BayCHI: See What I Mean / Context is King October 14, 2008

SEE WHAT I MEAN: HOW TO USE COMICS TO COMMUNICATE IDEAS
Kevin Cheng, Raptr

Comics are a unique way to communicate, using both image and text to effectively demonstrate time, function, and emotion. Recently, we've seen comics in use by startups to explain their products, by Google to market their new browser and even by the U.S. Navy to promote and explain a carrier landing in Japan.

Just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics tell stories of your users and your products. Comics can provide your organization with an exciting and effective alternative to slogging through requirements documents and long reports. In this presentation, Kevin Cheng, author of the upcoming book by the same title and OK/Cancel founder/cartoonist will discuss how you can use comics as a powerful communication tool without trained illustrators.

The presentation will discuss
* a method to document your organization’s work, ideas and vision in a way that any project teammate, customer or manager will readily understand and consume
* putting the "story" back in "storyboarding" and really describing the user experience from the users’ perspective
* where other organizations have used comics in their product life cycle
* how comics can be used as a way to engage users early and solicit their feedback
* the properties of the comics medium that make them so much more than either words or pictures, based on Scott McCloud's seminal work in the field

Illustration skills are completely optional for this presentation.

Kevin Cheng was one of those kids who missed the memo to stop drawing after the first grade. Nowadays, he splits his crayon time between many endeavors. He is the Director of Product Strategy at Raptr, a videogame social network, the co-founder and artist for OK/ Cancel, a webcomic on user experience, and the co-founder of Off Panel Productions, an online comic publishing network.

Kevin previously exerted his crayon prowess at Yahoo!’s Brickhouse incubator where he designed Pipes and Bravonation, and at Yahoo! Maps, Yahoo! Local, Adaptive Path, and Trilogy.

He holds a Masters degree from University College London in Human Computer Interaction and has presented on strategy and design topics at numerous conferences including the Information Architecture Summit, the User Interface Conference, and South by Southwest.

Kevin blogs at kev/null and has been known to Twitter. One day, Kevin hopes to be able to answer all questions related to design by simply referencing comic strips.

---

CONTEXT IS KING
Randall Farmer, Yahoo!

For more than three decades, people have been mediating communications with each other using computer networks.

Strangely, detailed best practices about how to facilitate online collaboration, communication, and community (aka Social Computing) are not yet in broad practice. Randy Farmer is working on a book that he hopes will remedy that situation by providing detailed patterns and anti-patterns for building online communities in context.

This talk contains many of the core inspirations for that work. He will outline common contexts and describe typical pitfalls encountered by product design and community operations staff when creating and operating social media-laden sites.

F. Randall “Randy” Farmer has been creating online community systems for over 30 years, and has co-invented many of the basic structures for both virtual worlds and social software. His firsts include: one of the first multiplayer online games; one of the first message boards; the first virtual world; the first avatars; the first online marketplace; the first user newsfeed/friend feed (in Yahoo! 360°); the first multi-purpose reputation platform and grammar; and many other smaller firsts—several of which are documented in the form of various patents which are either granted or in process. He has co-authored numerous papers on the topics of virtual worlds and social media which have been published in books and across the Internet. His most widely read publication is entitled The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat, which he co-authored with Chip Morningstar. Lessons is cited in over 50 publications (according to Google publication search.)

For almost 5 years Randy worked as the community strategic analyst for Yahoo!, the world's largest Internet portal, advising Yahoo properties on best practices for construction of their online communities. Randy was the principal designer of Yahoo's global reputation platform and the reputation models that were deployed upon it and was also a co-author of the Yahoo Open Strategy initiative, which will be deployed RSN. Randy is in high demand as a freelance community systems design consultant and public speaker, and his online publications and interviews are widely read and cited.

Official Website: http://www.baychi.org/program/