Category: Blog

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The Best User Experience Education Programs in NYC

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity.

What are the best User Experience education programs based in New York? Are there any college accredited programs?

NYU has a degree in its Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) which I believe is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, Masters program in the field.

School of Visual Arts has a highly regarded MFA program in Interaction Design. The founder Liz Danzico is now head of UX at NPR.

Pratt School of Information just started offering a masters in Information Experience Design (M.S.). I took the courses for a UX concentration for my MSLIS degree before the program was formalized in 2015. The teaching staff is quite good, with many industry leaders in adjunct roles. Pratt also offers a design BFA and MFA that includes UX.

Parsons School of Design at the New School offers undergraduate and graduate programs that cover UX but are along more traditional disciplines (communications design, product design, industrial design, design and technology, transdisciplinary design). The idea is that UX is necessary within all these areas.

There are several professional programs that offer Certificate/boot camp courses. Recruiters are mixed on the value of the programs, but they are good continuing education options or for transferring into the field. They are not highly regarded as a replacement for a BA, though could be an alternative to a Masters degree.

An alternative might be to enter into a traditional Library and Information Science program. There are a few accredited LIS programs in the NYC area, including Pratt Institute, Queens College, St. Johns University and Long Island University in New York City and Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. These programs teach the fundamentals of knowledge organization, information seeking behavior, taxonomic theory and related technologies, and have a growing interest in providing courses in user experience topics.

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Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia: Reflections on IA Summit 2017

I was honored once again to represent Wikipedia at the 2017 Information Architecture Summit team is in Vancouver last month. The IA Summit is an annual conference of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). It was hosted at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver on March 22-26 where I led two Wikipedia sessions. On Saturday afternoon, March 25, I presented a talk called Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia which was aligned with the conference theme of diversity in information architecture and UX design. Then on Sunday, March 26, I hosted a Wikipedia IA Edit-a-thon during the lunch session.

View of Vancouver from my hotel
View of Vancouver from my hotel

Prior to the session, my husband and I did some sightseeing to take in the diversity of the city. After breakfast in Gastown Friday morning, we stopped at the Vancouver Police Museum, which is in a poor neighborhood, with remnants of women’s residences and SROs, soup kitchens and storefront churches. The museum is located in the former Coroner’s Building, next to an active police station. We almost didn’t go into the museum, due to a homeless man sleeping in the entrance, with his blanket and the remains of a meal from the prior night. We wondered if maybe it was not open that day, but as we were turning to leave, a docent arrived with the keys to open up. She later told us that the man has been a regular feature at the museum for about three years. They do what they can to make sure he is safe and warm, she said, but the city is unfortunately seeing an epidemic of drug use and homelessness, and has been forced to become very creative in addressing the problem.

Inside the museum were exhibits on confiscated weapons, youth gangs and unsolved murders, and a preserved coroner’s exam room with two examining tables and a bullet hole in the window over one of the sinks. The story behind it was classic gangster: Someone didn’t want evidence revealed, so they tried to assassinate the Coroner while he was performing an autopsy. The Coroner survived and the shooter was charged.

As interesting as that was, I was there to explore diversity so I turned to the exhibit on youth violence. Many groups were represented including (Southeast Asian) Indian, White, First Nation and other groups. The exhibit addressed the challenges of policing in a diverse community and offered ways to promote dialog between youth and law enforcement. It was a thought-provoking display.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Not all people who self-identify or are identified with the same group share he same outlooks, values or ideas.”[/quote]

I found the following panel which provides good insight for being sensitive to diverse populations, and which I mentioned during my talk, since it calls to mind the sensitivity needed when describing people or groups in a Wikipedia article.

 

Diversity within groups diverse, display at Vancouver Police Museum exhibit on youth-police relationship
Image by Noreen Whysel. March 24, 2017.

After the Police Museum, we took a walk around Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, led by tour guide Robert Sung, to learn about one of the many diverse groups who have made their home in one of the Pacific Northwest’s most diverse and beautiful cities. During the tour, which included Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden, pastry and BBQ pork shops, an herbal remedy store, a Buddhist temple and a master tea salon, we learned about the community’s quest for balance between older ways and assimilation with BC culture. Our guide described not only the Chinese population but also the population of addicted drug users living in the neighborhood. At a statue commemorating the Chinese participation in the railroads and World War II, an older Chinese woman approached us, smoking marijuana. She smiled and greeted us, politely tapped out her joint, placed it in a container, and proceeded to explain her point of view as to what British Columbia owes to the Chinese settlers. Our guide thanked her for offering her point of view, and we went on to get dim sum.

