WritersUA 2009: Day 1

Day 1 of WritersUA 2009 started out rainy and cold in Seattle, so we were all very pleased to be inside a warm and cosy conference venue like The Westin.

I attended these sessions:

• Opening Session: Joe Welinske interviewed Scott McCloud, the cartoonist who did the manual for the Google Chrome browser in comic book form (see https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/interview-with-scott-mccloud/ for details)
• Contextual awareness: Responding to user actions and behavior (Bogo Vatavec) Bogo spoke about how he saw user assistance (UA) moving in the future, with Help and other UA being delivered according to your role, your location, or other attributes that personalized the content for you and your needs (e.g. Amazon). He took the paradigm further and delved into topics such as adaptive user interfaces and artifical intelligence, probability theory and machine learning, modeling, and scenario development.
• Microsoft Technologies: Sandcastle Documentation Compiler (Anand Raman), and Help 3 (April Reagan): Anand gave an overview of the Sandcastle developments, followed by April who told us about Help3 which is ‘coming soon’. Unfortunately, April wasn’t able to demonstrate any of the work done so far as it seems there was a major shift in design the previous Friday! It was disappointing that there was no demo, or even screen shots of prototypes as I’m sure many of us came just to see what it was going to look like and how it would behave.

and I spoke in the final session on Techniques for Reviewing a User Interface, a repeat of the session I did at WritersUA 2008.

My other conference links:

• Interview with Scott McCloud (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/interview-with-scott-mccloud/)
• Interview with Mary Jo Foley (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/interview-with-mary-jo-foley/)
• WritersUA 2009: Day 2 (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/writersua-2009-day-2/)
• User Assistance in Web Forms: Luke Wroblewski (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/user-assistance-in-web-forms/)
• WritersUA 2009: Day 3 (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/writersua-2009-day-3/)
• I just spotted a one-legged woman… (https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/04/03/i-just-spotted-a-one-legged-woman/)

Related links:

• http://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/writersua-2009-day-1/

[Links last checked April 2009]