CHI 2007: Day 3
I’m finally starting to get over the jet-lag, which is good… but it’s almost 11pm now and I’m feeling pretty worn out.
Today was a fun day that consisted of the following:
- Course: Ajax Design and Usability
- Experience Reports: Development Process
- Microsoft Party
- Google Party
The course was a good introduction to Ajax and talked about some of the limitations that we should consider when using it in our websites/web application. The instructor showed some really interesting examples of change blindness and selective attention. These are definitely common Ajax problems and there are some ways of overcoming them (like with colors and animation), but you have to be pretty careful to make sure people’s attention is in the right place.
The experience reports session was also pretty interesting. I was particularly interested to see how PowerPoint can be used as a prototyping tool. I had read about that before, but seeing it in action was really cool.
After that, I pretty much crashed. I’ve been feeling tired ever since I came here and I took a much-needed nap. After that, I went to a couple of the “hospitality parties”, one sponsored by Microsoft and the other by Google. Those were fun (of course!) and I got a free Google hat out of it. I was hoping to win something from Microsoft in the raffle they had, but I wasn’t lucky enough.
As I was typing this up, a woman came up to me and asked me if I work at Inxight (it’s on my name badge). I’ve had a number of people tell me they think they know what we do, but this woman actually did know! She said she worked at Raytheon and had our entity extraction software installed right on her laptop. I tried to find out what specifically it was, but she didn’t know off the top of her head. Still, how cool is that?!
And on that note, I am off to bed.
(flickr tag: chi 2007)
