Last week was the 4th annual Xerox Innovation Group (XIG) conference in Webster, NY. It is an event that brings together researchers from all of our centers: Xerox Research Center Canada, Europe, India and Webster (my center) as well as the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). I was on the conference committee as the one of the keynote speaker chairs (I brought Professor Judy Olson to speak to our researchers about scientific collaboration over distance), so I was pretty busy during the event, helping with the logistics and networking with all of the amazing people in our organization.

In the midst of all this activity, I was surprised with an Excellence in Science and Technology award, along with 5 other team members, for our work on on Open Xerox. Open Xerox is the web portal that hosts technology prototypes from XIG, making them accessible to the external user community well before the launch of a product offering. I am responsible for the design and usability of the site and it’s associated services. Here’s the text from the award:

This award recognizes the Open Xerox Team. It has over a thousand users and is being used to support RFPs, customer engagement and technology licensing as well as share R&D across the XIG and broader research community. Designed to combine technologies, facilitate transfer, ease integration into customer applications and host software at very different levels of maturity the proprietary platform also has built-in IP protection.

The team for Open Xerox is a cross-center team, including people from Xerox Research Center Europe (XRCE) and Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW). Pictured (from left to right) are Irene Maxwell (XRCE), Sophie Vandebroek (CTO of Xerox and President of XIG), me and Mike Kehoe (XRCW). Behind us is the video screen that shows some of our other team members connecting via video conference from XRCE in Grenoble, France: Jutta Willamowski and Nicola (hidden off screen). Herve Poirier (XRCE) is also on our team and was present at the conference, but did not make it for the awards ceremony. We were all given a nice plaque and an iPad 2 for our efforts. I’m very proud of the team and the project so I decided to post about it here.

In the beginning of 2010, I started working on a Xerox Innovation Group research project called Trailmeme in the role of Usability Lead. Last week, the project was launched from private to public beta at DEMO Fall 2010, a launch pad for emerging technology.

Trailmeme is a new kind of publishing that enables users to create visual maps of Web content. With Trailmeme, content generators, or trailblazers, can create trails to organize and present Web content in a way that tells a story. Trailblazing finishes with a social act, when authors publish their trails for others to walk. Content consumers, or trail walkers, can enjoy well organized journeys through meaningfully sequenced content with commentary. Trails can be turned into PDF documents for printing or use as ebooks.

If you are interested in seeing what Trailmeme is about, you can go to Trailmeme.com and sign up. This is a project with a lot of moving parts: a destination site, search site, a browser bookmarklet, a Firefox toolbar and a WordPress plugin. Throughout the year, I have been doing heuristic evaluations of each aspect of the project and then wireframing improved interfaces. I am privileged to work with a talented UI designer, Anoop Surendran who transforms my wireframes into polished designs that can be implemented by an amazing development team. We’re in beta so some of the edges are still rough; my next task is to plan some quick user testing to set direction for the next round of improvements and features. If you do try it, please don’t hesitate to let me know what you think.

For more information, check out the release post on the Trailmeme blog and watch the 6 minute presentation given by Project Lead Venkat Rao at DEMO.

The project has also received some excellent press coverage:
DEMO: Trailmeme lets you take a walk on the Internet on VentureBeat
Xerox-Incubated TrailMeme Launches, Reducing Real-Time Anxiety on siliconANGLE
Collect, Process and Share Your Online Research with Trailmeme on ReadWriteWeb
Trailmeme creates retraceable, social Web history on CNET News
A More Organic Way to Organize The Web’s Content on Mashable

For more press, see the Trailmeme in the Media Trail (also pictured in the screen capture above).

A few short months ago this application was only a series of screen designs I created with MockApp. Now it has been demonstrated at IPEX, a high profile print/publishing/media trade show. Reuven Sherwin, Founder; VP Products, Research & Development at XMPie (a Xerox Company) spent three months as a visiting researcher at the Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW). While he was here he had an idea for a mobile print application that would combine existing research projects around mobile printing and targeted ads with XMPie personalization technology.

I helped Reuven solidify his idea with some user scenarios and a task list. I then created the interaction design for the application, with feedback from Reuven throughout. This was my first iPhone application and it was great to be able to work with someone who understood the design process. Once we had the basic interactions worked out, Reuven called on resources from XMPie to get the development and graphics completed. It has been very gratifying to be able to work on a product that moved from design to reality so quickly. It’s also great to have something I designed be out in the world and not hidden away within Xerox or one of Xerox’s customers.

You can read more about the application in the press release. I’m looking forward to getting feedback from the demonstration and helping to refine the UI as we move forward into the next stages of this project.

NPR aired a story this morning in the business news on Morning Edition: Solving Health Care Problems By Design, an interview with Tim Brown of IDEO. I asked my partner to pay special attention because it introduced concepts of User Centered Design in a way that was understandable and easily accessible by regular people (non-designers). I thought it might be a good way to explain what it is that I do for a living and how important and useful “design thinking” can be.