I received a copy of Cases in Online Interview Research in the mail last month. I created an illustration and helped write Chapter 7 “Guides and Visitors: Capturing Stories in Virtual-World and Interactive Web Experiences” with team members Patricial Wall, Jonas Karlsson, Tong Sun, Wei Peng, Eric Bier, Christian Overland, Mike Butman, Suzanne Fischer and Lisa Korzetz. The chapter documents our work on a collaborative project between the Xerox Research Center Webster (XRCW), Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)  and The Henry Ford Museum called Document Interactions. In partnership with the museum, our research team created a web application and a 3-D virtual world to facilitate the sharing of stories around museum artifacts.

This was one of the first projects I worked on when I joined XRCW in late 2009. My role on the team was to improve the usability of the web application and virtual world interactions. I evaluated the web application and gave suggestions for improvement, I planned and led the user evaluation of the web application (combining user testing and structured interview techniques), and helped plan the user evaluation of the 3-D virtual world. All of the user evaluations took place virtually over the phone and via shared screens, rather than face-to-face, which made our project a prime candidate for inclusion in the book.

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.

I’ve settled into more of a routine this week. With the exception of Monday morning (when my parents do their work), I spent most of my time at the Mt. Shasta office. I was up very early for 7am (10am ET) meetings most days so I usually finish up around 3 or 4pm. If/when I transition to full time virtual work on the west coast, that will likely be my regular schedule.

I’ve been taking all meetings on my iPhone, rather than using landlines, to avoid long distance charges. This tends to run the battery down so low that the phone can’t cover the remainder of the day’s activities (usually taking photos and using the GPS to locate hiking spots and restaurants). So I’ve been having to charge it again around midday. On long calls it sometimes drops me off the call after about 45 minutes. This isn’t a big deal, but it has been somewhat disruptive.

I had my weekly one-on-one with Pat on Tuesday, we used the video component of Live Meeting. It worked well and her video only dropped out once. For as many virtual meetings as we have in our organization, personal video is almost never used even though most people have that capability. We do have specific meeting rooms available in the Webster office that have built-in video capabilities for the group, but they are not used on a regular basis. I haven’t seen much advantage to adding video to a meeting when I am present in the room. It just makes me more conscious of my appearance, attention and attitude as it is reflected back to me on the screen. It does serve to keep me feeling a little more connected to my group out here so I would probably use it more as a virtual employee.

Between meetings I’ve been continuing work on my primary projects. For our upcoming internal conference I spent some time searching for images that would best represent our theme “Advancing the Edge of Innovation” on the program cover. Image searching can take up a lot of time and it is always difficult to come up with something that will meet the Xerox brand imaging guidelines which are very specific. Working with another committee member, I managed to come up with 6 options which I then placed in the cover design template and pushed out to the entire committee for voting. So far, my favorite image is winning so I’m happy!

For Open Xerox this week, I’ve been doing some research on mobile website design. I have worked on several mobile applications on the iPhone platform, but I haven’t yet done a mobile website design. There are programs/services that you can use to create a mobile version, but we will probably develop our own for Open Xerox. Xerox.com does not yet have a mobile version, so I’m hoping I can be a little more creative with the design. This may even be an opportunity for me to influence the future mobile design of Xerox websites, but I won’t hold my breath. Right now I’m in the research phase, looking at the trends and existing sites that are doing creative things. I also need to understand how the sites will be displayed on a variety of mobile platforms (I have an iPhone so I’m a little biased). I’ll probably start sketching some ideas out next week. We have a great development team on Open Xerox so I know that they will be able to implement anything I come up with.

Working for Xerox, there are many things I do that I can’t write about here because they haven’t been released to the public yet or we don’t yet have patent coverage on them. One one such project, I’m primarily providing high level design direction, but I also have the opportunity to address some challenging design issues. One such issue I’ve been exploring this week is how to express the social value of a digital object (such as a blog post, news article or image). There are some very basic ways of expressing this out there (such as number of likes, tweets, diggs, votes, ratings etc.). But they are fairly one dimensional. The Facebook ‘like’ takes it a step further by adding the number of your friends who liked it. I’m trying to come up with some more multi-dimensional ways to capture value and to present them in a more visual way. For example, how many of my friends and friends of friends have read/used this object, how many of them have shared it, how did they rate it? I’ve been doing lots of thinking and sketching on that this week. I don’t have a complete solution yet, but I’m getting there. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a patent or two out of it…

I’ll be taking a long weekend off to do some traveling down to San Bernardino, CA to visit relatives. Then traveling back home on Tuesday. I should be back to my regular, non-virtual work by Wednesday. This has been a fun experiment and I look forward to doing it again sometime soon!

It turns out that my parent’s office is not as available as they led me to believe. Either that or I did not make it clear that it would be difficult for me to work in the space while other people were in it. I think that this has been an unusual week which necessitated extra use of the space by various parties. For the past two days, instead of going into the Mt. Shasta office, I have set up shop at the dining room table.

