Work

Work has been absolutely flat-out for me as usual, but despite that, it’s been a very enjoyable year with lots of interesting projects. I attended less conferences and work related events this year but had great fun at the ones I did make it to.

My workmate Kim and I presented Dealing with the different attitudes to accessibility at the OZeWAI conference at La Trobe University. The presentation was a fun look at culture change involving the Attitude Adjusters game cards that we did up.

Ruth & Kim presenting at OZeWAI 2011 conference, photo by Gary Barber

Our Attitude Adjusters game cards

UX Australia is one of my favourite conferences – it’s the once-a-year catch up with all my User Experience (UX) family.

Some old and new friends, post UX Australia conference

LOVING the photobooth at UX Australia

Kim, Scott and Ruth - rockin' the Stamford UX Superhero t-shirts

Family & friends

My brother turned 21, our friends Craig (and his twin Wesley) and Caronne celebrated special birthdays this year, my mum came to visit and Alastair’s mum also came to spend xmas with us. Our friends Joel and Kelly got married and we got to share in their special day by being their photographers. I played paintball for the first time when my youngest sister celebrated her 19^th birthday.

Mum and I at Floriade, Canberra

Bec and friends at her paintball birthday party

Our Perth friends at Joel & Kelly's wedding

Events & other social things

Lots of organising over 2011 – I helped to organise either in the lead-up or on the day: BarCampCanberra, TEDxCanberra, Sydney SkepticCamp and the Make Hack Void xmas party.

Checking out cupcake entries at BarCampCanberra (photo by Gavin Tapp)

My volunteers helping me pack up the TEDxCanberra showbags using a very efficient production line! (Photo by TEDxCanberra)

Me and my trusty clipboard at TEDxCanberra (photo by Gavin Tapp)

Hubby and I were one of the lucky 50 that attended the very first CSIROtweetup, to celebrate the launch of the Mars Rover Curiosity.

Our fellow space geeks (Photo by Martin Ollman)

Watching the launch

Watching the dish move in preparation for the launch

Making stuff

2011 was the year for making things. I made my first laser-cut jewellery, which will be available under the CrankyBot label in 2012; learned to sew (badly); got dressed up in various costumes, mainly the Lady Mechanika comic con costume which was the main impetus for learning to sew.

One of my space invaders, from my CrankyBot label

Doctor Who magnetic poetry and TARDIS I made as an xmas present (located next to the TARDIS cookie jar)

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. Hubby dressed as Commander Shepard from Mass Effect video game, and I’m dressed as Lady Mechanika. Comic Con in costume was a very different affair to Comic Con in layperson's clothing.

Hubby and I also made our first sausages with my KitchenAid sausage maker attachment! They were utterly delicious, particularly as the meat was flavoured with fresh herbs from our garden.

I did a lot of baking in 2011 - putting my KitchenAid to good use.

Travel

Hubby and I visited the United States in July. The main reason was to attend The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in Vegas, but we also discovered that Comic Con, the BIG (and I mean big) pop culture convention, was on around the same time. The US trip was huge – we visited our friend Bob and his wife in Dallas, Texas, then headed off to Las Vegas for to check out the sights, followed by TAM, then on to San Diego for LEGOLand, followed by Comic Con and New York. I love New York.

Discovering fossils at Eisenhower State Park, Texas

Caught up with old friends and made new friends, Las Vegas

Penn Jillette’s rock and roll party ticket, Las Vegas

Rock on at Penn Jillette’s party, Las Vegas

How awesome is Legoland!

The very brilliant Evolution shop at New York (thanks for the recommendation Minnie)

We made a muppet, Dr Chels, at FAO Schwarz

Playing the Big Piano at FAO Schwarz, New York

We visited the New York hackerspace - they have a great space with lots of character

We saw some awesome graff at 5 Pointz, New York. Hubby and I spent hours wandering around the building taking photos. We finished up with a late lunch at a local diner.

On the last day as we started the very eventful journey home to Canberra from New York (crisscrossing the country and seeing many airports!), we discovered that our flight was cancelled due to weather conditions. Fortunately Qantas upgraded us to Business Class and we made it home to Australia in the lap of luxury (I didn’t want the flight to end!).

