Design by Hacking
Tuesday, Aug. 14, 11:30-12:15 PM
by Bill Scott and Karon Weber
Yahoo! Teachers and the Yahoo! Gobbler™ are tools that create an environment for teachers to gather, organize and share materials to supplement their curriculum. This talk will explore the birth of both these products, including the integral role the teaching community played in shaping them.
We will also discuss some of the challenges of designing for the education market, and present the suite of tools that had to be built along the way. Finally, we'll take a closer look at some of the guerilla techniques we used to transform a scrappy idea into a launchable product, from the interactive design sessions with an on-campus workshop of 70 teachers to the dozens of Yahoo! employees who volunteered their weekends and nights to make this real.
In this session, you will:
- Find out exactly what it takes to bring a "hack" project to market.
- Discover new ways of innovating the blend of design and technology.
- Pick up tips, tools and hacks to help you get your product out into the wild.
About Bill Scott
Bill leads engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community that allows teachers to gather, organize and share web resources and lesson plans. For the past year and a half, Bill has been the Ajax evangelist at Yahoo!, where he focuses on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design and development. Bill was also Yahoo!'s Design Pattern curator, which lead to the launch of the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.
For 20 years, Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. He is also a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops, where he discusses the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. His many musings about these topics and more can be found at Looks Good Works Well.
About Karon Weber
Karon is a principal designer at Yahoo!, where she focuses on social media, hacks and mash-ups. While in residence at Yahoo! Research Berkeley, she designed and developed Yahoo! Prototypes such as A Local Event Browser, Checkmates, A Mobile Map Friend-Finder and International Remix. About a year ago, Karon began hacking the Yahoo! Trip planner to build a tool for educators to supplement their textbook curriculums. The result: Yahoo! Teachers, a new, free service that helps educators gather, organize and share materials for the classroom.
For over 20 years, Karon has been spinning stories about people and technology, and then working with teams of talented designers and developers to bring those narratives to life. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, she discovered the world of software design when she joined the research staff at Xerox PARC to understand the use of video in the workplace. She then led design teams that created feature animation production software for DreamWorks SKG, SGI/Alias|Wavefront and Pixar Animation Studios. At Pixar, Karon contributed to the development of custom artist tools for the production of Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo and The Incredibles.