wireframes & usability

We extended the deadline for submitting a session proposal until 10th of August.

In case you are doing some usability project in the context of web 2.0, send us some lines and share your experiences at the World Usability Day. Or maybe you just finished the work on a paper or thesis, feel free to tell us about it and present it in front of about 200 people. You ever wanted to do a workshop and help others learning from your skill set? The World Usability Day is the place for you.

We are looking forward to read your proposal. Have a look at www.wud-berlin.de for all the information about our event.

Some days ago we received an invitation to present our prototyping tool at the Usability Stammtisch in Hannover. For sure we will follow this invitation and will give a presentation on “web-based paper prototyping”. The Stammtisch takes place the 31st of July in the Apollo Konzept in Hannover. It starts at 6pm.

Our presentation will start with an introduction on paper prototyping with its advantages and disadvantages. The main part of the presentation will demonstrate our Prototype Creator and its concepts. This includes a discussion with the audience on what they think about these concepts. We are looking forward to a serious discussion.

In addition to our presentation, our friends from Nurago will showcase their LEOtrace tools as well.

See you in Hannover!

Although the actual event is still some months to go, we started the search for sponsors as well as for interesting talks. We chose the topic “Usability and Web 2.0” to explore the new challenges for usability professionals that the new technologies and social aspects of the Web 2.0 pose.

In case you / your company are interested in sponsoring the event, please refere to the sponsoring section of the event website.

If you have some interesting projects or other new solutions you want to talk about, feel free to submit a proposal. We also accept proposals in English!

We are looking forward to welcome you to our event!

On the background of the World Usability Day:

World Usability Day was founded in 2005 with a mission to increase the public’s awareness of the need to make the services and products important to human life easier to access and simpler to use. Global issues such as healthcare, education and government are addressed through expert forums, exhibits, events and initiatives in numerous locations throughout the world. (from the press release for the World Usability Day 2007.)

Next Wednesday will be the second meeting of the Berlin IxDA group. We from pidoco° will be there to show our Prototype Creator. For those who have seen one of our presentation earlier this year or have had a look at the preview can be looking forward to this presentation, because we will show our most recent version, which has not been shown so far.

The meeting will be at NewThinking Store, Tucholskystr. 48, Berlin Map.
It will start at around 7pm.

Looking forward to meeting you there.

I’m just on my way back from another BarCamp, this time in Leipzig, Saxonia. Somehow I have the impression, that there is a family of BarCampers that you meet everywhere, like Till form Sonntagmorgen.com, Peter from brainr.de, just to mention some. The nice effect is, that you already know lots of people. On the other hand, i have the impression that many topics repeat without a significant amount of new information. This makes the BarCamps less interesting, regarding the sessions.

However, two sessions stuck out:

Tom introduced a very interesting project, called AntMe.net. This is a new development environment for newbies to learn programming on a playful way. The environment is a game whose goal is to program a bunch of ants that are running around and should collect food and fight their enemies, the bugs. Using very easy to learn commands, kids can describe behaviour for the ants. Due to the fact, that the same program is used on each individual ant, they learn object-orientation without the need to study the theory nor read boring books.

A community has already been established that write incredible programs with AntMe. Some have transformed the given information of the direction and distance into coordinates. Others have written a ticket based system to distribute the different tasks to the ants. And the bonus was a program that made the ants dance on the playground. I’m really impressed by this system. For kids this is definitively a funny way to learn the basics about programming. If i have some time, i’m going to write my own AntMe program next week.

The other session I want to mention here was about Silverlight. Well, in fact it was declared to be on Usability and Silverlight. The presentation provided a good overview of Silverlight and the stuff around. However, to me Silverlight is just another Flash with some slight improvements and similar drawbacks (=> Plugin). I have not jet seen the big advantage. In addition, i do not know why Microsoft makes you think with Silverlight you will improve the usability of your software. I had this impression already last summer, when I attended “Express yourself”.

What you can do with Silverlight is improve the user experience. But this is, although related, a different thing than usability. What you definitively can do with Silverlight is build applications that are less usable, because the developers played too much around. Just think about tooltips that include a movie (as shown in the presentation)? I’m not yet sure what to think about Silverlight…

Maybe, I should do a presentation myself on my next BarCamp, that increases the diversity of sessions. Could be something about discount usability, a live prototyping session, or something more technical about SVG and / or ExtJS. Let’s see.

We are glad to announce that we will be at the CeBIT in Hannover this year. The CeBIT starts the 4th of march. You can find us at booth B20 in hall 9. You’ll be able to try our Prototype Creator yourself and chat with us about our future plans and how we can meet your needs.

We would be happy to see you in Hannover.

We will present our Prototype Creator at Usability Stammtisch in Berlin on 13.02.2008. The Stammtisch is a monthly gathering of usability people from Berlin. It will take place at the NewThinking Store. Starting time is 7.30pm.

The presentation title is “web-based prototyping”. We will cover basic prototyping techniques, show how to use our tool for your next prototype, and talk about our future plans for this tool. This will not only be about the creation but also about the evaluation of prototypes.

If you have any special questions that you would like us to talk about, don’t hesitate to contact us.