jasonbutler42

This post will serve as the coordination zone for the Pre-Thanksgiving Dinner at the Butler Boarding House on November 19, 2011.

The Boarding House will provide:
Smoked Roasted Turkey
Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes
Sour Dough Stuffing
Fresh Croissants

Guests have indicated that they will bring the following:
Pumpkin Pie
Chocolate Pecan Pie
Sweet Potato stuff
Green bean casserole
Green beans with bacon
Apple pie
Ambrosia salad
Cheesy Potato Casserole

Original invite:

Please join us for a Thanksgiving dinner that can’t be beat. Our family interaction avoidance scientists have been hard at work concocting a work around for regular Thanksgiving – and while they say you still have to see your family then, you can have an enjoyable evening with people you *want* to hang out with on November 19!

Dinner will officially start at 3pm, buy feel free to join us early and witness the tail-end of the circle of life while we finish the food prep and begin the drinking. The Boarding House staff will provide roast turkey, sour dough stuffing, and mashed potatoes so you can put the finishing touches on that food baby you’ve always wanted.

Please RSVP with number of guests (including yourself) as well as what you’re willing to donate to the cause (of dinner) so we can coordinate. Bring your favorite side dish or dessert and a bottle of wine, keg of beer, or 15 year old Scotch (the head chef is partial to Highland Park). This event is family friendly if you have little ones – we can find plenty of chores to keep them busy.

Scott Rismiller Monsanto
Christine Jenkins
Kathy Marshall
Jim Marsh

Kathy: history of agile – basic info
Ms. No name: ux design up front then iterative design during development
UX Long Sprint: up front contextual inquiry, focus groups, personas, etc
Jim: best practices. Having the UX process done up front allows developers to hit the ground running. Focus on the areas that you don’t do well so they don’t block you. Use the right amount of documentation. Product owner is critical.

Q&A
UX is important throughout the entire lifecycle to validate the requestors requirements.
Customers like seeing low-fidelity prototypes.

What if there are no or weak product owners?
Scott: if you see a risk to your project, the company is at risk. Make management aware of the risk.
Jim: as a team, they rejected the product owner and replaced her with someone else.
Kathy: current client delayed their project until a strong product owner became available
Christine: reduced a room of 12 decision makers to one product owner who could make decisions

Are the designers and UX people dedicated resources?
Kathy: It depends on how much work is required in the user experience side. Full time is ideal. This assumes you are working on one scrum team. Multiple scrum teams means more design resources.

Where does non-value add refactoring playing into short iterative cycles?
Jim: the technical leaders have to watch it. Sometimes you have to take a full sprint off to pay technical debt. Decided by senior leaders. If too much builds up too often, there is a problem. The sooner you pay off technical debt, the cheaper it will be to pay.

What’s the smallest manageable agile team size?
Jim: 3 product owner and two folks. Two people are agile by default. Kathy: Think about it as number of roles more than the number of bodies.

How much prototyping is done during sprints? How much ahead of time?
Christine: navigation, main page, high risk use cases – before hand. During sprint, prototyping the whole time. Many times the designs two sprints ahead.
Jim: spike – drive a spike to start generating the other requirements – in the middle of a sprint

How can I help my company adopt agile?
Scott: educating the decision makers. Back it up with case studies and the financial aspect. Show the financial value. Propose a case study on a non-essential product
Kathy: have them think of the way a project runs right before a release and imagine running the whole project like that
Jim: most people have heard of it so don’t be left out!
Christine: waterfall plus agile to meet govt regulations. Don’t use the term agile, call it “iterative”
Kathy: be adaptable to the current culture

What kind of things have to work well in a low-fidelity prototype?
It depends on what your trying to show. Whatever you are seeking feedback on needs to work well enough to get feedback.

How is ux testing done when ux resources are low?
Christine: Testing has to happen according to available resources – at least at first. Then build in ux lab testing to your schedule.

Micah Herstand
Linked data and the web

People want the information or data that is hidden behind our computers
The semantic web allows us to connect to linked data
Web pages are interfaces to allow us to combine and use the data

How are the connections represented? What is the context?

Links are unknown and take you away from where you currently are. How do we build trust and context into links?

Constraints are valuable in building context

1 uris for everything
2 uris respond with useful information
3 relationships between data

How do we design in the linked data environment

1990s
Behaviour
Style, structure, content

2000s
Style | behavior
Structure
APIs (content)
Data (content)

2010s
Style | behavior
Structure
Linked data (content)

A new kind of link
Facebook likes – you know what this is because of context
Google rich snippets

Using micro formats
Ogp.me
Linkeddata.org

Tangible constraints of distance are lost on the web

Mike Coble
Value
Help target users do target work
X users * amount of work supported * amount of cost to support each user per year = value in dollars

10 users * 10% * $4000 = $4000

Relative utility = supported work/ targeted work
User adoption = used work/ supported work
= f(usability)
Just requiring people to use something does not increase value
UX drives customer value

- Utility = how much work is supported
– % of targeted work actually happens
- Usability = how well that work is supported
– Quality of use metric
Realized customer value
I hope he publishes a version of this model!

