Spent most of our time in Brooklyn, but also spent the night at the Gild in Manhattan, just around the corner from Wall Street. Saw Lady Liberty from the shore. Walked over the Brooklyn Bridge to have some damn fine NY-style pizza at John‘s on Bleecker Street. Caught the Wafels & Dinges Truck for a Nutella fix.

The other Big Thing that happened… I’m leaving my job! After almost 3 years with a digital agency known at various times as Molecular & Isobar, I’m moving on to other opportunities. I am looking forward to a challenging new project, and to working on really cool stuff! My last day is Nov. 30.

2010 is off to a pleasant and eventful (if not rainy) start.

Crazy busy at work… which I’ll go into more detail at a later time. Also I’ve narrowed down what my graduate thesis is going to be. All I can say now is that it relates to both mobile devices and music, and unites some of my passions: technology, DIY music, and intuitive organization.

The Shants have been quite busy as well: the little EP that we recorded in November ’09 has been released on High Scores And Records and has been getting lots of warm reviews, we played a handful of shows in Northern California (recap can be found here), and we were named FILTER Magazine’s Undiscovered Artist of the Month. Since school starts for me next week, things will likely quiet down… but I expect we’ll go on a West Coast tour this summer. Stay tuned.

Here’s a few pictures & video from my holiday visit to Louisiana, as well as some shots from the road:

I’ve tried to take a camera wherever I go these days, whether its the shambolic serenity of the Albany Bulb (above, a nearby wetland/landfill that juts into the Bay), the summit of Mount Diablo, the abandoned 16th Street train station in West Oakland:

…or even to rehearsal with Maggie Morris, for whom I’ve been playing bass for these days:

It’s been nice returning to music in way where so much of the focus isn’t on me, and I can contribute instead to a songwriter I respect and think should get more recognition… helping them acheive their goals and reach more people. Maggie has a brilliant sense of melody and lamentation, with just a touch of California sunshine. We’ll be on tour throughout the West Coast in mid-August, as a part of the Boy Gorilla Records tour.

All this has in turn rekindled my own musical expression. Here’s a new recording that Maggie and I worked on together for a yet-to-be-named new project.

As fall quickly approaches, I’ve been thinking more and more about what to work on for my master’s thesis. Lately I’ve been obsessed with directional signage, and how different symbols translate across cultures. Lately I’ve taken to logging interesting, effective, awkward or otherwise amusing signage over on Which Way?

Other projects on deck:

• some pro bono web work in the elder care field
• prepping for my week-long visit to Yosemite in September
• wrapping a documentary of recording with The Stragglers

The SF chapter of the Interaction Design Association held a redux of Interaction 09 this weekend at Adaptive Path. I volunteered to help with A/V stuff and whatever else needed doing. Many speakers from the February event were from the Bay Area, and a healthy number of local practitioners couldn’t make it to Vancouver for the real thing, so we asked 5 speakers to give abbreviated versions of their talks. At $20 a head, this was an excellent deal for such a cool, collaborative and intimate event.

Up first was Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting, who led the group of 100 or so through some simple user observation exercises for use in the field with the intention of transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.

Next was Adaptive Path’s creative lead Kumi Akiyoshi, with a talk centered around sensory design experiences, listing her insights for designing brand leadership strategies. She gave a great case study of the recent refresh of MSN.com: getting rid of the clutter and uniting brand messaging by trimming back the amount of colors, icons and disparate images on the landing page.

Ian Swinson gave us a look at Agile UI pattern creation process that he & his team went through at Salesforce. When charged with the task of design pattern creation, his team set out individually to work on their own designs. 6 months later, they only had 2 designs to show for it. After regrouping and working together in collaborative brainstorming sessions, his team was able to piece together library of 43 design patterns in 3 months. Impressive to say the least. You can view his deck here.

Given that so many web users are also gamers, it stands to reason that we should take some experience design advice from the game design community. Razorfish IA Nadya Direkova outlined four best practices in bringing game-like user experiences to interactive marketing:

1. Understand that our ultimate goal as designers is to make the user happy. Games accept this by default.
2. Understand a product or message better by imagining it as a game. If you have a message you want people to find and interact with, invite them to play with it!
3. Convey a message by building it into an advergame.
4. Use game-inspired techniques to create a better experience in non-game products.

You can see Nadya’s entire deck from Interaction 09 here.

Finally, Cooper’s Kim Goodwin delivered her keynote on the state of the experience design discipline. She acknowledged that though interaction designers are in demand, even within the current economic climate, we are still a very young discipline that is trying to define best practices, educational standards, or even what we want on our business cards. One troubling point she made referenced the US News & World Report article heralding the User Experience Specialist as one of the best careers of 2009. The first sentence of the article is telling:

“This profession has a hard time agreeing on a name for itself. It’s called, for example, user experience specialist, interface designer, information architect, usability practitioner, user-centered design specialist, and usability manager.”

Goodwin stressed that we need answers to these questions if we are to evolve as practitioners.

My photos from the event are here, and the “official” IxDA SF photos can be found here.

16th & Mission

Well that’s what it looks like to me, anyway.

As I start my second semester at AAU, I’ve been leanding more and more thought to my thesis project. Originally I was leaning towards a rich, community driven site for carpoolers in the Bay Area… but we ended up concepting just that for my last usability class project.

Then, I really wanted to revamp BART.gov, but they recently launched a very lovely revamp (which actually enacts some of the ideas I had for them, ie. more user generated content, visual refresh, improved navigation etc. )

Grrr…. guess I’ll keep brainstorming!

Wow. December already? This year is flying past.

I’ve been swamped with school and work stuff mostly. The new year is looking even busier. My first semester at AAU is drawing to a close, and I’ve feel like my brain is about to burst with all the new stuff I’m learning… and that’s just from 2 classes. Next semester I’ll dive into web tech, which should be interesting.

Visited Intuit’s usability lab with my ux class. We got to poke around their observation rooms and play with the ultra-cool eye-tracking software. I wish every practitioner could have this asset at their disposal. We got to run a quick test on the university’s website, which confirmed my initial reaction when I enrolled that the user has no idea where to look or what to do first.

Heading to Louisiana for the holidays next week… but I’ll try to make my annual top ten albums post before then!

I recently snapped a few pictures during my daily commute. Enjoy!

“You should work on improving the structure of the Bionicle website, and also you should make the games easier. Also, can you fix the website for the new Transformers? It does not work very good.”

He’s the only member of my family who automatically “gets” what I do for a living now. He’s 9.