(Twitter didn’t do a great job of explaining why it made a small but significant change last week, and users staged a minor revolt.)

The Google AdWords team made a smart decision to make a video about changes to the AdWords administrative interface. Team members describe how they collected user feedback to inform changes to the interface, and how these changes make the user experience better. The video makes the interface changes feel necessary (they significantly improve site performance) and human (real people put lots of thought into how to make this better, and the new features represent their best efforts).

In the future, “games are going to be one possible dimension of your personality.”

Via fora.tv

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.

This is the first place I ever lived, in Austin, Texas. I haven’t been back in 26 years. The night was quite dark; I put the camera on the hood of the car, set it for a 10 second exposure, and crossed my fingers that it would work.

Tori Amos at La Zona Rosa on 2009-03-19. Canon EOS 5D, 70-200 mm lens at 89 mm, f/4

PJ Harvey at Stubbs on 2009-03-21. Canon EOS 5D, 70-200 mm lens at 200 mm, f/4

From a photo shoot for Bouclé SF. Photo by me, post-processing by Laura Brunow Miner, bag by Schauleh Sahba.

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!)

A view of Boulder (to the left) and the Flatirons from near the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Canon EOS 5D, EF 16-35mm lens at f/2.8, 16.0 mm

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.

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.