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The Catalyze Community July 23rd Webcast features two design experts sharing their thought on Personas:
Catalyze July Webcast - Wednesday July 23rd at 11am PDT/2pm EDT
Death to Personas! Long Live Personas!
The Catalyze July Webcast features design experts, Elizabeth Bacon of Devise and Steve Calde of Cooper talking about Personas. Elizabeth and Steve will address the misconceptions around the use of personas and share some best practices for leveraging personas during the research and design phase.
- fluffy
- expensive to create
- non-actionable
- limiting
- counterproductive to innovation
If you can’t wait for the webcast to learn more about personas, check out these two resources:
- Steve Calde’s article for the Cooper Journal called “Using Personas to Create User Documentation“
- Bill Cooper’s essay on the Origins of Personas
And here is some background information on our speakers:
Elizabeth Bacon is co-founder and Chief Design Officer at Devise, a boutique interaction design and software development consultancy. She began her career at Cooper, where she researched and designed products and also helped to refine methodology. She subsequently worked for five years at St. Jude Medical, a Fortune 500 company where she designed solutions for implantable medical devices and clinical systems. She is also presently the Vice-President of IxDA, the Interaction Design Association, an international organization for advancing the profession of interaction design
Steve Calde is a Principal Design Consultant at Cooper, where he’s been helping to make the digital world a safer place for users since 1998. Steve has worked on scores of design projects in diverse domains such as golf course irrigation, IT administration, online radio, enterprise resource management, intravenous medication delivery, telecommunications, and more. Steve also teaches Cooper’s Interaction Design Practicum and Communicating courses. In a previous life, Steve was a technical writer for Rational Systems and GW Associates (semiconductor factory automation).
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We are proud to announce the winners in the iRise “Visualize the Prize” Video Commercial Contest. The 15 semi-finalists received more than 4,500 votes during the two weeks of voting that ended on June 20th, and it was a pretty tight race.
The winning entry was “iRise Recipe” submitted by Brian Palatucci of Santa Monica, California. Brian wins $15,000 for his video which depicts a man preparing dinner for his girlfriend while asking the question, “What if there was a way to learn from your mistakes without ever having to make one?”
There were 2 runners-up entries that each claimed a prize of $2,500.
“Foresight is 20/20” by Michael Beeson of Great Falls, Montana – This video looked at iRise from the perspective of a spectacle manufacturer which lost its focus before trying iRise. “It’s made painful hindsight a thing of the past because thanks to iRise, foresight is now 20/20.”
“A Celebration of iRise” by Ron Rogers of Healdsburg, California – This video compared the process of developing company Web sites to the wine industry which doesn’t reveal the finished product until the very end. “Now that calls for a celebration!”
Visit the official contest website to check out the semi-finalists and all contest entries.
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Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber published a blog post this week titled “Which Vendors Have Made A Difference In App Dev?” - and iRise was nominated as one of her 5 difference-making vendors.
Carey started out her post by wondering which of the vendors she covers have had a broad-reaching impact on changing the way development works:
Forget which vendor’s tool has the best bells and whistles. Which vendor has really made the most difference? Which vendor has delivered products or services that have really improved project outcomes? Or resulted in worse project outcomes? Not just a single project outcome, but hundreds or even thousands of project outcomes.
iRise was nominated by Carey for:
Waking the market up to the limitations of textual requirements and providing an accessible and effective alternative.
In addition to mentioning iRise partner IBM Rational, Carey also nominated Sun (Java Platform), Junit (test-driven development) and Thoughtworks (agile practices pioneer) as game-changing vendors.
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At iRise, we have been preaching for many years that words by themselves do a poor job of defining the requirements for software applications. So, it’s refreshing to see someone else - especially a Forrester analyst - pile on to the discussion.
Tom Grant, a senior analyst in the Technology Marketing group at Forrester, published a research document this week titled “Improving Your Product Management Tools”. While the note is targeted at product marketing and management professionals, the roles and tasks performed by these workers have significant if not total overlap with business analyst and usability professions.
