education building

This morning on the CBC’s early edition, Rick interviewed Qixing Zheng, “Microsoft Canada’s first User Experience Advisor“. I was surprised they were doing such an interview in the first place, but more so that she is M. Canada’s FIRST user experience professional. I guess this responsibility has, until now been directed from the mothership or something. Regardless, it gave me some hope that my own role (as ‘experience designer‘ for several years now) here in the LIDC may become a little more recognized and understood. Of course it also begs the question, is such a position even needed at a university? A question I will attempt to tackle in future posts here.

The announcement was made back in March on the “User Experience Connection“, and I was interested to learn that Qixing is a masters graduate from UBC in Human Computer Interaction. I thought the interview went fairly well and I appreciated her explanation of what the role of the user experience professional is all about (even Ricki seemed to get it).  Her website states that her passion in this area is

…deeply rooted in helping people to improve their user experiences with the technology they rely on everyday. To me, a good user experience is simple, consistent, pleasing, and reliable.

I have been trying to update my profile page on the wiki we use in the LIDC (here, but soon maybe here), with a small blurb about my approach to creating better user experiences on SFU websites, and the projects I have worked on.  So far I’d say its still in an early draft form, but I look forward to articulating what I try to do here, especially in light of the recent news.

Im sitting in a NV session right now being put on by John Maxwell from SFU publishing. His workshop on ‘Designing Smarter Wikis‘ is showing some of his work on the Thinkubator site. He is using Zwiki on Zope/Plone engine, but you wouldnt be able to tell that from looking at it. SWEET! He is working WITH his grad students on the development of the site itself, not merely using it as a learning tool which is the first thing that strikes me as unique. Kind of a ‘media is the message approach. John is doing some interesting work in customizing his wiki, and making some simple options for authors to quickly and easily make different kind of wiki pages. For example, some pages can automatically list all their child pages in a sidebar, which could be very handy.

The discussion is lively, and it is apparent there is a LOT of interest in this topic, but we are at a nerd conference after all. It seems like they are beginning to broach the topic of RSS feeds in and from wikis which I am very interested in. At this poin,t the only use of RSS I see in conventional wikis is a ‘recent updates feed’ that simply lets you know WHEN a page has been updated. Well is kinda novel, but not really useful. In the wiki we have set up for our work (a wakka wiki) , my nemesis has hacked in some functionality to display RSS feeds right onto the wiki page. Now THAT is a handy feature! On my home page for instance, I can aggregate several of my feeds that are directly related to my work, such as this blog of my google starred items.

well off to another session, so quick.  but im looking forward to following up with John on this later.  great talk!