Last week I traveled to Denver to participate in the annual Web Directions North conference. I’m a fan of web conferences, and this one was particularly enjoyable. From watching the sun set behind the Rockies while snacking on still-warm doughnuts to debating the future of SVG with new friends, this was a good week.

On Monday, Mark Trammell and I led a workshop on user research. We focused on helping the workshop participants understand what key challenges their organizations face and how different research methods could help address these challenges. The participants were engaged and thoughtful and really inspiring as I think about my own organization and the user research that I do as part of my daily life.

I also gave a talk about how three companies made significant changes to products and processes based on user research and customer feedback, and how they knew which findings and feedback to act on. I’m still collecting stories of how companies make smart choices about acting on user research findings, so contact me if you have a good story to share.

Many, many thanks to John Allsopp for putting on an awesome conference in a tricky economic environment, and to the friends and colleagues who contributed so much to making this such a great event.

Darwin Day is celebrated every year on February 12, Darwin’s birthday. Tomorrow, the 200th anniversary of his birth, is a day when scientists, secularists, and skeptics will be celebrating his contributions to human understanding.

In the spirit of the day, here’s a mix tape honoring Darwin’s work.

The illustrious Bronwyn Jones pulled me into her scheming, meming ways today, and I’m powerless to escape.

The rules of the game are as follows:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Here I present seven skills that I have acquired and cast aside along the way in these past (almost) three decades. I will echo Bronwyn and Ethan’s themes of marching band and literature studies. (I knew there was a reason I liked you people.)

• I’m a former literature student, primarily of the French sort. I turned my back on Proust when I heard the siren song of HTML back in 2000.
  Discarded skill: the French language
• In high school I was in marching band for a year. I quit due to a loathing of early mornings, team spirit, funny hats, etc. I taught myself how to play viola so that I could join the high school orchestra and continue to avoid gym class.
  Discarded skill: taking 18.5 inch steps
• I can fly a plane once it’s in the air but can neither take off nor land.
  Discarded skill: IFR basics
• My worst summer of teenage employment involved hosing off sidewalks at a seminary in Atlanta by day and directing the efforts of a band of delinquent yogurt servers at Frëshëns by night.
  Discarded skills: hose repair, reliably extruding exactly 4 ounces of yogurt product at a time
• After many late nights in the Bryn Mawr Fossil Lab I could visually discern at least 15 brachiopod species.
  Discarded skill: paleobiology
• I read the reproductive health service guidelines for every country in Sub-Saharan Africa to analyze adherence to WHO standards. Many thousands of pages later, we didn’t end up publising the paper.
  Discarded skill: public health policy research
• I once organized a conference in the same county where Deliverance was filmed. It was tough to find a good caterer.
  Discarded skill: temping

And per the rules, I’m yelling “Tag, you’re it!” to these fine folks.

Carla Borsoi
April Buchert
Kevin Cheng
Coley Wopperer
Ann Larie Valentine
Tantek Çelik
Corey Denis

From the excellent introduction by Karl Fogel to Version Control with Subversion:

No one ever called the tech support line and asked, “How can we maximize productivity?”. Rather, people asked highly specific questions, like, “How can we change the calendaring system to send reminders two days in advance instead of one?” and so on. But it’s a lot easier to make up imaginary Frequently Asked Questions than it is to discover the real ones. Compiling a true FAQ sheet requires a sustained, organized effort: over the lifetime of the software, incoming questions must be tracked, responses monitored, and all gathered into a coherent, searchable whole that reflects the collective experience of users in the wild. It calls for the patient, observant attitude of a field naturalist. No grand hypothesizing, no visionary pronouncements here—open eyes and accurate note-taking are what’s needed most.

A few weeks ago we were out with a small group at The Alembic. Our crew included visitors from Australia and the UK, and the discussion turned to how to spend a day in San Francisco. Here, in no particular order, are our suggestions from that night that I scribbled in my notebook.