The problem is actually double-edged. According to Tom, “most product managers rely on tools - predominantly Microsoft Office - that do not adequately support them.” And while there are tools specifically designed to handle product requirements, the majority of technology companies do not embrace them.
Tom further identifies 6 functions needed to address the requirements challenges for product managers and describes the shortcomings of trying to use Microsoft Office, Web 2.0 tools and CRM systems:
- Collection
- Analysis
- Prediction
- Connection
- Communication
- Updates
By the way, iRise was mentioned as one of the tools for the Communication function which Tom defines as modeling or simulating use cases to communicate to stakeholders.
Tom’s research also pointed out that innovators are more than twice as likely to adopt requirements tools. He examined companies based on their size, company age and product delivery and found that requirements tools were adopted at a much higher rate in companies that were 1-5 years old, smaller than 500 employees and who used software as a service (SaaS) delivery.
The full 16-page report is available from Forrester for $279 and is worth a read for anyone involved in defining and managing requirements. You can also read Tom Grant’s blog at this link and he welcomes feedback.
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Carey Schwaber, Senior Analyst from Forrester Research presented at the iRise-sponsored June Catalyze community webcast last week.
In addition to presenting her top 10 list of ways to improve project outcomes for business analysts and others involved in software definition, Carey answered nearly 20 questions from the audience. If you missed the live broadcast, you will definitely want to listen to the webcast recording so you can hear Carey’s unique perspective on the role of business analysts, software definition and requirements.
For a sneak preview, here is a peak at Carey’s top 10 list:
- Define the business-IT division of labor
- Be part of the team
- Understand and communicate impact
- Define future as well as present business needs
- Remember non-functional requirements
- Make requirements painless for the business
- Measure project progress in terms of requirements
- Don’t rely solely on text
- Maximize feedback on requirements
- Invest in future project outcomes too
The webcast was recorded and can be viewed in the iRise Media Center, and the slides from the presentation have been embedded below.
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This is a reminder that there is just 1 week left to vote for your favorite videos in the iRise “Visualize the Prize” video commercial contest. There are 15 semi-finalists and you may vote once per day.
Cast Your Vote on the Official Voting Page
You may also watch all of the contest entries here.
The semi-finalists include (in no particular order):
As Al Capone once said, “Vote early and vote often”.
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The voting period for the iRise $20k Visualize the Prize Video Commercial contest starts today and runs through Friday June 20th at Midnight.
Help us select the overall winner and two runners-up by going over to the Official Voting page and casting your vote for your favorite video. You may vote once per day, so make sure to visit and vote often. The winner will be the video that captures the most votes over the next two weeks and will take home $15,000. The two runners-up will each get $2,500.
We ended up with 44 entries in the contest, and the iRise panel of judges selected 15 semi-finalists for the public voting part of the contest. There are some very good videos left in the competition and we expect to see an extremely tight race.
We will announce the winners before the end of June. All of the entries are still available for viewing on the iRise Video Contest Entries page.
Thank you to everyone who sent in a video submission, and best of luck to the 15 semi-finalists.
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Even if you’re a not a writer or lover of words, it is still important to note that today is the 80th birthday of the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary or OED as it more commonly known. The OED bills itself as the “definitive record of the English language” and is one of the most famous dictionaries in history.
The OED was a major collaborative efforts and a precursor of today’s Wikipedia. During the 70 years from it’s approval date to it publish date on June 6, 1928, the OED went through many editors. Sir James Murray shepherded it from 1879 to 1915, and probably had the biggest influence on the work.