Back at the Hyatt the next day, and setting the stage for my presentation was a very interesting panel discussion, Indigitization: Supporting the Digitization, Preservation, and Management of Indigenous Community Knowledge, discussing the University of British Columbia’s Indigitization project, an effort to preserve fragments of indigenous community knowledge on rapidly deteriorating magnetic media. Panelists included Alissa Cherry, research manager at the Audrey & Harry Hawthorn Library & Archives at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Sarah DuPont, Indigitization project manager and Aboriginal Engagement Librarian at UBC Library, and Indigitization project technology lead, Gerry Lawson, a member of the Heiltsuk First Nations and coordinator for the Oral History and Language Lab, at the UBC Museum of Anthropology.

IMG_1664
Image from Twitter by Marianne Sweeny, used with permission. @msweeny: “Helping cultures preserve their assets is a critical role for IA, UX and content as well @IAsummit @asist_org” March 25, 2017.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]“The panelists in this session share an awareness that existing information practices are firmly rooted in Western knowledge systems that are not always appropriate when dealing with Indigenous traditional knowledge” — IA Summit Featured Events email[/quote]

Image from Twitter by Jackie Wolf, used with permission. @flaxenhaircynic: “Great discussion of the archival challenges of First Nations oral traditions #ias17 @IAsummit @asist_org @xpaigen @dupontsarah @LawsonGerry” March 25, 2017.
Image from Twitter by Jackie Wolf, used with permission. @flaxenhaircynic: “Great discussion of the archival challenges of First Nations oral traditions #ias17 @IAsummit @asist_org @xpaigen @dupontsarah @LawsonGerry” March 25, 2017.

Following this panel, my session on Diversity and Inclusion covered efforts by The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to improve the creation and discovery of content about underrepresented groups. I spoke about WMF funded projects like Women in Red, Art+Feminism, Wiki Loves Pride, AfroCROWD, Indigenous Film and Media and Indigenous Storytellers WikiThon. I presented a deck that included many of the slides from the Art + Feminism training presentation, showing ways that Wikipedia content rules may both support diversity and inadvertently promote bias, as well as ways IA professionals can develop considered approaches to improving discoverability within Wikipedia guidelines by employing strategic tagging, categories and linked Wikidata. I encouraged participants to seek out and attend Wikipedia events in their area.

Twitter comments about the Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia session at IA Summit 2017
Twitter comments about the Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia session at IA Summit 2017

On Sunday, March 26, I hosted a Wikipedia editathon during the lunch session. While brief relative to a more traditional Wikipedia edit-a-thon, this session was meant to give attendees an opportunity to learn about editing tools that may be useful to information architects and knowledge professionals and also presented an easy way to make a meaningful contribution to the encyclopedia.

We welcomed student volunteers and facilitators from the IA community as well as the local Vancouver area to help out at the Edit-a-thon. This was a great opportunity for community engagement at one of the premier Information Architecture conferences. Unfortunately a UBC librarian (and Vancouver Wikimedian) whom I had invited to help facilitate was unable to attend due to illness. I didn’t blame anyone for not wanting to come into town, as it was a rather dreary, rainy weekend.

Image by Noreen Whysel. March 26, 2017.
Image by Noreen Whysel. March 26, 2017.

Ten people attended the Edit-a-thon lunch, including three facilitators. Conference co-chair Marianne Sweeny, Veronica Erb and myself helped walk new users through how to edit and save an article, add a category and select articles to work on from the event dashboard. About half of the attendees already had Wikipedia editing experience and half were new to editing. Most understood how to make edits and were curious about Wikidata and categorization tools. Most of the attendees signed into the dashboard and assigned themselves an article. A few felt confident enough to make some contributions.

I was hoping to recruit editors for WikiProject Information Architecture, which has a dual purpose to make Information Architecture tools and processes discoverable and to offer our IA experience to the Wikipedia community to improve discoverability of topics generally. Since the session was short, roughly 45 minutes including retrieving a lunch from another floor, we anticipated mostly learning and a small amount of editing. That said, seven people made contributions to pages tagged by WikiProject Information Architecture including at least one person working offsite.

IA Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at IA Summit. Images by Noreen Whysel. March 27, 2017

IMG_1640
IA Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at IA Summit. Images by Noreen Whysel. March 26, 2017.

We tried out the new Outreach Dashboard from WMF Labs for tracking Wikipedia editing events and found it to be quite simple to use, though not all participants registered and it wasn’t clear that all pages the attendees worked on were included. As an information tool, the dashboard helps keep track of who registered (by Wikipedia username), which articles they worked on, how many edits they made and the total data added in kilobytes. A full count of the impact of the session will be included on the WikiProject Information Architecture site.

In spite of being a brief session, I believe we made a strong case for bringing information architecture skills to the table, so to speak, to improve information in Wikipedia. New editors were quite interested in the power of infoboxes and Wikidata to reach beyond the encyclopedia to augment discovery of important topics. Alas, I was disappointed to find when I returned home that WikiProject Information Architecture was marked for deletion, pending an explanation and evidence for preserving these efforts. I was grateful this didn’t happen before my event, but acknowledge that it has been difficult to move the community beyond the kind of support that gets Wikipedia sessions on the schedule at a major conference toward active participation and hands on editing. My aspiration is that if I have engaged forty people to attend a talk about diversity in Wikipedia and ten people to participate in an Edit-a-thon, perhaps more will follow.

