What’s the point? The point of this book is to write clearly and concisely, to differentiate yourself, and to better equip yourself with tools for writing persuasively.  Ultimately, this book is designed to help you and your company write winning proposals.

How was it? Good.  I honestly felt that this book was easy to read.  Many times, there is even some humor written into the book.  Two of the best tools that I took away from this book were NOSE (Needs, Outcomes, Solution, Evidence) and Cognitive Webbing.  These tools seemed to help structure my writing and organize my thoughts.

Who should read it? Anyone who wants to be involved in writing proposals.  Anyone who is responsible for writing, reading, or approving proposals.  Anyone who is on a team that is involved with communicating about proposals.  Even if you don’t agree with everything Dr. Sant wrote, it gives us some common language to work from.

Jared Spool has reported that only about 10% of the user interface design questions raised by developers over the course of a typical project can be answered by reference to platform-based published guides.

Does this mean that the standards are lacking?

Or does this mean that we can’t categorize UX/UI (User Experience / User Interface) design specific enough, and apply it to a platform?

Or worse, does this mean that the people who are responsible for defining and publishing these guides don’t know their users or know how their users actually use said platforms?

These are just a few of the questions that keep running through my head as I continue to explore usability and UX/UI design.  Hopefully I can find answers to some of these questions in the near future.

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Currently reading:  “Software For Use – A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of Usage-Centered Design”

The most memorable quote I took away from the 3 days was this…

Software practitioners need to stop acting like waiters, and start acting like doctors. We don’t just take orders, we are here to help people.

…it makes sense, but it’s an extremely loaded quote as well!  The mental shift of facilitating the discovery phase, instead of simply doing what the client says to do…it’s flat out different!  It will take some getting used to, but I’m excited to try it.  I’m excited to help out our clients!  I’m excited to make better, more useful products…and with less “fat”, as Jeff called it.

Instead of blogging in detail about what we learned, I will try to blog about experiences I have when applying what we’ve learned.

Stay tuned…

Most of us here at SEP have already had the “culture shock” of a stand-up meeting.  In my experience it has been a very beneficial way to deliver information and get the entire team together, without completely disrupting any momentum that the team already had.  Most of the time, our meetings were less than 15 minutes!

I really like the fact that this style of meetings is taking off in other industries.  Ideally, our mission states that we are going to create success for our clients…perhaps we could start small by helping them become more efficient.  I think that the biggest improvement in these types of meetings is the lack of distractions…I see lots of people doing OTHER things while we are trying to have meetings – it rarely helps.

At any rate, there is a neat little poster that Nicole Steinbok made to describe this process.