UX

Design Thinking taught by Hong Qu at Hacks/Hackers NYC

The Design Thinking hands-on workshop with Hong Qu, one of the first designers at YouTube, took place at the CUNY Journalism school. It led the attendees through the premise behind user persona testing. Then Hong had us get together with teams and create user persona scenarios and wireframes for 5 ideas submitted by attendees; first on paper, then with Omnigraffle. The team topics: Finding medical price info Gourmeet Penpal news Event sign-up Videogames: mobile mall stats page Hong explained that taking the time to identify users and iteratively build from paper to wireframe and onward minimizes the risk of making something unusable.

Hacks/Hackers as contact sport

Things got a little heated at the Hacks/Hackers event on the Future of Personalized News. After founders Dan Olsen of yourversion and Ethan Gahng of lazyfeed talked about providing relevant stories to readers, some in the crowd pressed them about how to pay the creators who craft all that quality media that audiences want. But as Dan and Ethan pointed out, they aren’t making any money themselves and are still trying to figure out their business model.