What started as a fun way to make Christmas presents has grown into something more interesting; over the past couple months I’ve been making lots and lots of very small terrariums inside of lightbulbs. I’ve experimented with different types of lightbulbs (some are easier to open and empty than others); different positioning angles (the metal part of the bulb needs to be relatively high to preserve balance); different substrates (small rocks are easier to work with than sand); different mosses (too much sheet moss leads to mold); and different types of tillandsia (they’re all working well).

To learn more about what I’m talking about, see this blog post, “How to Make a Tiny Terrarium in a Light Bulb,” that I wrote for the fantastic blog The Hipster Home. It describes how to get started with basic terrarium/light bulb endeavors.

In the past week my terrariums have started moving in a new direction because of a cat. While eating dinner with friends at their house, we kept leaping up to move their terrarium (I gave them this one) away from the inquisitive paws of their highly active teenager cat. I realized that building terrariums with a loose substrate, like what I wrote about in the Hipster Home post, was pretty risky. They are just too fragile.

So I started experimenting with ways to retain the organic feel of a terrarium while constructing it in a way that would be more stable. Many failed experiments with polyester resin later, I figured it out.

What looks like water in these terrariums is actually resin. You can pick these up and shake them and they’ll stay intact. The tillandsia that I “rooted” in the resin is still doing well.

I realized that terrariums that are essentially all one piece can be safely shipped. I started an Etsy store thinking that maybe I could start funding this kind of weird hobby.

My next experiments will focus on resin; what is the right temperature for it to cure properly? How long should I wait after pouring the resin before I can water the plants? Will the tillandsia continue to grow happily despite being stuck in plastic?

I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath for my findings, so I’ll be sure to report back. Also, I’ll be tracking my terrarium project over at Tiny Terra.

As previously noted, I gave a presentation to BayCHI on January 12, 2010. Folks have been asking for the slides — here you go!

Next Tuesday, Jan. 12, I’ll be presenting to BayCHI about how to do great user research with remote methods.

The program description:

Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.

I hope to see you there!

I’m taking what has so far been a pretty exciting and enjoyable leap of faith. I’ve decided that the next step in my series of projects (”career,” as it were) is to do freelance user research on a full-time basis. I’m focusing first on usability testing, user interviews, and survey design, since these are research modalities that I’m particularly drawn towards. For now, I’m calling my little company Deluxify User Experience but am open to better suggestions. Expect a lovely new website, etc., at some point in the coming weeks.

I already have some awesome clients and am busy doing work I love. Not bad for six weeks in! If you are interested in learning more about how I can help your company, whether a stealth-mode startup or established enterprise, do drop me a line at juliette@deluxify.com.

Tomorrow, September 17 at 12pm CT Mark Trammell and I will be presenting a talk on “Effective User Research” as part of the DIYsummit. I’m pretty excited. This will be a great group of speakers, and the folks behind the scenes (waving to Christopher and Ari) know their stuff.

The DIYsummit will take place online. This does not, however, make it a “webinar” at least as far as my definition goes. A webinar is a slog through PowerPoint slides, presented online by a lifeless salesperson trying to sell some enterprise software solution. The DIYsummit looks like it will be a well-crafted and really engaging online learning experience.

Anyway, wish us luck and I hope to see you online tomorrow!

The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

I’m now a character in the game “Familiar Faces” by Lumosity. You can find me hanging out on level 6.

I don’t remember much about my college commencement address other than that it was really long and it was a cold morning in Pennsylvania and the stupid graduation hat kept popping off of my head. I wasn’t inspired, just cold and annoyed.

I just read the commencement address that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005 and was floored. You should read the whole thing.

Excerpt:

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed… This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

In June, AIGA will be holding “In Control 2009,” a conference in Cincinnati for web designers. The two days of workshops will give participants a solid grounding in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, design standards, and user research.

The roster of speakers includes some pretty great names, and I’m honored to be on the list.

(And you can use my discount code, INCMELT, to get $50 off the early bird discount rate!)

SXSW is just around the corner! Our panel, “Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users” has been scheduled for Monday, March 16 at 5pm. Come hear me, Mark Trammell, Nate Bolt, Carla Borsoi, and Andy Budd duke it out over user research best practices.

Here’s the panel description:

You know you need to do user research, but how? Should you write surveys, do focus groups, or develop personas? And how do you act on what you’ve learned? We’ve been in the trenches and have concrete suggestions on what you can, and should do NOW to conduct effective user research.

We expect your attendance. And come equipped with a good question or two.