Looking forward

2011 on the whole has been a good year. I had some health issues (getting addressed in early 2012), I’ve attempted to address my fear of vegetables (and learned a lot about myself in the process), and I learned a lot of new things. I look forward to 2012 – getting CrankyBot off the ground, working on a number of exciting UX and accessibility projects and learning to take it a bit easier. Here’s to 2012!

This year, I’ve decided to write about someone who is relatively unknown in the broader web community but is very knowledgeable in the accessibility field. She would never blow her own horn, which means that only those of us who have had the pleasure of working with her knows how good she is. She’s a shy and quiet type, and is truly one of the nicest and most generous person I know. She has been working in the tech and user experience field for a while. She’s smart, passionate and she knows her accessibility stuff.

I want you to meet my friend and colleague, Kim Chatterjee. What I love about Kim is her willingness to share her knowledge and time to help everyone, even if it means very little sleep for her! She has a detailed understanding of accessibility and has spent quite a few years doing some cool accessibility work in Government. She’s also really great at communicating complex concepts through interesting and lovely visuals. She’s really humble about her achievements so if you do get to meet her, she won’t tell you how good she is but if you get to chat to her, you’ll soon realise the depth and breadth of her accessibility knowledge.

While others are out and about talking the talk, Kim is busy with the actual doing. She’s helped to inspire a number of people about accessibility, who have now gone on into other organisations either carrying a passion for accessibility or having an increased awareness of accessibility. Now that’s inspirational.

From the Ada Lovelace Day pledge site:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I have many female friends who are doing wonderful work in the technology industry – too many to name but here’s a few Aussie females that I’ll like to sing out about.

• Donna – she is a great information architect, the Queen of Card Sorting and contributes much of her time to the web community. She’s always happy to share her knowledge and experience.
• Caronne – I love her passion for the work we do. She’s an extremely supportive person and manages to balance work, life, web community stuff and life with two teens. She does amazing stuff with advocating great user experiences in Government agencies that many people don’t hear about!
• Susan – one of the many challenging things of being a women is the ability to juggle multiple stressful components of our life. Susan is amazing – she loves the work she does and some how, manages to balance work, family, photography, blogging and web stuff!
• Viv – a special person I used to work with who is passionate about accessibility and user experience. She’s a solid rock for any team that she’s on and is always quietly working away in the background getting stuff done. It’s people like Viv who work so hard and never seem to get recognition for the hard work they do – so here’s my shout out to you Viv!
• Lisa – is amazing. She knows a lot of things about accessibility, usability and user experience. We have a very similiar approach to the work we do. She’s a very calming influence and I admire her passion for the work we do.

There are many other females out there who also doing great work (I’m looking at you Teresa, Amie, Suze, Lana!).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

On Friday, I said goodbye to my workmates of 14 months. I was really touched by the effort everyone went into organising a great farewell, in particular Viv who did a lot of baking and organising! I was sent off with a very delicious morning tea (lots of divine homemade goodies), beautiful flowers and a fantastic present. This was followed up with drinks at Old Parliament House. I was humbled by all the comments and gestures from various people through out the day, with emails, phone calls and face-to-face conversations.

I learned a lot over my 14 months and got to work on interesting projects. Met lots of interesting people and made some good friends. I will miss my workmates and hope that people keep thinking about creating great user experiences.

As of tomorrow (Monday), I will be working at Stamford Interactive. I’m looking forward to a set of new challenges!

Tonight, hubby and I watched the hilarious Weird Al Yankovic performance at the Canberra Theatre. Weird Al is a very talented American musician/satirist/parodist who is best known for his parodies of some of the biggest names in the music business – Michael Jackson, Eminem, Nirvana, Madonna, James Blunt, etc.

Some of the songs performed tonight to a very enthusiastic audience included White and Nerdy, I’ll Sue You, You’re Pitiful, Canadian Idiot, Amish Paradise, Pretty Fly For A Rabbi, Fat, and my two absolute favourites, Yoda and The Saga Begins. I also loved the Weird Al TV interviews that played through out the night, inbetween songs.

Despite a slight technical hitch towards the end of the show (involving some device freezing and the projector stopping at a particular frame), the entire show was really fun, really funny and worth the money.

