We're taking Training at Viget in a new direction next week by bringing in UX big gun Thomas Vander Wal to present, "Social Design for the Enterprise." It will be a small, hands-on, very interactive workshop hosted at Viget's Falls Church office. If you're a UX type and you work in or with large(ish) organizations, you won't want to miss it. Or, if you're the head of IT at a large organization and you're looking to see how you can best bring in some of the latest social techniques, this is a perfect opportunity for you to jump right in.
The workshop will focus on teaching attendees how to design and execute social products within larger organizations. It's easy to copy the industry by simply adopting social tools, but that approach usually fails in a big organization setting. Frankly, the organization itself gets in the way. To achieve success, you need to understand the special circumstances of the Enterprise. This half-day workshop will provide models and frameworks to think through the challenges of social tools within this particular context. You will leave equipped to achieve success within your company or for your clients.
Check out the workshop's page here for a complete description and Thomas Vander Wal's bio. See you next week!
(Psst - use the "vigetfan" discount code for 10% off!)
Well, of course it has. It's been pretty well-documented that the web changed the presidential election, and that the current administration plans to take that information revolution a step further by increasing transparency in the federal government.
But, there's also been a lot said about the President's "overexposure" in the media these days. That's where we are finding a third frontier of this new political era -- not only have elections and government communications been redefined, our expectations for the President's availability to the press are also shifting.
President Obama has been on my screen (television, computer, iPhone ... pick one) a lot lately. He's on Jay Leno having a few laughs, he's filling out March Madness brackets on ESPN, he's posting those weekly video addresses to his web site in case I want to check in on him, and he's holding press conferences to talk about economic recovery. And, when he's not talking, everybody else is talking about him. Television, radio, blogs -- everybody's analyzing the President's every move.
Continue reading "Has The Web Redefined the Presidency?"
Here at the Labs, we're all about planning for the user experience -- we do user research, we develop personas to help us identify with our users, we painstakingly wireframe out the tiny details of user interfaces, and we develop content structures for the way our users think about content. Having gone through that process countless times during the past several years, I can't browse the web without noticing how the web sites I visit have planned for my needs.
While my favorite sites have done a great job of understanding what I want and providing relevant content based on that understanding, there are some sites that fail because they make assumptions based on demographic information rather than user research. A perfect example of this is Yahoo!'s foray into female-targeted social networking. It launched a few years ago; but, it made such an impression that as I began thinking this week about the notion of targeting content to women (it came up in a class I'm taking), Yahoo! Shine was the first thing that leapt to mind.
I first encountered Shine a year ago when I read a press release about its clever new strategy of focusing on women. Shine was meant to be a hub of content and community for all things women are interested in. That seemed like a pretty cool idea ... in theory.
Continue reading "Dear Internet: Women Are Way More Complicated Than That"
A team of Viget folks spent a long weekend in Texas for South By Southwest. We saw some interesting panels, reunited with folks we hadn't seen in months or since last year, and got to meet and talk to dozens of folks we hadn't ever seen. It was definitely a great time, but it was also lacking a lot that we look for in a great event, especially one being paid for by our professional development budgets.
Continue reading "Building a Better SXSW"
This content originally appeared as a press release on viget.com, and has since been adapted for our FourLabs blog.
FALLS CHURCH, VA – Designers Samantha Warren and Erik Olson will be among nine inaugural presenters on Feb. 29, 2008 who will speak at DC Design Talks at Viget Labs‘ headquarters in Falls Church. The event, which falls on Leap Year Day, is catered to the larger design community in the capital region.
Continue reading "Viget to Host DC Design Talks on Feb. 29"