The official policy of the OED was to:
- “present in alphabetical series the words that have formed the English vocabulary from the time of the earliest records [ca. AD740] down to the present day, with all the relevant facts concerning their form, sense-history, pronunciation, and etymology. It embraces not only the standard language of literature and conversation, whether current at the moment, or obsolete, or archaic, but also the main technical vocabulary, and a large measure of dialectal usage and slang”
Here are some quick facts about the First Edition of the OED:
- Actual size - 10 volumes, 15,490 pages
- Time to complete - 70 years
- Number of entries - 252,200
- Number of contributors - 2,000
- Number of quotations submitted - 5 million
And here are some quick links to check out when you have more time:
- OED website
- OED Facts
- OED Word of the Day
- The Meaning of Everything by Simon Winchester - “this is a scintillating account of the greatest monument ever erected to a living language” and well worth the read if you want to become an expert on the OED
While iRise is trying to do away with textual word-based requirements documents, we still love words and the English language! Take a moment today and reflect on the efforts of so many to bring sense and order to our English language.
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The Catalyze Community is a free member-driven community for business analysts, usability professionals and others who define and design software applications and websites. For those of you who may not realize the connection, iRise sponsors or ‘powers’ the Catalyze Community. Besides being a frequent blogger on the iRise blog, I am also the community manager of the Catalyze Community.
This morning, I just realized the Catalyze Community officially opened our doors to the public in a sneak preview on June 4, 2007. So, today is Catalyze’s FIRST ANNIVERSARY!
In the last year, the Catalyze Community have grown from about 100 members to almost 3,800 members. Over the last year, the Catalyze Community site has had 68,000 visitors, 37,000 unique visitors and served up 293,000 pageviews. Visitors have also averaged 4 1/2 minutes per visit.
I got to thinking about Catalyze this morning because of a blog post from sometime Catalyze blogger Craig Brown who recently published the results of an informal survey of business analyst communities.
I want to share my response to his blog post:
Here’s why the Catalyze Community is different (and better) than the other BA communities:
Definition AND Design - We don’t think you can separate the definition and design aspects of developing software or websites. For example, 45% of our members are business analysts and 27% are usability professionals with the rest scattered among product managers, project managers, software engineers and others. We believe that the interplay and different points of view are essential to developing a vibrant community to advance both the business analyst and usability professions.
Community Openness - Catalyze also embraces more community openness than the other communities. For example, anyone can view content on Catalyze without registering or logging in. Registration or logging in is only required if you want to post to a discussion or blog, or upload content. Speaking of content, Catalyze is the only community that easily permits members to upload content. We are also very open on our statistics and share our growth numbers publicly on the site.
Better Content - We may be biased on this front, but we think we offer the best content of any business analyst site. We do host monthly webcasts that are well-attended, and we post recordings and slides back into the community to build the knowledgebase. And you can easily search for content via search terms or tags.
Commercial Free! - Finally, Catalyze is the only commercial-free business analyst community site. All of the other communities are pushing an agenda, whether it is conference participation, services, profit motive, etc.
In any case, it’s good to have competition because that pushes each community to do their best to deliver on their vision. And it’s good to have different opinions, and I encourage people to check out each of the sites for themselves.
And a special thank you to all of the faithful and active Catalyze members who have been critical to our growth and viability.
Learn More About Catalzye Register for Catalyze Check out the iRise Users Community
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Are you having a slow Wednesday? Tired of playing computer solitaire? Come on over and check out the entries in the $20,000 iRise Video Commercial Contest.
There are now 29 entries in the contest which closes tonight at midnight, and we expect a few more to trickle in over the next few hours. Some of them will make you laugh, some will make you cry, some will make you cringe, some of them will make you say ‘uh?’ and some are actually pretty good.
After tonight, an internal iRise team will evaluate all of the entries and select 10 semi-finalists. Starting on Friday, we will start the public voting part of the contest which runs through June 20th. Everyone can vote once per day for their favorite semi-finalist and the video with the highest number of votes will win.
The winning videos will be announced before the end of June.
We’ve learned some things along the way. Running a video contest is a lot like participating in an eBay auction - all of the action happens at the last minute. Our first official entry came in less than 2 weeks ago and traffic to the website was up almost 10x yesterday compared to the daily average for most of April and May. Overall, we’re pleased with the both the participation and submissions.
Check out the contest website today and tomorrow to see all of the entries, and check back on Friday and start voting for your favorite video.
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