Anyone who may be interested in participation should sign up and start editing at WikiProject Information Architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Information_Architecture.

Links:

Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia Slide Deck: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/nwhysel/diversity-and-inclusion-in-wikipedia

IA Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Training Deck: https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/nwhysel/ia-wikipedia-editathon

WikiProject Information Architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Information_Architecture

IA Summit Vancouver: http://iasummit.org

Wikipedia Session Descriptions: https://iasummit2017.sched.com/type/community+working+session

Outreach Dashboard: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Information_Architecture_Summit/IA_and_Wikipedia/students

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Impact Hub: Help Millennials Make Better Financial Decisions

On January 31st, Decision Fish led a lively session on how to Help Millennials Make Better Financial Decisions as part of Impact Hub NYC’s 100 Days of Impact program. 100 Days of Impact is intended to figure out what we can do as a community to address concerns and make an impact in an era of fear, uncertainty and doubt. We recommend that our readers in New York City participate in future workshops.

Planning for an Uncertain Future

Tim Herrera, the “Your Money” columnist for the New York Times, reported in October 2016 that only 24 percent of millennials have “basic financial knowledge,” and just 27 percent are getting professional financial help, according to a study from George Washington University’s Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Half of millennials are concerned about student loan debt, nearly half couldn’t come up with $2,000 in 30 days in case of an emergency and only a third are satisfied with their financial situation, according to the study.

All of this is even before the uncertainty under Trump’s administration. How will this administration’s proposed changes affect the outcome for Millennials who are already struggling? The goal of our workshop was to provide millennials tools they can use to make wise financial decisions, as well as to ease concerns about the uncertainty and to uncover hidden opportunities.

Given that we were only ten days into the new administration, uncertainty around these changes are rather high. Questions abound, such as as whether the Fiduciary Rule, signed in June 2016 to protect consumers from conflict in retirement planning, will be upheld or if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from abusive practices and provides tools for making smart financial decisions, will continue to be funded.

We began by discussing how uncertainty about a variety of potential changes in financial regulations is universally high and then drilled down to specific concerns of the millennial generation. Workshop attendees were predominantly millennials, with a few Generation Xers.

Key financial challenges that millennials face with respect to debt, saving, spending and planning include the following:

  • Student loan debt totals $1.4 Trillion in the US; and it’s still rising.
  • Mistrust is high; between “alternative facts” and the fear of financial firms profiting off our ignorance, how do we know who to trust?
  • Low signal to noise ratio; an abundance of information, while helpful can be overwhelming.
  • Obamacare may get repealed; will we be able to afford healthcare?
  • Unemployment is low now, but will proposed deregulation help or harm future job security?

In addition to these external challenges, cognitive bias is a challenge that comes from within. We discussed some of the cognitive biases that get in the way of making sound financial decisions. Fear of uncertainty, of missing out on a good deal, of being exposed to our peers as financial novices, present bias, choice/information overload, inattention and procrastination were all concerns that workshop attendees brought up.

Framing the Decision-Making Process

To address uncertainty, it is helpful to follow a framework for decision-making that considers potentially unknown challenges. The OODA Loop, developed by Colonel John Boyd of the U.S. Air Force, describes a process for decision-making as a feedback loop between observation and action in which decisions are oriented by various aspects of known information and past experiences. The orientation is continually updated based on unfolding circumstances and interactions within the environment.

OODA Framework, Developed by Col. John Boyd of the US Air Force

In the OODA Loop framework, it is assumed that circumstances and interactions result directly from actions of adversaries, but they can often be circumvented by the habits and biases of an individual that prevent the actor from considering new and changing information. Without adequately processing the feedback, we may jump from directly from observation to action to our detriment.

As we discussed the Challenges, Characters and Components of the financial decision-making landscape, we drew a chart to come up with the Characteristics of a good outcome. These Four Cs are shown in the image below.

4Cs of financial security for Millennials

Components of financial decisions for Millennials include savings, student loans, literacy training, credit cards and prepaid cards, a budget and nudges, or the defaults settings and reminders that affect our actions. There may be many more components, each affected by its own set of constraints and opportunities.

Characteristics of a desired outcome include a secure retirement, productivity-enabling technologies, automated actions, financial literacy and awareness, the ability to track expenses and a growing preference among Millennials for experiences over material goods. Someone mentioned robo-advisors as an example of a helpful technology, but that may be concerning if the underlying algorithms are not transparent or understood well by the user.

Challenges, discussed above, include debt, mistrust, “alternative facts” or noise and misinformation, uncertainty around the future of healthcare, choice overload and cognitive biases.

Characters include all of the individuals and entities involved in helping make a financial decision. These include the individual making a decision, lenders, bursars, insurers, advisors, brokers, parents and other people who have been there, as well as organizations like the CFPB and the Trump Administration.

