STC Carolina Competitions

STC competitions offer an excellent way for you and your team to get recognition for your technical publication, help system, artwork, training, or any other form of technical communication. Each year, the STC Carolina Chapter generally sponsors the following competitions:

• Online Communication Competition: This page describes the categories in which you can submit an online communication entry.
• Technical Publications Competition: This page describes the categories in which you can submit a technical publications entry.
• Technical Art Competition: This page describes the categories in which you can submit an art entry.

The Call for Entries has been distributed. Start working on those Competition Forms for items you or your colleagues want enter! Remember, you do not have to be an STC member to enter (but members save money on the entry fee, and even more by submitting entries by the Early Bird date.

• Entries are due by October 9.
• Early Bird rate ends September 18.

If you’re shy about submitting your work, sign up as a judge. Assessing the work of other technical communicators invariably gives you insight into your own work. Judge Training day is a great networking opportunity too. You don’t need to be a member to judge, so recruit those non-members in your office. Judge training is October 17. This year, the door prizes include four signed copies of “The Well Fed Writer” by Peter Bowerman.

Contact: Betsy Kent <lizkent@nc.rr.com> for more information.

TriUPA workshop — Escape the Lab: Remote User Research and Usability Testing — October 1st, 2009

What: Escape the Lab: Conducting Remote User Research and Usability Testing

When: full-day workshop: 9a – 5p | Thursday 10/1/09 | coffee & lunch included

Where: Council for Entrepreneurial Development in RTP

How: Capacity is limited — Register online now to reserve your spot!

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Intended audience

Researchers, designers, and product managers who want to watch real people use technology from the comfort of their own desks. (While saving travel costs and the planet!).

About the workshop

Nate Bolt, one of the pioneers of remote UX research — and author of the forthcoming book, Remote Research — will lead this hands-on workshop covering the latest remote UX techniques and tools.

Give us a day and we can teach you all the rocket surgery you need to conduct qualitative studies the real-time, native environment way.

Learning Objectives

What we’ll cover…

• Strengths and weaknesses of remote ux research
• Study design & scripting
• Participant recruiting options
• Moderating in the remote environment
• Tools for screen sharing, recording, and communication
• What can go wrong and what to do about it
  

About the speaker

Nate Bolt, president of Bolt|Peters, is fascinated by the personal, social, and cultural role of technology, and how research and design can transform those roles. After pioneering and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate co-founded Bolt | Peters. He now serves as el presidente, where he has overseen hundreds of user research studies for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and others. Beginning in 2003, he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research.

Nate regularly gives presentations on native environment research methods in both commercial and academic settings, and is currently co-authoring Remote Research, a book on remote testing. Working with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, he created a degree titled “Digital Technology and Society,” which focused on the social impact of technology. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.

World Usability Day – November 12, 2009

Please save the date for our annual Triangle area World Usability Day celebration.

The theme this year is: Designing for a Sustainable World.

World Usability Day 2009 is approaching design from cradle to cradle. Coming from a user-centric perspective and looking beyond form and function, we are exploring the impact design has on our world. For this year’s event we’ve lined up a great speaker and planned a killer design competition. See below for more information.

Slides from Edward Tufte and Information Design Strategies for the Web

Nathan Huening, who presented “Edward Tufte and Information Design Strategies for the Web,” has provided his slides for anyone interested in downloading them.

Slides: Edward Tufte and Information Design Strategies for the Web (PDF)

Edward Tufte and Information Design Strategies for the Web

When: 6:30pm | Thursday 7/23/09

Where: Rigsbee Hall (208 Rigsbee Ave, Durham, NC 27701)

How: Register Online – We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Co-Sponsored with Refresh the Triangle!

“Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not attributes of information. And so the point is to find design strategies that reveal detail and complexity—rather than to fault the data for an excess of complication.” –Edward Tufte.

No matter how sophisticated the technology nor pleasing the design, your Web visitors are really interested in one thing. (No, not that.) They’re after great content like your essay, your photo, your widget, your tutorial. It’s what makes the Web so great: exploring, learning, and sharing what we know. And the task of a designer—whether of user interfaces, graphics, data or type—is to present this information appropriately and elegantly; to remove obstacles to understanding, not introduce them.

In this presentation, Nathan Huening first presents an overview of the work of information design expert Edward Tufte and then discusses concrete applications and examples for applying his principles of analytical design to the Web. Selected themes include: contrast and meaning in design, avoiding “chartjunk” and “computer administrative debris”, clarity and clutter, the value of aesthetics, and simplicity vs. minimalism.

Edward Tufte is Professor Emeritus of statistics, information design, interface design and political economy at Yale University. In addition to his touring workshops, Mr Tufte has written four books on the display of information and analytical design: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983), Envisioning Information (1990), Visual Explanations (1997), and Beautiful Evidence (2006).

About the Speaker

Nathan Huening is a principal at Sprocket House, a creative firm based in Chapel Hill that specializes in Web and print design. When he’s not writing client copy or puzzling over UI design, he enjoys making messes in the kitchen and falling off his unicycle to the bemusement of curious onlookers.

