Brian will be traveling to Prague next week to discuss Viget's work with Choice Hotels International at their annual European convention. He'll co-present a series of workshops with Jeff Hickey, Choice's Director of International IT, sharing the results of the extensive research and testing that went into the redesign effort our team has worked on since late last year.
Continue reading "Brian Speaking in Prague, Sharing Work with Choice Hotels"
Jackson Fox's proposal to speak based on his experiences with UX research for Choice Hotels International has been accepted to Agile 2009. He's slated to take the windy city by storm (pun intended) for his talk on August 26.
"We learned a lot about collaborating on user research with Choice Hotels International, and those experiences could benefit designers (and developers) facing similar challenges. Like lots of agile teams, we find that research and customer feedback are incredibly valuable but hard to fit into projects. I've got high hopes that by working together with customer-facing team members, more people can be involved with research activities toward building better products."
Ben is avoiding the slot machines (we think) and instead is cashing in on all the great RailsConf sessions he's moderating, attending, or participating in this week.
Last night, he moderated a talk called "Teaching Rails," which grew out of a discussion he had with Brian Hogan on IRC. On Wednesday afternoon, he's participating in a panel discussion called "Starting Up Fast: Lessons from the Rails Rumble" before giving his own session, "And the Greatest of These Is … Rack Support," on Thursday morning.
Just as Ben was packing his bags for his Ruby talk this weekend in Buenos Aires and polishing his slides before presenting "Rails Page Caching" at the Central Virginia Ruby Enthusiasts' Group on April 14, he learned that another of his proposals, "'Comics' is Hard: Domain Modeling Challenges," was accepted to RubyNation.
In a very cool development (pun intended), we learned that three other Viget staffers will be presenting there, as well.
- Mark will present "Code Stinkers Anonymous: Learning to Write Better Code and Love Refactoring"
- David will present "Optimizing Perceived Performance"
- Tony will present "'Handling' Legacy Databases with DataMapper and Rails"
But, before those guys can head to the Reston in June, they'll be setting up shop for the first Developer Day DC conference on May 30, which we'll be hosting here at headquarters. Although planning continues on the effort, we know that Pat and Justin will be presenting during that day-long conference.
Jack's back after presenting How MacGyver Would Do Design Research on April Fool's Day (ask him about his joke that day) at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. A core element of his talk, which was attended by about 400 people, was:
Even if you have a week and a very limited budget, you can still do worthwhile design research. This talk can help show you how.
Jack said the conference, which was themed "The Power of Less," was incredibly relevent to everyone in the web space given the economic effects industry folks are experiencing to varying degrees right now.
It was good to see a side of the web industry you don't see often – a bit of conservatism with respect to budgets and timelines and scope, but still trying to drive creativity as much as ever.
Ben will be carrying around a Spanish translation book on April 3-4, when he travels to sunny Buenos Aires to present at Locos por Rails. He'll be giving a talk entitled, "Page Caching Resurrected." From the abstract:
. . . It is now feasible to build a complex Rails application that can still respond extremely quickly and directly to a specific set of requests, such as those an AJAX service might experience. In this session, we'll explore in depth how this strategy reinvigorates a useful, but formerly limited, capability of Rails: page caching.
Ben has presented on Rails internationally, but he's looking forward to visiting Borges' hometown for this experience.
"I'm very excited to be connecting with Rubyists outside the United States. The development scene in South America in general seems to be growing very quickly, so I'm eager to see what they're doing."
Samantha has been invited back to the great state of Pennsylvania, this time to speak at Pittsburgh Design Day on Saturday, April 4.
The one-day conference is catered to web professionals in Western PA, and Samantha will be talking on a topic similar to the Refresh Pittsburgh typography presentation she delivered last November.
Mindy and David work well together; that is, particularly since they identified ways in which designers and developers can better communicate.
They'll be telling Refresh the Triangle all about their experiences this Thursday at 6:30 pm when they deliver, "10 Things That Designers Do that Piss Off Developers (And Vice Versa)."
Our own Jackson Wilkinson will add New Zealand to his list of international speaking gigs next February when he presents at Webstock 2009, where he'll lead an all-day workshop on how the Agile process can benefit designers, UX strategists, and managers.
The topic is borne from the frustration user-centric practitioners can sometimes feel when working in Agile -- with its characteristic tight timeframes and limited up-front planning -- that cater to development circles. He'll help attendants recognize the opportunities Agile holds for everyone by sharing tips, tricks, and methods we've employed at Viget to ensure our teams find balance and our projects (and, ultimately, our clients) are successful.