At one point an attendee added a fifth C: Catastrophes on the horizon. These additional challenges highlight concerns about uncertain future outcomes and led to a lively discussion of the fears Millennials have about external factors over which they may not have control: loss of healthcare, loss of financial protections, the potential institution of a national austerity budget or even war.

What Can We Do Today?

After some discussion, we came up with the following things we can do to make an impact.

Checklist for improving Millennial's financial decision-making

  1. Financial Education: Create formal programs and apps to educate people about financial decision-making. (Shameless plug for Decision Fish app here)
  2. Community Programs: Get financial education into community centers, high schools, libraries, immigration and language centers and other community organizations.
  3. Create and promote tools such as those provided by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Protect and monitor the availability of CFPB tools and archive them in case the bureau is defunded.
  4. Discuss finances with friends to create a comfort level around what we know and don’t know about money.
  5. Create a “financial GPS” to monitor and inform people about their daily spending habits.
  6. Develop a guide for student debt that addresses present bias, or the tendency to prioritize near term gains over long term security.
  7. Encourage your company to set up a student loan forgiveness program.
  8. Set up a daily bank balance reminder.
  9. Start guidance early: teach financial literacy in high school or even earlier.
  10. Sign up for automated savings where available.
  11. Invest in social lending programs, like Kiva, to give underserved borrowers a leg up.

Of these ideas, workshop attendees felt the most effective way to make an immediate impact was to talk to their friends about what they learned, and to be alert for possible changes to Federal financial regulations. Keeping each other informed, sharing new apps and resources and asking honest questions is a way for Millennials to manage the doubt and insecurity around their financial futures. Knowing that we are not alone is a good lesson to take away from our activity.

Written by Noreen Whysel

Decision Fish is Hiring!

Sign up for updates or to try our our app prototype.

Learn More

Learn more and sign up for Impact Hub NYC’s 100 Days of Impact at http://nyc.impacthub.net/100days/.

Learn about tools for framing observations and actions, sourced from Dave Gray’s Gamestorming exercises:

The 4 Cs: http://www.designgames.com.au/4cs/

Create a matrix of Components, Challenges, Characters involved in decision-making and the Characteristics of a good outcome.

Actions for Retrospectives: http://gamestorming.com/games-for-any-meeting/actions-for-retrospectives/

Similar to 4Cs, Actions for Retrospectives helps you review past events or decisions and create future actions.

Spectrum Mapping: http://gamestorming.com/games-for-decision-making/spectrum-mapping/

Prioritize ideas along a team-defined scale.

Impact and Effort Matrix: http://gamestorming.com/games-for-decision-making/impact-effort-matrix-2/

Frame a goal in terms of a “What to do” or “What we need” question and prioritize outcomes by highest impact and least effort.

Impact Hub NYC interviews Decision Fish (with apologies for the 90 degree tilt – we will update if Impact Hub uploads a corrected video) https://www.facebook.com/impacthubnyc/videos/1562798330401295

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What to Ask? Contract to Permanent Salary

So you’ve been offered a job at a company where you are doing contract work. That’s great news! You’ve shown them your value and they trust you and want you on the team permanently. But you may be thinking, “Am I at a disadvantage in negotiating a salary? The client already knows what they are paying me and the full time position may entail additional or different responsibilities. How do I convert my contract rate to a fair, permanent salary?”

I imagine this question will come up for a lot of freelancers like me particularly in the United States as the uncertainty in the private health insurance market forces us to consider moving to a full time job with an employer provided plan. A Facebook inquiry from Louis Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media prompted an interesting discussion of the relationship between contract fees and full time salary.

Rate negotiations are always delicate conversations. As a freelancer, I have a standard rate chart with adjustments for my role (UX of one or part of a team), length of contract (fees go up the shorter the term) and whether I expect to develop new skills or increase my network (fees may go down). My fee schedule isn’t public. It’s a set of starting points that make sense to me based on what I’m offering to do.

But the talking points get trickier when you are negotiating a full time salary with a company where you already have a contract. Many people use a simple fraction to convert an hourly rate to an annual salary, with reasonable justification for the conversion, and expand that to a range that takes into consideration various perks and responsibilities at the new job. But in this case, your client already knows what they pay you and may or may not utilize a similar conversion. The goal is to find a range of numbers in which both you and your client are comfortable and negotiate from there.

Start with a Rule of Thumb

Here are some rules of thumb suggested by friends of Lou, starting with an average $100/ hour rate, as reported in the IA Institute’s 2015 salary survey:

  • Multiply your hourly rate by $1,000, e.g. $100/hour = $100,000/year
  • Multiply your hourly rate by 2/3 then multiply by 1000, e.g. $100/hour x ⅔ = $67; $67 x 1000 = $67,000
  • Multiply your hourly rate by 50-60% then multiply by 1000, e.g.
    • $100/hour x .5 = $50,000
    • $100/hour x .6 = $60,000

The above calculations give you a range of $50,000 to $100,000 for a contract rate of $100/hour. This is a rather broad range, but will give you a sense of where your client might think you should fall. You don’t want to be too alarmed when they offer you the lower number, but the higher number may not be in the company’s budget. There is clearly a lot of room for negotiation.