Refresh the Triangle

Refresh the Triangle is a community of designers and developers working to refresh the creative, technical, and professional culture of New Media endeavors in their areas. Promoting design, technology, usability, and standards.

Recap: “Sketching for Interaction Design” workshop

TriUPA recently welcomed David Malouf, professor of interaction design at SCAD, for a full-day workshop on sketching for interaction design.

TriUPA member Leslie Carter was kind enough to provide some notes, ideas, and links to resources from the workshop.  Thanks, Leslie!  (You can also download a Microsoft Word copy of the notes: Notes from Sketching Seminar with Dave Malouf – June 2009).

View this document on Scribd

Join fellow Triupians for UX Trivia Night!

When: 6:30pm | Wednesday 6/10/09

Where: Raleigh Ale House at Brier Creek

How: Register Online – We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Know the difference between HCI and Hi-C? Do you make user interfaces in your Alpha-bits? Can you recite all the HTML4 tags? In reverse order?  Want to get to know other UX Professionals and win prizes?

Come out and join us for the first ever TriUPA UX Trivia Night. You’ll be able to show off your UX knowledge while answering user friendly trivia questions in a quest for fame and prizes.

This is a great chance to get to know other triangle area User Experience folks in a fun, relaxed atmosphere. There are a few prizes too:

• Chance to win free admission to a TriUPA workshop of your choice
• UX Books straight from our library
• Bragging rights, bragging rights, bragging rights!

TriUPA IA Summit 2009 Recap

This year marked the 10th anniversary of the annual IA Summit conference, and we were lucky enough to have six local colleagues (including myself) make it out to Memphis, TN for the event. In an effort to bring the Summit back to the community, we held a recap event last Thursday. We shared our favorite presentations, and some of the larger themes we noticed throughout the event.

ASIS&T event: Introduction to Content Management Systems (CMS)

The Carolinas Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology is hosting this workshop on content management systems…

Event details

There are roughly a gazillion open-source CMS products using a variety of means (PHP, Ruby on Rails, Java, blogging software, etc.) to manage documents, graphics, text, and other digital creations. They can also be used to manage web content, and hold the promise that all you need to do is create the content and leave the HTML markup and publishing to the CMS.

But just what exactly is a CMS? What does it look like? How does it work? Many CMS products are free or open-source–but does that mean they’re cheap in terms of the time you spend setting them up?

This event is intended for beginners or those new to the CMS idea. It’s especially for anyone who’s been asked to use a CMS to revamp their organization’s web site, but doesn’t know where to start or where to go for more information.

There will be no hands-on activities at this event, but there will be plenty of opportunity to see a few choice CMS products in action and to ask lots of questions.

When

Saturday, April 18

9 a.m.-1 p.m. (approx)

Where

Manning Hall, UNC-CH campus

Directions

Registration Fees

Students (with ID or student email address): $15

Members of STC or ASIS&T: $25

General: $35

You can pay via credit card at the cc:ASIS&T site.

Register now: https://www.asis.org/Chapters/carolinas/ccregform_041809.html

Sponsors

• Carolinas Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (cc:ASIS&T)
• STC Carolina
• NC State Chapter of the Society for Technical Communication

Program

9:00-9:30 “What Is A CMS? Do I Need One?”

9:40-10:10 Break-Out Groups (one presenter for each room, one CMS for each room)

10:20-10:50 Break-Out Groups

11:00-11:30 Break-Out Groups

11:30-Noon Lunch and chat

Noon-1p.m.  Continue eating during informal Q&A with all three presenters

Presenters

Jeff VanDrimmelen: “What is a CMS? Do I Need One?”

Dan Frey: WordPress

Julia Kulla-Mader: Drupal

Jonathan Pletzke: Joomla

Q&A session will be with all four presenters listed above.

Talk: Interaction Design for Novel Media Technologies

The School of Information & Library Science at UNC has an interesting seminar happening this Friday —

Talk: Interaction Design for Novel Media Technologies
Speaker: Dr. Hyowon Lee, Dublin City University

Manning Hall 208
UNC Chapel Hill
Friday April 3rd
12-1pm

Abstract:
Current R&D in media technologies such as Multimedia, Semantic Web and Sensor Web technologies are advancing in a fierce rate and will sure to become part of our important regular items in a ‘conventional’ technology inventory in near future. While the R&D nature of these technologies means their accuracy, reliability and robustness are not sufficient enough to be used in real world yet, we want to envision now the near-future where these technologies will have matured and used in real applications in order to explore and start shaping many possible new ways these novel technologies could be utilised. In this talk, some of this effort in designing novel applications that incorporate various media technologies as their backend will be presented. Examples include novel scenarios of LifeLogging application that incorporate automatic structuring of millions of photos passively captured from a SenseCam (wearable digital camera that automatically takes photos triggered by environmental sensors) and an interactive TV application incorporating a number of multimedia tools yet extremely simple and easy to use with a remote control in a lean-back position. The talk will conclude with remarks on how the design of novel applications that have no precedence or existing user base should require somewhat different approach from those suggested and practiced in conventional usability engineering methodology.