Bluebottle Coffee (Hayes Valley)
Flora Grubb Gardens (Bayview)
Seward Slides (Noe Valley)
Greenwich St. Steps to Coit Tower (North Beach)
Bimbo’s 365 Club (North Beach)
Land’s End Trail (Outer Richmond)
Papalote (Mission)
Vermont St. (Potrero Hill)

There’s a lot of talk of jobs getting chopped and savings being slashed. In the interest of spreading positivity, let’s focus on chopping and slashing vegetables, instead!

My awesome product designer friend Jeff Beene (nerveaction.com) and his business partner Chris Raia (christopherraia.net) have designed a new line of kitchen tools that I’m swooning over.

I do seem to spend a sizable chunk of my time dismembering vegetables, and the Cut & Prep System looks like it will make that process faster, safer, and more pleasurable. And isn’t that the ultimate goal of any thoughtful design?

In February I’ll be traveling to Denver for the next Web Directions conference. Web Directions is officiallly described as “a highly focused conference and workshops for web designers, developers, UX and ID designers, and other web professionals whose day to day job is building web sites and web applications. It features two dozen world class experts, with a razor sharp focus on practical techniques and technologies you can use right away to build even better sites.”

I’ll be giving a talk on building empathetic corporate cultures and co-leading a workshop with Mark Trammell on setting up a user research program.

Beyond usability: How to build a culture of customer empathy

When everyone at your organization cares deeply about the customer experience you will build better, more inventive, and more delightful products. So how do get everyone to really care about and understand not just the usability but the overall experience of your products? Though it takes time, an empathetic corporate culture is not impossible to create and nurture.
In this session Juliette Melton will share several case studies in how to build a culture of empathy at your organization, including best practices for running usability tests, sharing web usage statistics, and developing user personas.

Know Your Users: How to start tomorrow with guerrilla user testing

Right now, someone, somewhere, is using something you’ve built. Who are they? Are they having a good time? It’s not that hard to find out.
User testing doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive, and shouldn’t only happen at the end of the product development cycle. The best and most useful research is distributed throughout the product lifecycle and can be done within a stone’s throw of your office using inexpensive tools. At this workshop, Juliette Melton and Mark Trammell will show you how to build an effective user testing program from scratch and how to keep it going over time.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for those who want to understand how to learn about user experiences, including project/product managers, designers, and usability professionals.

What will you learn?

• A structured approach to building a user testing program
• Web analytics basics
• Surveying tips
• How to include coworkers in your research
• How to perform task analysis
• Recruiting testing participants tips
• Best practices when sharing research findings

(Wondering about the spaceship I would land in Colorado? Full lyrics here. Anyone who lived in Colorado as a kid will probably know it by heart.)

• Have a slide deck that is too long for your allotted time
• Use bad fonts with drop shadows
• Use funny voices and occasionally sing
• Frantically wave your hands around
• Be sure to never credit your sources
• Talk a lot about your credentials
• Use only really obscure examples of whatever you’re talking about
• Avoid eye contact with the audience
• Bring up lots of anecdotes about times when you were smarter than other people
• Be sure to not leave any time for questions at the end
• Apologize for your presentation

(Recently compiled by me, Mark, Kevin, and Coley at an In-N-Out Burger in Daly City.)

I’m looking forward to seeing this in its finished state. The filmmaker is a student and is looking for donations to keep the project rolling.

More good news from The Berkman Center:

StopBadware.org, the university-based consumer protection initiative developed to combat badware, announced today that Mozilla, creator of popular free and open source software such as Firefox, will become its newest sponsor. Mozilla joins Google, PayPal, Lenovo, VeriSign, AOL and Trend Micro in supporting the initiative led by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

“Firefox was developed through the collective knowledge of a community,” said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of StopBadware.org and author of The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It. “We look forward to applying lessons of Mozilla’s open development process to our own efforts in fighting badware.”

Those efforts include research into how badware spreads online, an active community of users helping each other to keep their websites and computers protected, public alerts about new badware applications, and a clearinghouse of dangerous websites reported by StopBadware.org’s partners.