Then Make Some Adjustments

What is the total cost of your freelance business now, not just in expenses but also in risk? Some freelancers charge a premium rate for short term contracts or for speculative work to offset the risk of missing out on a steady opportunity or the risk that a project may not go through to completion. If you joined a relatively risky project your contract rate may be on the high end of what a more established company would be willing to pay.

Is your contract full time? If so, it is possible that your rate is somewhat lower than if you were called in for a shorter term, or faster turnaround. If you are not typically 100% billable, and include this in your current hourly rate, you may wish to make an adjustment to reflect the fact that you will be 100% employed in a full time job. (As a contractor, you may or may not already be putting in 40 hour weeks).

Andrew Boyd in Singapore suggests that in a big company, the salary offer would likely be a “market rate,” based on their standard “role banding” matrix, which is then adjusted to facilitate a conversion. These role bands are likely rather fixed at an established organization. There may be some wiggle room in a startup or a new or restructuring practice. For example, there was a time in my previous life when my department was restructuring its salary matrix after a corporate reorganization. When they released the new matrix I realized that, unless I was promoted, I would be ineligible for a raise because someone in Houston in the level above me negotiated a terrible starting salary, which they decided to use as a base for that level. There were no positions available to promote me to so I could have been stuck there for years, if I hadn’t brought it up with senior management. If a salary matrix confines what the client can offer, a tactic could be to negotiate for the next higher level position, if agreeable and you can draw out a plan for what you add to the team at that level.

Don’t be surprised if your client has already considered a potential conversion to full time salary when they negotiated your hourly contract rate. Depending on where they work in the company, they may also have no clue what the full-package value of their offer is. Again, this is tricky, but it could be helpful at that point to have a conversation with someone in the HR office, something that may be easier to request if you are already working for a company than if you were applying as an outside candidate.

Equity and Other Perks

Another thing to consider is whether your rate includes adjustments for health insurance, training, conferences, office space and other administrative expenses that you have as a freelancer that normally would be provided by an employer. I was able to justify taking many lower rate nonprofit clients for years while I was on my husband’s employer-provided medical plan, because medical insurance wasn’t an issue and my administrative costs were low. I increased rates significantly (and alas took on fewer nonprofit clients) when he started consulting from home, because our overhead increased significantly.

Health insurance may not be an issue where you are. Because health care is nationalized in the United Kingdom, the above calculations will also be different. Our friends Ian Fenn and Elizabeth Buie offered a calculation for UK rates: 50%. That means a rate of £100/hour would be £50,000 per year.

A good reminder from Kaleem Khan is to consider whether the benefits being offered are in fact ones you will use. “It depends if you’re talking about cash/base salary or the entire package,” he said. “One needs to look at both frames of reference. A lower salary can be justified if one will maximize benefits but you’ll leave money on the table if a package has benefits that will not be used.”

Below are additional questions to ask, any of which may be factors in your negotiation:

  • Are you a direct 1099 contract or did an agency place you? If an agency placed you there may be an additional fee the client is paying (something like 15-25% of the total hourly cost of hiring you) that may or may not be on the table when negotiating a full time salary.
  • Will you get an equity share or other profit sharing package? If so, is there an employer match? When do contributions vest?
  • Is life/disability/medical insurance included? Some companies, particular smaller startups, are not required to offer these benefits. (Companies that employ under 50 employees in the US are not required to provide health insurance).
  • How many days off can you take? Some employers are generous with vacation and personal time off. Others, not so much.
  • What other benefits are offered to full time employees? Gym memberships, marketplace discounts, financial advisory services, meals and other perks may also be included.
  • Is there a probationary period? Benefits may become more attractive the longer you stay with a company.
  • How often are employees evaluated? Frequent evaluations could mean frequent opportunities for pay increases or promotion.

I hope this has been helpful in figuring out what a reasonable salary might be for contract staff. And congratulations on your offer!

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Data Detox: A Journey into My Digital Past

What Strange Wonderful Things Lurk in Your Digital Footprint?

While running a Data Detox, I came across a review of my 2016 DH Week Workshop, “Pinterest as Digital Exhibition” from Pratt student, Akaya Sato. 

This was interesting. I did the detox primarily in the hopes of reducing my data footprint. I knew I might find strange and potentially, dare I say, scandalous (or at least worrisome) information about myself that I didn’t want out there. Once upon a time a boss of mine informed me that my posts to a maternity forum and at least one post I made to a video game cheat code list were easily findable in a Yahoo! search. So yeah, pretty embarrassing. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find clues to a mini Noreen Whysel fandom. At the risk of expanding my data footprint ever so slightly, here’s a peek at Akaya’s review and some background.

