Pinterest Boards

We have heard a lot of talk about Pinterest, its conversion rates, phenomenal design, and growth over the past 6 months.  I resisted the urge to jump in as it seemed like a waste of time, initially, to me.  But then I started to watch what people were doing and talking about around me, and few observations changed my mind.  These are:

• For the past few years, my friend James has been maintaing a Facebook photo album of other people’s photos that he likes.  He has posted everything from inspiring quotes to luscious landscapes from around the world.  This is user behavior Pinterest supports.
• I started to notice that people on my feeds were sharing the same as 1-offs.  They didn’t have a particular photo album like James, but they were sharing the same type of content.  I started to comment every few days, “You need Pinterest.”  Just being facetious, as always
• Then I took a trip to Lynchburg, VA.  A big town (or small city) in Southwest Virginia.  It’s not a particular hub for technology, just good people, good values, and the beautiful Blue Mountains to surround them.  My friends were talking about Pinterest as part of their natural conversation, such as, “Did you see that hair style I posted yesterday?” or “I have a great decoration ideas for your new house, I’ll share my board with you.”

In just a short time, Pinterest has become part of the dialogue and the dialect.  And so, I realized it was time.

Check out my Pinterest boards and please do connect.

User Research for Agile Teams

Last night I had an exciting opportunity to share what I am doing at Group Commerce with the Agile Experience Design  Meetup here in NYC.  I sat on a panel with 5 other professionals, and talked about how creating a cadence with each sprint can help feed input from User Research and Usability Testing into the product development lifecycle.

IA Summit 2012

"Holy shit, this should not happen!" Helen Walters exclaimed at the closing address at the 2012 IA Summit

Last week, I attended the 2012 IA Summit in New Orleans. It was an exciting 3 days to share with other professionals in the technical + creative field!

Here are some of the sessions I attended:

• Integrating UX and Agile: Designer and Scrum Master Perspectives:  This was presented by two coworkers from Intuit.  I appreciated how they broke down the distribution of time for a designer between the current sprint (20%), the next sprint (20%), and the following sprint (60%).  It was very ideal, and I’m not sure how easy it is to put into practice in an environment where the product roadmap can skip a heart beat every now and then.
• Myths of Mobile:  I absolutely loved this session, and am now a huge fan of Josh Clark.  I highly recommend taking a look at his PDF presentation. I think the biggest take away, one in which Clark challenges Jakob Nielsen, is that mobile in no way equals less.  A huge percentage of the population accesses the web strictly through mobile devices, therefore access to lengthy articles (also a mobile myth, users are not always distracted and rushed!) and forms such as applications, are really important to provide equal access.
• Collaging by Kyle Soucy:  Kyle brought to us a new way to uncover the unconscious thoughts by playing games with photos.  I have been able to run two sessions using her collaging method, and found it to be so helpful in learning about topics that are important to ur users.

I posted a few photos – mostly slides and food – from the IA Summit on Flickr. Check them out!

Teaching UX to Your Team

Engineers Without Borders USA – Project Yamabal

Last month, I started working with Engineers without Borders USA – New York Professional Chapter to help with one of their three projects, this one in Yamabal, El Salvador.The team of engineering professionals is working on a 5 year partnership to bring safe water and cleaner sanitation to this rural village.

Some of the things I did to help this non-profit get their technology and social media cards in order include:

• Identified the primary goals for the website: 1) Recruit Volunteers, and 2) Solicit Donations
• Structured the site to answer the Who, What, Where, When and Why, making these pages part of the primary navigation.  This is particularly important for those looking to volunteer, and those deciding whether to donate.
• Updated the WordPress theme from the basic layout to a more interactive theme – Swatch by Woothemes.
• Worked with the team members to distribute a questionnaire so that we could regularly post about what makes EWB so special.  You can view these member profiles here, called Meet the Engineers.
• Tied WordPress to Facebook and Twitter so that information about the project is distributed consistently across all channels.
• Hooked up the EWB USA donate page so that donations are made directly to the project team, rather than the chapter or the national society as a whole.
• Created a Google Analytics account so we can start tracking where our traffic comes from, and build on top of those sources.

Project Yamabal Website