montreal

One of the keynote speakers at this years OOPSLA was the normal-from-afar-but-impressive-from-closeup-especially-when-speaking Kathy Sierra. She talked to us about how to create a host of passionate users. I'll try and give an impression of the key points she touched upon.

To put it briefly: it sucks. We have little or no connection in our room, even when using a hotel provided WiFi connection device. We can get access in the hotel lobby, but uploading anything larger than a few KB does not work. Opening a secure shell to a machine outside the hotel, e.g., at work, is not possible. Thus, SVN access is simply fubar, as is pushing patches to a darcs repository. Uploading to flickr ... no way. Not even through the HTTP interface.

And to think the hotel is hosting a few hundred geeks attending OOPSLA.

I attended the 'From use to user interface' tutorial at OOPSLA, which was presented by Jeff Patton. The approach outlined was the following. First, start by writing a scenario, with a specific user (and his associated persona) in mind. Go down to the nitty gritty details (fish and clam-level), as well as the broad scope (sea-level and above). In reality, you might have to create a few dozen scenario's to cover the entire use-space for your particular problem.

Last night, Dries, Webchick and I went out to grab some food. Travelling with somebody (read: Dries), who knows people all over the place (thank you, drupal), has its obvious advantages.