The Contract Gets SignedWhile my peers and I were executing and expanding our contract with Intelligroup, our upper management was exploring a possible company-wide contract with Accenture. Rumors circulated the office, and everyone was worried about their jobs. Would they remain on the company side of the contract, converted to Accenture on the other side of the contract, or receive an end date as no part of the contract at all? It was a time of little information, and lots of rumors and ... Read Full Story

Day 3 was the final day of the Usability In Practice 3 Day Camp. Today the presenters covered a wrap up of how to report your findings by reviewing our homework. Reviewing the bad Findings Report was just as informative as seeing the good report. They also covered paper prototyping, field studies, how to finance usability studies, the cost benefit analysis of your work, and successful usability programs.Paper prototyping is a low-fidelity, cheap and easy way to try lots of different ideas ... Read Full Story

Today started off reviewing our homework. We had to write an objective and 3 to 5 tasks to review the inmod web site. We spent the first half hour reviewing the tasks in small groups. I am always surprised when working in small groups how easy it is for people to take the group off track. The big topic for session 2 was about conducting the user test. You need to make sure that not only you are prepared, but everyone involved is prepared. The steps of a user test session are Introduction... Read Full Story

Sunday was the first day in a 3 day intensive boot camp on how to run User Tests called Usability In Practice. I have been trying to keep up with my activities in Washington, D.C. by posting on Twitter as well as here on my blog.Hoa Loranger kicked things off by covering the foundations of usability. She explained that you and your colleagues have a very different experience than your users, and makes it very difficult to predict their needs. This is the basis of user-centered design. She... Read Full Story

In preparation for the Usability Week conference, I checked into The Omni Shoreham Hotel the day before. To my pleasant surprise, Saturday was the same day as the Cherry Blossom Festival. It was a very windy day, it was late in the afternoon, and there were hundreds of thousands of people in town to enjoy the cherry blossoms. All of these factors did not lend themselves to a peaceful photo session down along the Tidal Basin. But, it was the last of the 4 day peak bloom period of the trees... Read Full Story

The PlanThe initial plan was to train the liaison within my department, as there was an immediate need for assistance. After, he would be cycle through the teams of my peers, to have him learn about each of their departments. The liaison was to learn about the environment, gather documentation, and set up an environment offshore for development. As demand increased, we would slowly grow a team offshore. My focus was to start them off slow, as content managers, support staff, and graphic d... Read Full Story

The World is FlatOutsourcing and offshoring is a mainstream business practice in today's economy. Companies reach to outsourcing and offshoring to find cost savings, find expertise outside of their core business, and provide a follow-the-sun workforce. Blended costs for outsourced companies is lower than a purely domestic team by leveraging lower resource costs in other countries like India, Brazil, and the Philippines. Things are no exception where I work.The StoryI have decided to do... Read Full Story

The TaskI have been asked to put together a working group to put together user interface standards. Initial discussions are that we will need to come up with different standards for different environments, like portal sites, websites, custom applications, mobile applications and off the shelf applications. So... I have done some research on the areas of user interface standards, usability, and user experience.Some DefinitionsWikipedia was a big help. Here is what I found there.User Interface... Read Full Story

I was the victim of a very annoying piece of malware I have been avoiding the corporate install of Internet Explorer for months now, and I have been using Firefox 2 and 3 instead. I am sure I was doing something I should not have been, because for the last two weeks these strange popups have been plaguing my Firefox browsers, and my machine has been running like there was taffy on my hard drive. I tried to remove the trojan with Spybot S&D, and that did not work. It did identify a Brow... Read Full Story

Well, another Christmas has come and gone, and we have all exchanged our gifts. Everyone in the family got new gadgets to alleviate their tech addiction.Nicholas got his long-overdue Xbox 360. We bought him the Elite version, with the wireless remote and the 120GB hard drive. Can't get a new console without a shiny new game too, right? So we got him one of his favorites... the new NHL 2K9. He also got lots of gift cards, so that he could go out and get a game of his choice. He picke... Read Full Story