Mike Coble

ABC is the basics
-paper prototyping,
-usability testing
-contextual inquiry

DEFGHI is the rest

HF – human factor
- HF is the basis for UX
- Building affinity models
- Team immersion in the user data so they can interact with it – people only retain 10% of what you tell them or they read but 90% of what they interact with [citation needed].
- rough is good. Things that are rough are malleable
- create don’t debate. Don’t present ideas, just make them
- Parkinson’s Law: work expands to fill the time available for it’s completion
- first, schedule the first test
- deal with real people, not abstract cogs

EG
Exampli gratia – for example (e.g.)
- UCD (user centered design) guided design with task examples
- personas
- stories and story boards

DI
Design Idea
A way to tag design ideas. Bits and pieces of designs that may or may not be used.
Capture but don’t venerate design ideas
- contextual inquiry
- team ideas
- paper prototyping

Medical inertia
Keep doing more of the same, oftentimes doing nothing other than making sure what we were doing worked.

The current system does not accommodate narratives – you can’t record a life style change. It’s not recordable. No proof that doctors are doing anything. It’s easy to prescribe drugs – or at least it’s easier to record that something was prescribed

Medicalization – if there is a drug for it, why would you offer other things?

Medical Home
Patient focused: focused on the whole person. Patient preferences guide the care provided
Team-based:
Efficient: receive the right care at the right time
Comprehensive: pcp is first contact but is tied to everything else to deliver fully integrated care
Continuous
Communication

What is health/wellness?
Proscriptive health – do this to be “healthy” instead of “do this when you get sick”
Lots of varying definitions
Health is a measure
Wellness is a process

My kids have too much stuff. Like most of us. So, we’ve decided that we aren’t planning on getting them a bunch of stuff for Christmas. We’re already working with them to eliminate the excess stuff they already have.

So, instead of the usual presents that are fun to give but eventually lose their luster, I’m going to build them their own PC. The initial plan was to build two, one for each of them, but since my son’s birthday is so close to Christmas anyway, we’re going to build one for now and then another one in about a month so they can each have their own. This will have the additional effect of them not using my and my wife’s computers!

This is the build I’m looking at for them initially:

Things like a mouse and keyboard I can scrounge from my boneyard as well as some HUGE 19″ CRTs that haven’t been used since I got my LCDs.

The question remains, though – should I build it for them and present it altogether? Should I let them unwrap each piece and then build it with them – or would this be too cruel since (in their eyes at least) unwrapping PC parts really isn’t special?

I don’t normally read more than the first ten replies on a blog, but in the last few weeks I’ve read every comment for several articles related to the enhanced patdowns the TSA is performing for those who opt out of the full body back scatter machines.

The latest of these was at www.ourlittlechatterboxes.com

I’m fascinated by people’s responses. Most folks agree that these procedures are too invasive with a few dissenters who basically say that it’s a small price to pay for “security”.

As so many others have said far better than me, this all amounts to security theater. People want to feel safe, but these things don’t actually make anyone safer. Sure, maybe these procedures will prevent someone from bringing contraband onto a plane – but only if they are storing it outside their body. Anyone will to go through the trouble to bring a plane down just might be will to store something internally.

But why go through the trouble of bringing a plane down? If terrorists are looking for soft targets, or looking to cripple air travel, it would be much, much easier for them to just load up on explosives and detonate themselves in line – before they ever get through security!

Think about it, all those people, waiting in line, bunched up. You blow something up there and not only could you cause a lot of casualties, but you’d shut the entire airport down. No flight lessons needed. And if this was done as a coordinated attack across the country, not only would there be a mandate to once again ground all planes, but even after everything was declared safe, the physical damage to the nation’s infrastructure would take weeks or months to repair, and the damage to the flying public’s psyche would take even longer to heal.

On the other hand, an attack like that might actual make the flying public recognize that there is a difference between security theater and actually being safe and we’d begin to implement something akin to what Israel has.

When I hear stories like this I wonder about flying with my kids again: For the First Time the TSA Meets Resistance

When I flew with my kids to Disney World, we all went through the metal detectors, and even though I was flying with an expired license (and both ways the TSA officers pointed it out but still let me fly) we all got through with a minimum of fuss. But if the TSA wants me to send my children through a device that makes them look naked, and I refuse, are they going to grope my kids?

I think I remember an article a few years back about how the child pornography laws in Great Britain might be at odds with the back scatter machines. All this security theater makes me feel very insecure.

Pre-Thanksgiving is on November 13 this year. Invites have been sent, but I need a place to keep track of things – what are people bringing, what’s left to do, other stuff.

Menu (so far)

If you are coming and bringing something, please leave a comment below.

• Applewood smoked turkey
• Stuffing
• Mashed potatoes
• Handmade Rolls
• Key Lime Pie
• Green Bean Casserole
• Whatever anyone else brings.

Left to do

These aren’t all related (directly) to Pre-Thanksgiving, they just fall into this timeline.

• Paint living room
• Paint kitchen room
• Install new dishwasher
• Return guitar/amp to [redacted]

Grocery List/Prep Work

• apple wood
• honey
• kosher salt
• roasted garlic paste
• sour dough
• leeks