1. Do not book a Canberra Cab using their online form – the cab will never arrive (discovered this one through my hubby, which was also verified by Russel)
2. Do not ring up and book a cab for the future (i.e. at least a day ahead) – that cab will never arrive either
3. What ever time you’ve allocated for the cab to arrive – give yourself at least another half an hour on top of that

So after two phone calls this morning, and a lot of panic attacks, a cab finally showed up. The driver had to significantly speed along the highway to get me to the airport so I could just make it on the plane. The passengers were already boarding when I made it to the airport. I’m entirely grateful to Qantas for their fairly usable self check-in system – I managed to check in for my flight (including my return flight) in under a minute. It took longer going through security (my shoes set off the metal detector) but I finally made it. I was one of the last few passengers on the plane, but I made it!!!

We (Russ and myself) visited both offices in Sydney to conduct our accessibility testing. Discovered lots of interesting stuff about various disabilities, particularly, Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) /Occupational overuse syndrome (OOS). It was great to get verification about the issues we thought were occurring, and very importantly, to start building up the relationships with our users of assistive technologies.

A piece of learning from the last few years is that, like usability evaluations, you have to consider the context of the user in terms of their environment, their experience levels (of the assistive tool as well as of the application), the amount of training they have received, whether they undertake other training, the frequency of that training, and the work culture.

It is ideal to conduct the accessibility evaluation with a range of users across different experience levels, and across the different assistive tools. It is also important to note that when analysing the feedback received from the users of assistive technologies, it should be balanced with the factors mentioned in the previous paragraph. For example, a user may have been using an assistive tool for many years, but if they were not given the opportunity to do much training (whether it is self training or through a trainer), their experience levels may not match another person with the same number of years experience who had more opportunity to get more familiar with their assistive tool.

I could go on, but ironically enough, my own RSI is playing up…..

• I’ve had my eyes opened to political intrigues
• Watched with great interest the myriad of human behaviours and interaction
• Developed into the extremely passionate-about-accessibility-and-usability person that I am today
• Researched, developed and maintained user interface standards (and the associated challenges that the whole process brings)
• Met a lot of interesting people (within and also external to the organisation)
• Run lots of interesting usability sessions
• Facilitated many collaborative design sessions
• Start my Human-Computer Interaction course at University of Queensland
• Helped integrate the user centred design methodology into current practices (still quite a way to go though)
• Lots of relationship building with various people
• Ate lots of cake and sweets (I can’t keep away from team morning teas)
• Did lots of fascinating User Centred Design “stuff”!

I was farewelled with a box of gorgeous flowers, a card with lovely words from many people, and Seasons One and Two of Little Britain (one of my favourite comedy series). Headed out to the B Bar in Kingston with couple of work mates from varying teams. I enjoyed some delicious cocktails (I love cocktails), got enjoyably tipsy and said random mushy stuff to my UCD team mates.

I was really pleased to see the turn out, and really appreciated the effort that people put in to make it (some had to drive out from a different part of Canberra). It gave me lots of warm fuzzies – a good way to end an era.

Good bye old organisation! Hello new organisation!

I have been writing up each day of our journey, but will post these entries once we get back to Perth.

In the meantime, I leave you with a photo from our wedding photo shoot:

Photo credits: © 2006 Samm Blake

The above photo was taken on the grounds of the University of Western Australia. It is part of a series shot at that location for our wedding. Our photographer was Samm Blake. See more of her work at www.sammblake.com.

Thanks to those of you (you know who you are!) who have provided help, moral support, and providing a ear for my bridezilla moments!

Good bye, and see you on the “other side”!

The first is Back in time, located in The Lakes Shopping Centre, at North Lake Road, South Lake, Western Australia. Don’t be deceived by the discount feel of the shopping centre. It hides this gem of a shop, which stocks beautiful designer clothing, handbags (my favourite Olga berg designer bags), jewellery, gifts etc. There’s such a range of interesting stuff. I could easily have spent more time there, but I had to get mum home to rest.

The other is Ice Accessories. There’s a few branches in Perth, but the one I’ve been to is Shop 45/425, in Perth Forrest Chase. It stocks the latest accessories at very cheap prices (about $5 upwards!). It mostly stocks costume jewellery, but there are some bags, a tiny selection of cheap scents, and various lip glosses etc. I first discovered this store on my last trip to Perth earlier this year.

The final is a clearance outlet named X Dream. It can be found at Shop 4 of the Concourse (Perth central train station, opposite Angus & Robertson bookstore). Lots of the latest fashions at cheap prices. It’s a pity that I don’t like the current gypsy look, else I would have gone nuts in there.

Of course there’s always Harbour Town (why don’t we have anything like this in Canberra?).