design for the Web: Communicating with Customers presented by Luke Wroblewski

and

Bringing User-Centered Design Practices Into Agile Development Projects presented by Jeff Patton

Jeff’s seminar is of particular interest to me in that at work, I’m seeing more and more how an agile development process would suit many projects I work on. In addition to pushing how usability services could fit into the project lifecycle, I’d like to push for a new way of thinking and a new way of creating a software product. No matter how many companies are progressive with their programming techniques and iterative cycles, there are at least twice as many still stuck with the waterfall method. Easy to plan, perhaps. Easy on the users, probably not.

After a bit of an embarrassing moment being what I’d like to believe is a typical user of an election ballot, I realized how much passion I have for government design. With a little education from Dana Chisnell, I am getting up to speed on some UPA research and what influences the design of a ballot form. Hurray for laws dictating instructions. That’s a joke. Laugh. So next week I am hoping to get a chance to meet others with this interest and have a conversation with Dana to see how I can become more involved with the ballot usability project.

So next week, I hope to see you at UI13 in Cambridge, Mass. I arrive Saturday to hang out with my family for the weekend, but I’ll be in the city Sunday night, anxious to learn, learn, and learn some more.

Follow me on Twitter. Perhaps I’ll have a contest with Ms. Hess on who can conference tweet the most.