Exciting New Assignment

Work is actually fun these days! Of course, when the bar is set by floods and STC meltdowns, "fun" is a relatively easy state to achieve.

I'm lead on a multifunctional team that is tasked with reshaping the user experience for the deployment phase of a SaaS-type application. We have the following types of folks on the team:

• Information developers
• UI developers
• User researcher
• Visual communicator
• UX specialist

Wow! That's some collective horsepower.

I'm also experimenting with some new collaboration tools. This will be my second time using Lotus Connections to manage a project team. It's a nifty piece of collaboration software, combining blog, forum, and wiki technology. I'll also be using some other tools, such as Balsamiq Mockup (wireframing), The Brain (mindmapping), along with a proprietary tool for doing affinity wall type of analysis, and of course, my old standby Visio.

And even though I am no longer officially on the Information Development team, it gives me an opportunity to bring that group into the upstream design process in which I have long argued they belong. See my column Use Cases for User Assistance Writers.

I see a case study if this works; I see some self-pitying blogs down the line if it doesn't. Meanwhile, I'll use this blog to maintain a loose journal as I share what seems to work and what doesn't as I go along.