An IA Institute job posting for "System Designer / Prototyper" at Klein Associates in Dayton reminds me of the "Management by Discovery" workshop that I attended in March. The workshop was part of the Mind your leadership conference at BGSU. (I missed the rest of the conference because I was travelling to the IA Summit.)

The workshop was officially titled "The cognitive dimenions of leadership: A practitioner's toolkit." I had no expectations, was mainly attending because it sounded interesting and it was close to home - worth the risk of a day of my time. What surprised me was that I already knew a lot of this stuff because Gary Klein is well-known for Cognitive task analysis and other HCI work (not sure how I missed Gary up until then). I had "stumbled" into an HCI person presenting to a business audience, so I felt right at home.

Management by Discovery is different than Management by Objectives and other management styles because it focuses on emergent goals (instead of upfront, well-defined goals, which never happens anyway). It means a lot of story-telling, sense-making, iteration and other things we assume with a user-centered design approach. "Taking UCD to the management decision level" might be a good summary.

Jay Rothman added his expertise on conflict engagement to the workshop. This was Gary and Jay's first collaboration on this topic.

All-in-all, a good day for me - sitting with a bunch of organization development people and "peeking over the fence" back at my own profession.

Karl Fast's The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture is a recap of IA and research from the summit. If you were at the panel discussion you will remember Karl as the guy in the audience who had more / better stuff to say than those of us on the panel.

I like his point about the difference between researchers and academics, and I look forward to the 2007 Summit.

Links to items from the CUU 2003 proceedings are now available on the CUU 2003 program page.

Links go to the ACM Digital Library. You will have to log in to get to the PDF files. My SIGCHI membership gave me access, but if you have a general membership in the ACM DL, you should probably be able to get to them as well. Also, you can buy 1 item at a time if you wish.

I made it to Denver this morning (6th airport in the last 5 days) and am looking forward to the UPA conference.

First, I will be learning more about World Usability Day 2006 - November 14th - check out the new website for it. For those of you in northwest Ohio - start thinking about what you want to do for World Usability Day this year. Last year I was in San Francisco - this year I will be home and looking for help to organize something locally.

Second, I will get to hang out with more IBMers - lunch on Wednesday if nothing else. Often the easiest way to find out what my colleagues are doing is to spot them "on the outside". IBM is too big.

Of course, I will also be attending a few days of the conference. My two must-sees: interaction design / agile and the panel on the state of web site usability (I was on a MIUPA / local version of this panel a few years ago). Other sessions: too hard to decide.

Finally, look for me up on stage. I get 15 seconds of "fame" this time, which will be related to something I am very proud of: serving my profession.

不管我们是否愿意，“外包项目”都是一个不得不说的话题。“是不是要外包、什么时间开始”已经不再是关注的焦点，人们谈论的中心变成了“多少钱”——我们可以为外包项目付出多少，更确切地说，我们能坚持外包多久？UX（User Experience用户体验）从业者已经走了很长一段路来使自己与软件设计和已知的UX设计不同。当外包项目到来的时候，我们还能够继续坚持这种不同吗？

Whether we like it or not, offshoring is here to stay. ?If? or ?when? to offshore is no longer an issue. The heart of the discussion is ?how much? ? how much we can afford to offshore or, more precisely, how much we can afford to keep. The User Experience (UX) profession has gone a long way in making the distinction between software design and UX design known. Will we be able to hold on to that distinction when it comes to offshoring?

This week, I merged universalusability.org (which got its start as a student project for the 2000 Conference on Universal Usability) and uuslash.org (which was created in May, 2003, as a community news site). What you see here is the new community site for universal usability. It contains information about what we mean by "universal usability" and news contributions (in blog style) about the topic.

News entries from the previous sites were migrated here, which is why we have news going back to 2000.

I was not able to save most of the accounts - we got hit hard by spammers - so if you had an account on uuslash.org, please create a new one here. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Yee-ha! Flamenco, the leading faceted browsing research platform, has officially gone open source. See also: Flamenco section at SourceForge.

I was lucky enough to get a preview copy of the code to test out a few months ago. It was easy to install and within a few hours I had learned just enough Python to make changes. I plan on using it for some of my personal sites - perhaps reviving Usable Web on Flamenco, if I ever get the time.

The weekend of September 30th and October 1st will be a big one in the Information Architecture world:

• EuroIA is having its 2nd European summit in Berlin, Germany
• Oz-IA will be the first "down under" conference/retreat on IA, in Sydney, Australia

Perhaps there could be some sort of video hook-up between them? Or at least some internet conference / live chat during the hours when both sets of attendees are awake and coherent? Using this meeting planner for Berlin and Sydney, the best time appears to be:

• 9am Saturday morning in Berlin is 5pm Saturday evening in Sydney

The Aussies could end their first day by helping the Europeans kick off their first day.

Depending on how late people would be up (drinking?), there are other possible times. But could the 2 events sync up?