For the workshop, I presented a set of Pinterest boards that I have been curating for the research group, Architecture_MPS. These boards focus on conferences and journal issues published by Architecture_MPS as well as topics the group covers, such as Housing – Critical Futures and the Mediated City. Additional boards cover events, exhibitions, books, films and political issues around architecture and related design.

“By providing these Pinterest boards, AMPS emphasizes collaboration with other institutions. With their contributions, many users, including architecture firms, can recognize the significance of AMPS and raise awareness about architecture. Institutions and nonprofit organizations utilizing social media advance the public awareness by collaborating and highlighting community engagements over the same field.”

I knew some of the attendees would be from the museum community so as an exercise, we created an example set from my MetIllumination project, covering devotional art represented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We explored many ways to document and annotate art objects by pinning links to articles, provenance records and other related materials that describe the artifacts and encourage discussion and sharing.

“Since many of the attendees were staff members from institutions and museums, the ‘Fire and Light: Illumination in Religious Art‘ website demonstrates a great example for archivists and librarians to utilize Pinterest and display visual images of the institutions ephemera.”

When I did the data detox, I expected to find things that needed to be removed, deleted or forgotten. I certainly wasn’t expecting to find a review of a small talk at a digital humanities event. In any event it was nice to find someone gleaned enough from my little workshop, that they posted a review for their fellow classmates. But it also made me wonder what else might be out there that is good, but hidden among my digital footprint.

So I kept looking and found a couple other things that I found delightful, including two published books where I was mentioned in acknowledgements, one that I knew about: Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s book Pervasive Information Architecture, where I somehow made it above Bruce Springsteen (but below Richard Saul Wurman) in the thank yous. Quite an accomplishment. The second was Aaron Irizarry and Adam Connor’s Discussing Design, which I own and have read, but somehow missed my name being mentioned in the acknowledgements. (Thanks, Guys!)

I won’t tell you about the things I found that weren’t so delightful. I am working through the Data Detox advice to reduce the prominence of these items.

Have you done a data detox recently? What have you uncovered?

Read Akaya’s review: http://dh.prattsils.org/blog/resources/event-reviews/noreen-whysels-pinterest-as-an-exhibition-gallery-at-metropolitan-new-york-library-council-21016/

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (DH Week slides, February 10, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/dh-week-workshop-pinterest-as-exhibition

Pinterest as Digital Exhibition (IA Summit poster, May 7, 2016): https://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/pinterest-as-digital-archive-ia-summit-2016-atlanta

Data Detox: https://myshadow.org/ckeditor_assets/attachments/189/datadetoxkit_optimized_01.pdf

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Short Bursts: Noreen Whysel

The Information Architecture Summit has a feature where they ask members of the community to answer the same ten questions. The feature editor, Marianne Sweeney, invited me to participate.

“Short bursts is a head start on meeting some of the smart, talented, funny, thoughtful, creative and disruptive information architects, user experience professionals and content strategists that you might see in Vancouver.”

Read my answers

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Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World

Amy Jeu and I curated a weekend exhibit, Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, on October 29-30, 2016 at the Queens Museum celebrating the map-making community. The event featured talks and demonstrations as well as a hall dedicated to paper and digital maps submitted from the private collections of members of the GISMO community. These maps represent a wide range of themes including the diverse Queens neighborhood and demographics, urban planning, environmental studies, election analysis and more.

Visitors at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Mezzanine Level with map exhibit and children's activity tables at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Mezzanine Level with map exhibit and children's activity tables at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Five maps with placards at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Table with flyers and Dr. Suess book for children's story hour at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Four visitors at interactive map station, one wearing 3D glasses at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY
Interactive map station with 3D glasses at Map Mosaic: From Queens to the World, Queens Museum, NY

My Submissions

For my contribution to the exhibit, I created a cutout map of the 1964 World’s Fairgrounds to teach children how map layers work in GIS. This series of maps, printed on acrylic transparency sheeting can be stacked to show through various layers: Base Map, Parks, Buildings, Streets/Paths. We also provided additional paper and colored pencils for children to use. This activity helped younger visitors to understand the concept of map layers in GIS.

Because the event was held over Halloween weekend, I also contributed a set of themed maps with Halloween parade routes and a “Crime of the Century” story map retelling the activities from the 1934 Ice House Heist in Brooklyn and Upper West Side Manhattan. The piece included reproductions of aerial photographs from the time period.

Documentation

Each item in the exhibition included a placard indicating the name of the mapmaker, the materials used and a brief description of the subject. We used icons to indicate whether an interactive version was available at the computer stations or that the mapmaker is also a speaker in our forum.  

interactive

Interactive Map

speaker

Speaker

Amy Jeu created the flyer and copy for the exhibit which was published on the Queens Museum website and the signage used for the exhibit and presentations. I created the placards and the online exhibit catalog.

