Bryce Johnson has posted a video recording (in two formats) of Jess McMullin’s session from the IA Summit, Game Changing: How You Can Transform Client Mindsets Through Play:

One of the sessions I saw was Jess McMullin

Philip, Anjali, Gaven, Dan, Chris, Marsha, Joel, and I had dinner at the Young Avenue Deli tonight. Great food and nice divey atmosphere.

We also played a little Galaga (vintage video game) and pocket billiards, although the cue ball kept going down into the coin-op vault.

I just spent all day in a seminar led by Kevin Cheng and Jane Jao, both currently at Yahoo! Local, on the subject of Creating Conceptual Comics: Storytelling and Techniques and I came away from it with some great ideas about how to communicate web interface and functionality ideas at the early, prototype stage of a project using comics.
The presenters articulated the problem this way:

At Yahoo!, we’ve used a combination of tools such as requirements documents, personas, user scenarios and storyboards with varying degrees of success. For example, requirements and personas were rarely consumed or were interpreted differently between individuals. Traditional storyboards detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.

The solution offered was to use comics as a relatively cheap and easy method intermediate between video and static sketches, and avoiding the problems of traditional storyboards which, by “detailing screen by screen progressions created a focus on the interface, rather than the concept.”
They taught us some principals of communicating with comics, and some key elements of a visual vocabulary and then assigned us in groups to brainstorm, script, and illustrate a scenario using storytelling and the comic-art techniques we’d just learned.
After lunch we paired up with other groups and acted like user focus-groups, giving feedback on the scenarios and suggesting what we found useful, confusing, etc.
The workshop taught me a lot and I can think of a few ways we could employ these techniques at Extractable to get buy-in for some hypothetical user-interfaces, both within our multidisciplinary teams and with our clients.
tags: iasummit2006, iasummit

Tanya Raybourn (Pixelcharmer) points to Waterfall2006 in her Field Notes blog:

This one, Waterfall 2006, sounds unmissable.

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You

I know it’s probably just because I’m racing around to get a bunch of things done between trips (to Austin, Vancouver, and Utah), but this article (Be smarter at work, slack off) sounds like the perfect advice to me right about now.

David Seah’s Printable CEO Series incorporates some interesting paper-based tools for tracking and prioritizing your tasks during the day. His system assigns points to different types of tasks. Life-sustaining work, such as billing or signing new deals, earns 10 points. Work that provides concrete results that demonstrates your skills earns 5 points. Networking-related tasks are worth 2 points, and the efforts involved in maintaining current relationships are worth 1 point each.
Seah is a new media designer so his concepts are encapsulated in beautifully designed forms that he apparently fills out to track his progress each day.