Reflections on Power to the People

Today I co-presented a full day workshop at GOVIS 2007 here in Wellington. I didn’t think I’d make it having spent the last few days in bed with an aggressive case of bacterial sinutus.

identitykit
Audience attempt at creating a "typical New Zealander"

Over the weekend I’d taken nasty antibiotics (for the first time in living memory), and was feeling a tad strange…

My presentation wasn’t quite finished and on top of that I have a stutter (oh, and a lisp!).

Well you can imagine, I was feeling a bit stressed…

…thankfully, the audience was fantastic and tolerated all my quirks!

Busy people working it out…

There was a really interesting mix of people from Government agencies including writers, content managers, web strategists, business analysts and all-round usability consultants.

They proactively engaged in the day – asking questions, speaking about their own experiences and doing the audience activities with gusto.

At the workshop I described Provoke’s comprehensive persona-creation process, including user-behaviour clustering and ‘POV (Point of View) Personas’ – my own technique for ensuring personas are proactively used throughout the design and development process. I also demonstrated different types of conceptual models.

There was a lot to cover and the time passed quickly.

The feedback from the workshop was very positive in all – we also got some really constructive feedback on how we could do it better next time – useful stuff.

I’ll post some of the audience feedback here later in the week, as well the presentations on ‘Conceptual Models’ and ‘Usability Testing’.