Life Update of a Very Busy Designer
I’ve pretty much dropped off the face of the blogosphere this semester (I was posting several times a week, now it seems to be a few times a month).. but I’m doing more work than ever for Open Source, school, and work!
Usability testing is continuing on digiKam and the K/Ubuntu Installation process, and should wrap up this week. I haven’t received all the updates from the groups testing digiKam, but we have had consistent feedback on some issues with the install process — mostly selecting partitions and assigning root. I hope to have preliminary results/reports on those projects in a few weeks. (For those of you who don’t know, I organized two usability studies through my university as both a learning activity for graduate students and a cheap way for these two projects to get user-based testing done)
One of my current research projects at the HCIL has been to investigate the use of annotations by humanities researchers, and how computer interfaces can aid in various ways. There is tons of work in this area, especially in CSCW and mobile/table PC interfaces and it is very interesting. Taking notes is such a simple activity, yet it is quite difficult for current computer interfaces to fully support it.
More on the academic front, I am also working on my thesis. My “big idea” I am researching is a new card sorting protocol to aid in information architecture design. The hardest part of the entire project has been trying to get participants recruited to conduct my validation experiment. I have yet to begin writing the thesis, but I hope that should be relatively painless once the experiment and analysis is complete. I have until the end of July, so wish me luck.
Work has show a little more mercy than at the beginning of the semester, and I no longer have 7 projects going on at the same time. That is not to say I don’t have anything to do, I have about 3.5 things going on (I say .5 because there is a lot of stuff pending before I can move on with it). One of which is writing a research report of a unique interface we prototyped for a government client. The interface is a hypertext reader for scientific texts, and the reason why it is unique is because of the strict limitations on how we could alter the text. Prose is a typical style for formal print writing, but very difficult to read online. Normally content would be rewritten to fit the web, but we could not alter the text in anyway and had to preserve a lot of the formatting. The constraints lead to a unique approach I am documenting in the paper. Finding academic references for “industry standards and best practices” have been a tedious process and a pain in the ass. I am also trying to write design commentary in a scientific writing style which doesn’t seem to be coagulating. Luckily one of my coworkers is an excellent writer and editor :)
I will also be in Prague and Berlin from May 25 to June 2 to visit with friends and attend the OpenPrinting meeting at Linux Tag. I have never been to either so it will be very exciting. Let me know if you will be in town!
seele :: Apr.18.2007 :: Design, General, Life, Open Source :: No Comments »