Archive

The Map Mosaic event was privately curated. Queens Museum published an announcement and the exhibit catalog and list of interactive maps are available at GISMO’s Website. The acrylic manipulative work is located in the GISMO archive. All maps produced by the NYC Office of Emergency Management were donated to the Queens Museum and all other, individual artwork was returned to the artists.

Queens Museum Website Announcement
Exhibit Catalog
Interactive Maps

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Hackathons: Prizes, Waitlists and Making Introductions

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. The following questions about hackathons appeared in my inbox in August and September of 2016.

If I win a prize at a hackathon, should I put it on LinkedIn?

Hackathons are no longer just about security, pen testing or “hacking” in a systems infiltration sense. I’ve been to hackathons that were about developing a solution to a humanitarian problem, creating a product that utilizes open data, and regular lock-picking type contests. Even the pen test type is losing, if not already lost, its negative reputation. If you won a hackathon, it means you were the best at whatever challenge was put before you. So go ahead and claim that prize. Be sure to link to any materials you publish about the project, like Github or winners page at the hackathon site.

Which school should I put on Hackathon registrations?

I started studying and will graduate from X university in country A, but I am currently on a one-semester exchange program so I am studying at Y university in country B. When I am applying to hackathons in country B, should I put school X or school Y?

Since you are affiliated with both universities you should be able to put down either or both If the entry form is free text. If there is a requirement, discount or preferential status for the local program, use that. If it seems that international affiliation may be an advantage, use that one. Some hackathons like to brag about having international participation. If you aren’t sure and you can only pick one, ask the organizers.

Does getting in the waitlist in mhacks a polite way of saying I’m not invited?

It likely means they met capacity. If anyone cancels you would move up on the wait list. The organizers may be able to tell you how many people are ahead of you, or it’s possible they may open up registrations if they reach a significant number of interested people over the maximum. I’ve done that when it looked like the weather was going to be bad and we might have low turnout. I’ve also been able to book a bigger room when it looked like there was a lot of interest. But a lot of time it depends on how many people you need to help facilitate and volunteer per # of attendees.

You also could offer to volunteer but you may end up running around instead of getting to participate in hacking. But showing a lot of interest, as long as you aren’t demanding or annoying about it, might move you up faster if the organizers have that discretion.

By the way, If by “not invited” you mean “can’t just go anyway,” don’t crash the event. It takes a lot of planning to do an event like this well. Room capacity, food/drinks, security all need to be planned up front. And you may not be let in anyway.

What do Hackathons want when they ask “Tell me something interesting about yourself?”

I’m used to in job interviews them asking questions like this such as “tell me about yourself” and they don’t want your personal life. Are hackathons the same or do they really just want an interesting fact about you

Think of it this way. You are about to spend a considerable and compressed amount of time with a team of people you may not know, working toward a common challenge. Your prospective team mates will want to know your basic skillset, your experience or interest in the challenge topics and generally whether they can get along with you well enough to be on your team.

I went to two Hackathons this summer at New York Public Library and the United Nations. At NYPL I was a participant and introduced myself as a UX designer and researcher and because it was an open audio hack I said what my favorite podcasts were. At the UN I was on the organizing team for uniteforhumanity.com, preparing challenges based on humanitarian goals, so it was really good to hear which of the UN goals people were most fired up about and that also helped people form teams. One woman said she was a UX designer and could do great pitch decks. And since I was building the event repository, I told everyone about my MLIS degree and offered to help with research or datasets.

If you are an experienced Hackathon attendee, say so. If you aren’t, tell everyone what got you there. Some hackathons can be really serious, but even so, I’ve always find them a lot of fun. Enjoy.

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Is 38 Too Old to Start a Career as a UX Designer?

I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity.

A lot of what makes a good UX designer/researcher/architect are the soft skills that you only really develop having been in the working world for a while, so a 38 year old is at an advantage in that respect. Ability to listen, communicate, sketch out ideas (you don’t even need to draw well), and understand the goal of a user and how it aligns with the needs of a product or business. Ability to prioritize user needs against the goals of the business and the technical feasibility of developing the product. You don’t need to be able to code, but it helps to understand some core capabilities of the development team to get a sense of whether what you are asking them to do is feasible within the project’s budget and time constraints.

As for technical skills, products and platforms change, but it’s good to have a strong foundational understanding of UX and general design principles. UX Matters and Boxes and Arrows are good online resources. Books like Morville/Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond, Jesse James Garrett’s Elements of User Experience, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think and Donald Norman’s Design of Everyday Things are classics. There are many more titles at Rosenfeld Media and O’Reilly Media on more specific topics like mental models, story mapping, enterprise UX, design critique, etc. and many other publishers in that space. There are dozens of meetups and organizations like User Experience Professionals Association, IA Institute and Interaction Design Association that have local and international conferences and dozens of local Meetups.

