Lightning Talks Berkeley 2010
From InfoCamp
Contents |
User Experience (by Rachel Elkington)
A Venn diagram of:
- Technical Communication
- User Experience
- information architecture
- User Research
TC: How to get user to understand what you’re trying to tell them, design technology and make it user friendly. UX: comes out of library science (ischool mvmt), includes information architecture (IA), organizing info so people can get what they want, make information meaningful, naviga, naming, classifying…how does user encounter your info. What need, want, looking for, help navigate. Library = brick/mortar example, but put same concepts in software design, etc. UR: methods and inquiries used to solicit (ex. paper prototyping method), usability testing, prototypes, surveys, heritage from social sciences.
UX is generally still evolving; above 3 areas have separate but overlapping deliverables. (ex. content mgmt) Deliverables might be different flavors with diff approaches, but similar goals.
Wikimedia (by Phoebe)
Wikipedia projects - 100,000 committee volunteers around the world.
- How do you turn 365 million users that 1,000 people are active.
How To's
- You can change your wikipedia skin to the new skin "vector". How to make editing more intuitive. Make editing toolbars more apparent.
- Behind logo, there is a feedback to beta.
Feedback / Content
- Free culture, Creative commons, and made a scavenger hunt. Which has become Wikipedia Loves Art
- category: Bundescarchiv - donated historic photos
Issues
- Schema for libraries and museums to work together.
- How can you make the articles more accurate? ie: Wikireader
General facts and figures (#5 most visited website) What’s behind the scenes, what makes it work? Run by donations, dedicated volunteers Wikimedia Foundation:
Current projects:
- Usability **needs feedback from YOU
- Preferences page
- Make editing more intuitive
- Outreach
- Working with other groups to get free content and resources (ex. Manhattan scavenger hunt)
- How to get people to build a giant educational resource that’s free (ex. Bundesarchiv gave info to Wikimedia)
- Open strategy project (community driven)
- Where to go next? (suggestions?)
- How to make more articles more accurate, reuse info, engage community
Electronic Literature/Art (by Liat Berdugo)
Electronic Literature - is work that has a digital birth, coding basis, a digital context and artifacts that cannot be done with print.
Why is it impt? (People think it’s the Amazon kindle….no.) Use the coolness of technology to think about literature in a different way.
Examples:
- Hypertext stories (Shelly Jackson) - reading in a non-linear way.
- Interactive fiction (Emily Short’s Galatea) - interact with the literature.
- Brown Univ’s Cave – immersive reading experience. Wear goggles, and your gaze makes words move…
- Flash piece - letters grow and flip. Electronic writing can turn linear things like reading, help us think about them differently
- CAN HAZ CHEESEBURGER language.
- Jello letters :P
- tweet - @missioncatcalls
Sources!
here are the URLs of projects I spoke of (you can also find my slides here, feel free to reuse!):
- kindle book cover: you are not a gadget
- shelley jackson's patchwork girl - not available on the web, but you can purchase it if you really want to see it!
- emily short's galatea - it's a game you need to download. or you can read about it here.
- brown university's cave, and my friend josh spechler's cave project wind X-tra
- brian kim stefans's the dreamlife of letters
- aya karpinska's for this we pray sms project
- my co-twitter blog with leora silverman fridman, mission catcalls
- lolcode, the code written in the style of LOLcats
- my jello project -- hasn't had it's web debut yet but i'll let you know when it does!
and here are some of my favorite other works that didn't make it into the presentation but are FANTASIC:
- liz filardi's Status Grabber
- anything by young-hae chang , especially SO SO SOULFUL
- ...and you can find many more on my delicious: http://delicious.com/whatliat/electronic
HTML 5 (by Ryan Greenberg)
Slides: http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryan/infocamp/not-your-grandfathers-html.pdf
Dark Ages > light (HTML) > XHTML (lots of hype, not much progress, and not much benefit if don’t use XML) > HTML 5
Why use HTML 5?
- Much simpler. Advantage when just need to get things done.
- Cool new tags (again simpler, and can add more semantic meaning). More accessible, and for people who are differently abled.
- No. doesn’t work on Internet explorer. (Add “HTML 5 Shiv” to make compatible. Or http://www.modernizr.com)
- navigator.geolocation (how googlemaps and firefox can tell you where you are)
- localstorage (can store mb of data for quick loading, great for rapid prototyping, also easy, don’t use cookies)
- canvas (can draw on pages, create drop shadows, other fun stuff. Replacement for flash pretty much. Free.)
- font (lots more font!!! And send it to user’s computer)
- learn more (http://diveintohtml5.org or http://www.whatwg.org)
XHTML
- XML
- namespaces
- lower case attributes
- ...let's just scrap it
HTML5 is simpler. You could actually memorize the doctype, it's so simple.
Lots of cool new tags: add semantic meaning without having to invest in divs with classes and IDs. More accessible for machines (Google) or screen-readers.
Does it work in Internet Explorer?
- Yes and no. In short, no.
- HTML 5 Shiv
- http://www.modernizr.com
Some things aren't technically part of HTML5, but they're cool so they're sort of lumped in with it:
- navigator.geolocation
- localStorage
- cached data
- rapid prototyping that fakes a server-side tool
- canvas
- draw on pages
- libraries that do charting for you
- a replacement for Flash in a lot of ways
- @font-face
- specify any font you want
Industry Advice
- You're serving the business, not the academia
- Business is paying you.
- Have sense of humor
- Be flexible
- Don’t get upset or take things personally
- Think of larger issue
- Where to pick your battles
- You’re doing really good work.
- You’re fighting the good fight.
- Capacity to communicate well and concisely.
Tips about change:
- Come to infocamp type of events.
You’re minted but a newbie. Don’t be surprised if the compensation/responsibilities commiserate to your experience.
Academia or experience? Guild-mentality before. Now want to see evidence of what did you do, how do you think, and what are your interests.
