wireframes & usability

After a long time of just developing pidoco°, next October will be different. I have two trips planned, one going to Silicon Valley and the other one bringing me to Brighton.

2nd-4th of October will be the SVG Open 2009, a conference hosted by Google in Mountain View, CA, which is all about Scalable Vector Graphics. I am very excited about meeting the SVG community for the first time after almost 4 years of SVG development. With all my experiences, I guess I have a lot to share, especially with respect to a complex application like ours. The second day will start with my talk, which will be about how we use SVG for pidoco°. However, the schedule is packed with great talks, which I hope not to miss.

Since I will stay a whole week (30th-7th) in the Bay Area, please don’t hesitate to contact me (volker at pidoco.com) for a spontaneous meet-up.

My second trip will go to Brighton (13th) and London (14th), where I am really happy to meet our friends from Webnographer. Together with even more people we are going to give an exiting talk about Remote User Research in all its aspects. Louise Klinker will present a Case Study on Remote Usability, David Tait and Ofer Deshe will introduce Remote Ethnography, and finally we will present both our tools for asynchronous (Webnographer) and synchronous Remote Usability Testing (pidoco°).

That not being enough, the next day we are traveling to London to meet people from Flow Interactive in order to get the UXcamp 2010 started, which promises to be even better than this year! (We do our very best…)

pidoco° is an official sponsor for the Mensch und Computer 2009 (MuC/09) as well as the Usability Professionals 2009 conferences in Berlin which are held from the 6-9th September 2009.

We hereby would like to invite you to come along and see us at our stand which is located on the 2nd floor of the main Humboldt University building in Berlin Mitte.
We’d be pleased to meet you and hope to be able to give you some more insights into our products and future plans. Additionally, we will offer you a free BETA-account upon registering with us at our stand. You can then use the Remote Usability Tester (R.U.T), which is included in the pidoco° advanced suite, until the end of November -free of charge!

In case you want to know even more on our us and our vision, make sure to attend our talk!
Just like last year, Tino Truppel which is one of our visionaries at pidoco°, will give a speech on Prototype-Testing and on Tools in Usability Engineering. Tino will present a deeper insight into pidoco’s° Prototype Creator and the Remote Usability Tester (R.U.T) and on the upcoming tools which are currently being developed.
You can join the talk on Wednesday the 9th of September in Room 1070 at 10.45am in the main University building.

We hope that you will be able to attend the conference and that we can have to please to meet you in person.
Your pidoco° team

If you’re round this way visit us at the Usability Stammtisch in Berlin on July 8, 2009 at 9.30 p.m.! You can find us in the Newthinking Store.

We will present our brand new Usability Tester.

Next week you will find us as exhibitor at two exhibitions at the same time and you can visit us for free, either in Berlin or in Munich, the choice is yours:

We look forward to welcoming you to one of our booths (or even both). There will be many exciting things to see: besides demonstrations of pidoco° in action, we will present a Sneak Preview of our newest product, but see more next week.

Coming Monday, June 15th, the HPI-Alumni-Club is organizing an evening of talks of alumni for students at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. The main topics will be the “Way into Self-Employment” and “Working in a Corporation”. Last year we took part in the first event of this series and we are sure not to miss this one neither.

Several former fellow students are going to provide an impression of the start into their working life. Martin Karlsch and I will give a short presentation together and we will talk about our experience in founding companies and how our university prepared us for the professional life. Like last year I am already looking forward to the question-and-answer session and the following get together with the students. See you there!

What a weekend! The first UXcamp Berlin is over right now. To me it has been an extraordinary weekend. About 300 people shared two days full of discussions, presentations, networking, and chatting. Although there were many barcamp newbies (maybe half of the participants), there have been many many sessions (Saturday and especially yesterday, on Sunday). The people made this barcamp a very special one. And I’m glad having seen many of our sponsors participating in the sessions and doing their own sessions.

It has been a pleasure seeing all the different groups coming together for one common event: the information architects, the interaction designer, the usability guys, graphics designer, and all the others. I’m happy, that Henning Breu from German UPA has been there. In my opinion it could be a model for the more scientific conferences like Usability Professionals and IA Konferenz to organize one big conference with different tracks. There are differences in the topics of the conferences, but from a broader point of view, they have a lot in common.

At the final session yesterday afternoon I asked the audience three questions, which I’d like to answer in here as well: What I liked? To meet all the great people and see that they enjoyed the UXcamp. What I didn’t like? Well, most sessions lasted almost an hour, which led to the fact that the breaks for networking were quite short. What surprised me? The very positive feedback that we are getting right now and all over the weekend. That was great! (Just have a look at twitter and search for #uxcb09)

Thanks to all participants for this weekend! See you all next year at UXcamp 2010.

Just some few more days and the UXcamp is finally starting. There are still plenty of things to do like printing the name tags or preparing the session grid. On the other hand, the main task is done: getting enough sponsors. The UXcamp seems to be a hot topic, judging from the number of sponsors that we were able to acquire and the few days that passed until the list of attendees was full.

Taking a look at the session proposals the weekend is promising to be very exciting. And there seems to be one topic especially interesting to many out there: prototyping. We have proposals for every kind of prototyping and prototyping tools on the list. Paper and Flash, Expression Blend and Axure, Visio and Acrobat. And somewhere on my personal to-do list is the preparation of a pidoco° session. (Although I’m sure we will be mentioned in at least some of those prototyping sessions.)

I’m really looking forward to the UXcamp, especially after half a year of preparation. Let’s have an excellent weekend in Berlin!

For those of you who are going to attend the UXcamp I added some Infos to the German version of this entry.

Just one more week and the German IA Konferenz 09 is held in Hamburg (16th and 17th of May). Tino and Philipp will travel to Hamburg to join the conference with a booth and a poster session. The session will be 6.45 pm on Saturday. Although we do not know exactly where our booth will be, it shouldn’t be very difficult to find us. Just follow the white rabbit and get an introduction to our web based prototyping software. You could also meet us for a drink and a chat at the get together on Friday night.

We’d be happy to see you in Hamburg.

For all the BarCampers among us: Tomorrow, at 11am, we will open the registration for the UXcamp Berlin 09. As places will be limited, you may want to register early. We have already more than 400 people in our network and quite some interesting session proposals. Please feel free to add your proposal, as the UXcamp will live from your active participation!

Although we already have some sponsors who enable us to offer the whole event, we are still looking for further companies who are willing to support us. (get in touch with me: volker at pidoco.com)

We are really looking forward to an exciting weekend. Make sure you don’t miss it!