When Software Attacks!

@media Day 2 - Afternoon

I hadn’t really thought about it before, but Andy Budd has a very similar presentation style to my own. He’s incredibly enthusiastic and passionate about what he’s speaking about, and he wanders around waving his arms in an extremely animated way. Snap!

The topic of usability testing is an important one. I always try to impress upon our clients the need to see how the systems we build for them are used and tweak and fix accordingly. Andy’s approach to low-budget, formative testing to identify and solve usability issues during development as part of an agile approach struck a chord with me. I think that it’s important to have a dialog with ‘average’ users (i.e. not involved directly with development and therefore too close to a project to notice the problems) and to feed back into the development process what you find and the pain points you identify. Far better to find and fix during development than to force your product to fail testing or, even worse, to hit issues during rollout that hinder adoption.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 26, 2009

@media Day 2 - Morning

It’s a muggy day today. With thunderstorms expected, the morning air was thick as we walked over to the South Bank Centre.

I found Douglas Crockford’s opening session thoughtful. It wasn’t what I was expecting – I had anticipated a focus more on methodologies and approaches to improving quality. instead, it was an interesting and sometimes humorous examination as to why quality in software is such a difficult area, with an informative walk through the history of software thrown in.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 26, 2009

Joining in the background noise: I am now on Twitter

One of the reasons I enjoy conferences like @media is that I can be persuaded to change my mind on things. After a persuasive argument from Nick I’ve decided to alter my stance on twitter and give it a go for a while.

A few others recently have suggested that I should sign up to the microblogging system even if I didn’t plan to use it, just to make sure I got the nickname I wanted and nobody else could use it. I’ve never really bought into that kind of approach, and sometimes I wonder if that is as key an indicator as to the lack of importance I have personally come to place in social networking tools. I’m old enough that my first instinct if I want to socialise is to pick up the phone and arrange a pint with a mate.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 26, 2009

Places to eat on the South Bank in London

A set of conference posts wouldn’t be complete without a run down of the local culinary delights. We haven’t strayed far from the South Bank Centre for the past few days, but we’ve had a great variety of meals.

Wednesday night and Thursday lunchtime was Wagamamas. I love Wagamamas. There’s one in Leeds as well, and whilst Fuji Hero is perhaps more authentic, I just love the deserts at Wagamamas. I also have at least one of their recipe books, so I can try it at home! Busy though – we arrived just shy of seven in the evening of our arrival and the queue to get in didn’t really die down until after nine. The new teppanyaki soba is to be recommended.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Friday, June 26, 2009

@media 2009 Day 1 - Afternoon

Not providing lunch at the conference was perhaps a bit of a double edged sword. On the one hand, Wagamamas is just so close (mmm… chicken katsu curry); on the other hand, lots of people were nodding off in the warmth of the first session.

Which is a great shame, because Dan Rubin is a really good speaker (and singer, as it happens). His session was all about reflecting the real world in our user interfaces in order to make them much more usable. It was also about taking real items and using them in designs (such as real textures from scanned objects) because of the much better emotive affect that has with our users. It was pretty inspiring, even though at the end of the day everything he talked about should be common sense.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Thursday, June 25, 2009

@media Day 2 - Afternoon

@media Day 2 - Morning

Joining in the background noise: I am now on Twitter

Places to eat on the South Bank in London

@media 2009 Day 1 - Afternoon

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