• 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.

Intended audience

About the workshop

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.

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.

Speaker
Amy Hathaway, a Water Quality Engineer from the City of Raleigh, will be talking about the Fred Fletcher Park Water Garden design project. The project is unique in that it addresses the environmental issues of storm water runoff, water pollution and erosion in an aesthetically pleasing way that creates an enjoyable and educational park experience for visitors.

Design Challenge
In keeping with this year’s theme, we are featuring a design challenge. The challenge is open to club members, undergraduate and graduate students in related fields and asks them to solve some of today’s sustainability design issues. Participants will present their solutions and ideas during this year’s event. Learn more about the design challenge >>

For more information or questions about this year’s event contact:

Rebekah Sedaca – rebatilley at yahoo.com  or Laura Blanchard  – laura.blanchard at mac.com

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

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.

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).

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.

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

A huge thanks to everyone who came out, and, as promised, here are the presentations we talked about:

Amanda McGuire (BCBSNC)

• “ROI: Speaking the Language of Business,” Eric Reiss
• “Using Enterprise IA to Support Business Strategy,” Gary Carlson & Samantha Starmer
• “When Appeasement is Not Enough — Or, How to Work Within ‘Government Time’,” Naomi Norman
• “Strategies for Enabling UX to Play a More Strategic Role,” Richard Anderson & Craig Peters
• “Turning HiPPOs into Allies: How to Connect With Powerful People in Your Organization,” Samantha Starmer

Download Amanda’s Slides (PPT)

Javier Velasco (UNC SILS)

• “Experience Themes: An Element of Story Applied to Design,” Cindy Chastain
• “Evangelizing Yourself,” Whitney Hess

Anita Crescenzi (UNC Health Sciences Library)

• Dr. Michael Wesch’s Keynote
• “Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon,” Jared Spool

Download Anita’s Slides (PPTX)

Jonell Gades (Fidelity)

• “Lessons from Slime Mold: How to Survive and Thrive in Ever-Changing Organizational Environments,” Kate Rutter
• “Motivating Teams: Motivating Teams: Inspiring People to Do Great Work,” Dorelle Rabinowitz
• “Beyond Findability: Reframing IA Practice & Strategy for Turbulent Times,” Andrew Hinton, Livia Labate, Matt Milan & Joe Lamantia

Download Jonell’s Slides (PPT)

Jackson Fox (Viget Labs)

• “Is Interaction Necessary?,” Karl Fast
• “Digital Space & the Context Problem,” Andrew Hinton

Download Jackson’s Slides (PPTX)

Other Resources

In addition to our slides and the presentations linked above, you can see many more presentations on Slideshare, and listen to podcasts of the sessions on Boxes & Arrows.

• IA Summit 2009 presentations on Slideshare
• IA Summit 2009 podcasts at Boxes & Arrows

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
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.