I’m relatively comfortable here. I think the back and neck problems mentioned in my earlier post were caused by my attempt to replicate the way I work in my office in Webster. There I often sit and work for 8+ hours straight with few breaks, eating at my desk and not taking a real lunch. This isn’t really very healthy and in a home/temporary office space this has become much more apparent. So I’ve been taking more breaks between tasks, getting up and walking around, petting the cat, going outside to pet the dogs or pick raspberries from the garden, and actually eating lunch away from the computer. For the most part, I’ve been able to focus and get things done.

Connectivity is somewhat of an issue here. For people who live in rural areas, options are limited. Until only recently my parents had dial up Internet access. They can’t get regular DSL or cable access here, satellite connections are apparently unreliable (although my brother has had good luck with his in Trinity County which is more remote). Now they use Verizon MiFi which involves a small wireless slab that projects a network in the neighborhood of your devices (you can see it to the right of my laptop in the picture). It works pretty good but I’ve discovered that it will only last for about 3 hours before it needs to be charged again. My parents only turn it on when they want to check their email. On top of this, I don’t get cell service (AT&T) unless I go out into the front yard. Luckily I don’t have any meetings today or tomorrow and I should be able to have more access to the office in Mt. Shasta next week.

I brought all of the files I need with me and I have been downloading relevant documents from email then working on them offline to conserve battery time on the MiFi. Today I did some work on the Xerox Innovation Group Conference materials. I’m on the planning committee of this internal conference that takes place next month and things are starting to kick into high gear as the date approaches. I also gave some feedback to the UI designer on trailmeme.com. We’ve needed to re-evaluate the landing page goals and design for a while, but other more pressing issues have taken priority. This week I think we are finally zeroing in on an appropriate update. I then spent some time on Open Xerox, a portal where the public can experience various technologies from our global research labs. Xerox Interactive Marketing has recently updated the style of the xerox.com website. Associated websites like ours have a little while to update their sites to match the new branding. Our team is eager to make the switch so, after a meeting with interactive marketing last week, I reviewed the new guidelines and made a list of the things we will need to change in our template. Luckily it is not a complete overhaul so we should be able to get it done fairly quickly.

No, I’m not in San Francisco or Sacramento. If you were in Sacramento, then got into a car and drove north for 4 hours on Interstate 5, you would be where I am now: Mt. Shasta. I’m here visiting my parents and my manager at Xerox has been kind enough to let me work virtually from here two weeks so I can spend more time with my family. I eventually want to transition to full time virtual work so this is a trial run.

This is a picture of my temporary office in downtown Mt. Shasta, you can see the mountain that dominates the landscape here just behind it. My parents live in Weed, a smaller town just north of here, but they have an office space in Mt. Shasta that I can use for most of the time I am here. I know it will be better for me to have an office space that is separate from my home base. I worked from my parent’s house yesterday but found that there were a lot of distractions and it was hard to find a good place to situate myself. I did a lot of catching up on email and some reading (I brought several months worth of Interactions magazine, the ACM’s computer human interaction publication).

I’m quickly discovering the importance of ergonomics in even a temporary office setting. Yesterday I set myself up in front of the picture window in the entryway at home. It was somewhat out of the way and I had a nice view of the yard. The table there is a little high so I sat on a stool for three hours, looking down at my laptop. Needless to say, this was not good for my back or my neck. I had to take some ibuprofen and spent the rest of the afternoon reading on the couch.

This morning I got up and came into the Mt. Shasta office early. I’m also dealing with the 3 hour time difference so most of my regular meetings happen during the first part of the day. I’m not used to getting to work at 8am, but it will probably have to become a regular practice for me out here. I was able to set up my laptop on a desk and there is an adjustable office chair. I raised my laptop up on some phone books so I wasn’t looking down on it as much. I had project-related meetings all morning which I took on my iPhone using my headphones with a microphone built in. For some of the meetings we also used Live Meeting to share screens. Many of the meetings that I have throughout the day are with groups of people that are not co-located (Xerox has research centers in India, France, Canada and California; we also work with development resources in India) so phone conferencing is a standard mode of interaction.

My last meeting today was my weekly one-on-one with my manager Pat. I called her a little bit early because my Dad showed up and wanted me to go to lunch with him. Pat and I decided to forgo the video conferencing through Live Meeting because we had some technical issues with it last week. Pat’s computer has been a little fussy about video sharing. It was nice to hear her voice and check in. After lunch I worked for a few more hours but my back and neck were bothering me again. I’m starting to realize what a nice office setup I have back in Webster, NY. If I plan to do this long term, I’ll need to invest in a comfy chair, as well as a full size keyboard and monitor. Luckily I don’t have many pressing things to do this week so I’m heading home now to read some more Interactions.