Human Factors

The Adobe CS5 Roadshow visited Wellington yesterday, and Mike McHugh, Andrew Spaulding and Paul Burnett from Adobe Australia spent a whole day on stage – entertaining the crowd with all the new and amazing features in CS5. Apparently reaction from the people was not what these guys are used to – usually they’ll get a lot of “Oooooh”s and “Aaaaaah”s when presenting – but Wellingtonians are a little bit more reserved. My personal feeling is, that because in Wellington a lot of people work for government, many of the attendees won’t get an upgrade to their current software anytime soon. They can only dream of all the new features that could make their lives easier and increase productivity, it’s simply not their reality. I was sitting next to three ladies, who have just recently been upgraded from CS2 to CS4, and would in theory be entitled to a free upgrade to CS5 by Adobe – but “impact assessments” required by the organisation’s IT department would take a long time and are apparently rather expensive, so they simply won’t be upgraded.

But apart from the crowd being a bit quiet, it was a great show.

After the roadshow Mike, Andrew and Paul joined the Wellington Creative Suite User Group for a very special meeting. Adobe New Zealand sponsored an enormous cake to celebrate the release of CS5, and all attendees got some further insight into the new features. A software raffle at the end of the meeting saw one lucky user group member walk away with a brand new copy of a Premium Suite license.

What a great day – big thanks to Mike, Andrew and Paul again, and to all the other Adobe people, who made the roadshow and the user group meeting a highlight!

I’ve just returned from Sydney, where I attended my favorite conference – webDU. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the conference in general here – others (such as Dale Fraser or Michael Plank) have done that in great way already. But I thought I’d quickly share my main personal take-aways from some of the sessions. Since most of the attendees were hardcore developers, I guess I’ll have a different view on some of the topics covered. Here are my thoughts about selected events/sessions:

Software Requirements without Tears by Robin Hillard

Define your requirements by asking the right questions. A mini-manual to get those requirements right before starting the design/development. Robin finished his presentations with a little quiz, and I teamed up with a friendly chap next to me. Although I paid attention during the talk, we really sucked at identifying some requirements. Certainly something I need to follow up on.

Usability: Thinking about the user, not for them by Richard Turner-Jones

Richard was around when I had the second-scariest experience of my life. Only 3 people witnessed me freaking out on the horrible ferris wheel at Disneyland during the conference party at MAX in Anaheim a couple of years ago. Surely I had to attend his session, especially since it wasn’t solely development focussed. The main take-away for me was the link to www.guimagnets.com for some sort of a prototyping on a fridge (or whiteboard), which I wasn’t aware of before. The talk covered some of the basics only, which was ok since it was advertised for general audience and it was my own choice to still go there…

Wireframes – From Screen Concepts to User Interaction by Mia Horrigan

Mia presented a case study and shared her experience with a project that went wrong in several areas, and she explained how she brought it back on track. I always appreciate a speaker’s personal experience – you can read about the theory behind a topic in books, blogs and magazines. But if someone tells me “That’s what I did and that’s why it worked or didn’t work”, that’s when it gets useful for me.

The Hotness of Agile Software Development by Matthew Hodgson

My favorite of webDU. I fell in love with Matt’s presentation style at last year’s webDU, and he didn’t disappoint me this year either. Unfortunately he gave some insight into how his team works, and that totally made me want to work for them. Look for yourself.

The Mobile User Experience by Rod Farmer

I now have a deep respect for all the designers/developers out there, who manage to deliver a consistent user experience across different mobile platforms, screen sizes, networks, carriers, etc, etc, etc.

The Value of a Ruber Chicken: better team development through shame… and tools by Tim Buntel

Tim just recently moved to Sydney from the US, and it was great so see that he and his family seem to have fully adjusted to life in the southern hemisphere. His talks are always fun and enjoyable – it doesn’t really matter what he’s talking about. I would probably even go and listen to him speaking even if it was about some alien hardcore coding language, but this time I was lucky and I learnt more about different approaches of version control.

After a Round Table session with some of the key speakers (highly entertaining, but no women on the panel) sadly the conference came to an end. On the day after the conference, us Adobe user group managers from New Zealand and Australia held a mini UGM summit (including a surf lesson), and in the evening I interviewed Peter Bell (which is available on createordie.de or interpreted by a robot via Google Translate). The legendary Aftershow-Party at Deamon HQ brought the whole conference experience to an end.

The slogan of the conference is”Like a Rock Concert for Geeks”, and I can totally relate to this statement. And for me it was a “Beach Party with Friends” as well!

* Photos from the webdu2010 Flickr stream

This week is Webstock week. Webstock is a great web conference in Wellington/New Zealand. The main conference days will be Thursday and Friday this week, but the days before that are filled with workshops and networking opportunities. On Monday I’ve attended “Designing and Sustaining Creative Communities” with Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, and I was planning a long blog entry about this workshop. But Dean Stringer from Waikato University was much faster and he did such a good job wrapping up the workshop, that I will simply refer to his blog. A big thanks Dean, for such a great summary!