Look at job ads for specific tools they are using in positions that interest you. It used to be they were always requiring Visio and Omnigraffle skiils, sometimes Axure, but now Sketch, Balsamiq and InVision are very popular, along with good old Adobe Creative Suite. But there is always going to be another tool, and once you know a few, the learning curve gets less and less steep. There are probably a half dozen new, “essential” tools that came out just while I am typing this. Richard Saul Wurman noted in his plenary at the 2010 IA Summit in Phoenix that the UX designer’s penchant for focusing too much on tools is problematic. Tools change but Understanding the User’s experience is more important.

Public speaking ability is often described in job posts as a plus, and I know tons of self-described introverts who do this and well. A lot of good speaking comes from good listening skills. Persuasion skills are also good for getting buy in around an idea.

You should have a portfolio that highlights some of the above, including design samples/mockups/UI graphics if you’ve done some, whether for work or pro bono/fun side projects. It doesn’t need to be a lot. (I know I have way too many on mine). Include descriptions of projects that highlight evidence of your soft skills, because that will set you and your experience apart.

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New IDESG Service Empowers Organizations to Better Protect Digital Identities

Registry Is Key Step in Growing Healthy and Secure Online Identity Ecosystem
Marketwired Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG)

Jun 6, 2016 8:00 AM

WASHINGTON, DC–(Marketwired – Jun 6, 2016) – The Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG) — an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to creating the future of trusted digital identities — today announced a new service that empowers organizations to improve the way they handle identities. The Identity Ecosystem Framework (IDEF) Registry brings the digital identity community closer to realizing the White House’s vision for trusted identities in cyberspace.

Every organization involved in online identity transactions plays a key role in creating and sustaining a healthy online identity ecosystem. The IDEF Registry allows companies to independently assess their own identity management methods against common industry practices. Using the IDESG’s Identity Ecosystem Framework as a model, organizations can now master and build on commonly accepted criteria for interoperability, privacy, security and usability. Meeting milestones in these subject areas is essential to ensuring that digital identities are protected and trustworthy online.

“This is an essential step in creating a safer environment for online transactions,” said Salvatore D’Agostino, President of the IDESG and CEO of IDmachines, LLC. “By equipping organizations involved in online transactions with a tool to measure where they stand relative to accepted policies and best practices, we’re promoting a safer internet on two levels. We’re making industry-accepted best practices more accessible to organizations who want to meet them, and providing a structured benchmark to organizations and individuals that want to use safer protocols for their digital transactions and information management.”

The Registry is an actionable step in the Identity Revolution, and the first opportunity of its kind for online identity service providers and owners and operators of applications that register, issue, authenticate, authorize and use identity credentials to prove that they operate secure platforms for their customers. Those that voluntarily register with the Registry publicly demonstrate their dedication to best practices in identity management. In addition to increasing participating organizations’ value and trust in the marketplace, the Registry gives them access to their industry’s most cutting-edge methods for identity management.

Initial listers include some of the preeminent companies in the identity space, such as MorphoTrust and PRIVO.

“As a founding member of the IDESG, PRIVO understands the level of commitment, subject matter expertise and vision required to bring the Registry to life,” said PRIVO Co-founder and CEO Denise Tayloe. “We are very proud to be one of the first services to hold ourselves accountable to the IDEF requirements that support a privacy-preserving, interoperable, secure, easy-to-use credential for families we serve, in order to protect and enable young users to engage and transact online.”

The IDESG has a pipeline of applicants and anticipates significant demand to join these early adopters to complete the process. Listing in the IDEF Registry is currently free for those who self attest.

“An Internet built around the identity principles of the Identity Ecosystem Framework, is in the best interest of us all as individuals,” said Mark DiFraia, Senior Director of Market Development at MorphoTrust. “MorphoTrust is proud to be one of the first organizations to join the IDEF Registry because we made the investment to build our online identity solution from the ground up to deliver on the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) Principles. It is our sincere hope that the combination of NSTIC principles, the IDEF and now the IDEF Registry apply the right amount of pressure to shape the behavior of online players for the benefit of us all.”

For more information on The Identity Ecosystem Framework Registry, visit IDEFRegistry.org.

About the Identity Ecosystem Steering Group (IDESG)

IDESG is a voluntary, public-private partnership dedicated to developing an Identity Ecosystem Framework (IDEF) and services to better online digital identity. The IDESG looks to advance the Identity Ecosystem called for in the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). The NSTIC, signed by President Obama in 2011, envisions the identity ecosystem as an online environment where individuals and organizations will be able to trust each other because they follow agreed-upon standards and policies to obtain and authenticate their digital identities. Come see how IDESG is making this happen by joining us in the effort and taking advantage of our services at IDESG.org.

Contact:

Media Contact
Donna Armstrong
ConnellyWorks, Inc.
571-323-2585 x6140
donna@connellyworks.com