David Verba in Conversation with Karon Weber & Bill Scott of Yahoo!
David Verba, Director of Technology at Adaptive Path, had the pleasure of talking with Karon Weber and Bill Scott of Yahoo! about their recent project, Yahoo! Teachers. Don’t miss Karon and Bill’s UX Week 2007 session, Design by Hacking.
David Verba [DV]: Welcome and thank you. I am here with Karon Weber and Bill Scott of Yahoo! to learn about their work and the presentations they’ll be giving at Adaptive Path’s upcoming UX Week 2007 in Washington, DC. Would you mind giving us a little background on yourselves?
Karon Weber [KW]: I’m currently principal designer at Yahoo!, and have been working for the last couple of years on social media applications. Prior to that, I spent about six years at Pixar Animation Studios, heading up the design of studio tools for the custom tools that they use at Pixar. Before that, I worked at a PBS affiliate, and spent time actually at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, in the mid-eighties, working on video in the workplace and applications of video in the workplace.
So basically, I’m a technology storyteller who’s found different media to tell how people work with technology.
DV: Fantastic. Bill, can tell us a little bit about your background, too.
Bill Scott [BS]: Most recently, I’ve been the AJAX Evangelist here at Yahoo!. Now, I’m heading up engineering for Yahoo! Teachers and still fulfilling some evangelism roles. Before I came to Yahoo!, I created the Rico open source AJAX framework that was one of the early AJAX frameworks: Just kind of a voice for design in engineering, the blend of those two. That’s been my focus throughout my career, is bouncing back and forth.
I got my start writing a best-selling computer game for the Macintosh back in ‘84 or ‘85 called GATO, a submarine simulation. And that got me interested in doing graphics, and followed on doing war gaming and building 3D graphic stuff, and IDEs, and a number of tools that sort of blended technology and design together.
DV: And then just really quick, and we’ll dive into some more details later, but what is the project that you guys are going to be talking about at UX Week 2007?
KW: We’ve been working on a project called Yahoo! Teachers. It’s a new service that’s going to be launched later this fall which enables teachers to go out onto the web, gather materials to use to supplement their curriculum, add their state standards, so that they can actually incorporate the requirements of the pedagogy that’s put into their classrooms, and then create projects to then share with their kids. So it’s a way for teachers to go out onto the web — collecting materials, gathering those materials, collaborating with each other, and sharing with each other. Basically, it is social media for teachers.
DV: And I gather there are multiple parts to this? There’s the part that allows the acquisition of materials, the Gobbler portion of things, and then the part that allows the sharing of those items? Is that correct?
BS: Yes, that’s correct. I had mentioned that on my blog before, too. The Gobbler allows you to easily gather material. And then we share things implicitly through the network, and we make it easy to find that material, obviously, within the network with ways to publish that back out to the web and to each other.
DV: I also gathered through my reading that you’ve brought a lot of teachers in for actual development. How challenging was it to bring in such a large group of people that weren’t familiar with building the tools and communicate what you could provide to for them? Also, how did you learned from them what they were interested in doing?
KW: Well, I think that both Bill and I believe deeply in participatory design, and we come out of a world where you have a troika between end users, designers, and engineering. This was actually a perfect use case from that standpoint, where we had the prowess of Yahoo! engineering, Yahoo! designers, and then this community of teachers who knew what they wanted. So this notion that we could build things by teachers, for teachers, was really how we approached the project.
We were also very lucky in the sense that it was summer, and teachers have some time off when they’re actually not teaching to come and spend with us. We traded our technical know-how on how you use things like Flickr, del.icio.us and Yahoo! Answers in the classroom, and in return, they traded us their work practices, best practices and what teachers need in order to have technology suit their ways of working.
So it really was this amazing partnership that came together, and with the help of some amazing Yahoo!s, we were able to give them a prototype. And during the day, they would work on the prototype, provide us with bugs, and at night, the engineering machine would crank away as many of those bugs as possible, and give them a new build the next day. As I said, it was an ideal case of participatory design.
DV: So just to put some idea of scope to this, how many teachers did you have in, and for how long were they intimately involved with the process?
KW: We had 65 teachers on site for seven-days, and then post that seven days, they were available and using the tool throughout the course of the next several months. It was an intensive seven-day workshop.
Read the rest of David Verba’s interview of Karon Weber and Bill Scott of Yahoo!.
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