Collaboration with Oracle.

Tue Aug 14 23:12:02 UTC 2007

>
Hi George,

It's great to hear Oracle will be participating in the Fluid project.

Welcome!  It would be great to hear about your work at Oracle and how  
we might utilize some of your methods, etc. on our Fluid work.  The  
timing is great since we are in the midst of defining much of this  
work for Fluid.  I've commented below on some of the biggest  
challenges I see for us from the UX perspective.   I'm sure there are  
more but these are just the ones on the top of my mind right now.    
Does it make sense to schedule a conference call or Breeze meeting to  
talk about the topics below (and others people think of)?  Are you  
planning to attend the Fluid summit, http://wiki.fluidproject.org/ 
display/fluid/Fall+2007+Fluid+Summit?  If so we could also include  
some of this on our UX agenda.  My preference would be to talk before  
then since we'll be presenting and discussing several Fluid UX  
processes and methodologies at the summit.

As far as current work in progress, there are several activities  
going on and it would be great to have you participate in any or  
all...whatever makes sense from your perspective.  Here's the short  
list:
- UX walkthroughs (a hybrid usability & accessibility heuristic  
combined with cognitive walkthroughs) of Sakai, uPortal & Moodle,  
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Experience+Walk- 
throughs.  Also see Colin's blog post, "Fluid UX Walk-throughs  
Getting Started",  http://fluidproject.atrc.utoronto.ca/blog/ about  
ways to get involved in this work.
- Several process definitions are being created for review and  
refinement at the Summit:  1) User testing protocol, 2) Content  
management research, http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/ 
Content+Management+Research (very drafty and still populating with  
information from work last week), 3) Component design process, 4) UX  
walkthrough process and protocol (on the wiki at URL above).  These  
are all at various "in-progress" states and I'm sure you're thoughts  
on them would be appreciated.  There isn't anything posted yet for  
the user testing or design processes but I expect there will be soon.
- Design patterns, http://bugs.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/ 
DESPAT/Home.  This work is being done within the Sakai working  
group.  Please feel free to join our weekly calls and/or give  
feedback on the pattern library thus far.

-Daphne
>
> George Hackman wrote:
>> Hi all,
>> Thanks for the intro Jutta.  I look forward to contributing where I
>> can.  A couple of topics, I could talk about further include...
>> * UI design patterns and how we use them at Oracle to promote  
>> usability
>> and consistency.   This is a big help for us as we have a lot of
>> developers to support with a fairly small UX team.
We continue to struggle with "what is the right level of granularity"  
for these patterns...which is quite related to who is the audience,  
designers or developers.  Our goal is that we meet the needs of  
both.  Also, in distributed, complex projects such as Sakai, uPortal  
& Moodle, what is the right level of flexibility to promote  
consistency yet allow for creative innovation and the "it depends" in  
design.
>>
>> * Accessibility and evolving standards.  Accessibility is key to  
>> us as
>> we sell lots of software to the goverment.  I could talk about our
>> program and what we are doing here.
Great!  I'm sure we face similar challenges here with creating  
accessible system behavior at the same time standards are evolving.
>>
>> * Usability methods that we use at Oracle (Customer visits
>> (ethnography),  usability testing (remote and local) etc.).  You are
>> probably familiar with most of these, but I could call out what we do
>> differently or uniquely.
It's always good to hear what others have found to work.  I see a big  
challenge for us here to define, suggest, promote UX process and  
methods to a distributed group whom all likely already have some  
process and methods in place in their current organization.   How  
much consistency in these activities do we need?  How do we make sure  
the community is "brought along" early in the design activities  
(research, modeling, etc.)  Do we require (rather than just  
encourage) research and modeling (persona and scenarios for example)  
for instance?   Research will likely be done in a distributed  
manner.  What are the best techniques for making sense of the  
research findings (modeling activities are best done, or at least  
started, f2f at a white board for instance.
>>
>> These are just starting points.  I am open to new ideas or topics.
>> Thanks,
>> George
>> _______________________________________________
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>> fluid-work at fluidproject.org
>> http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
>>
>
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Daphne Ogle
Senior Interaction Designer
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Technology Services
daphne at media.berkeley.edu
cell (510)847-0308

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