Announcing The UX Hour

Get a User Experience problem solved, re-educate me on a UI&us blog topic, crowdsource your design dilemma.

'The UX Hour' an effort to give back something to the community from which I've got so much. It will be one hour a week live video, chat, and skype call-in session somewhat modelled on Leo Laporte's and 37signals' live broadcasts.

To be clear — I'm not a UX 'fixit guru'! But I hope to offer perspective, resource suggestions and a forum for User Experience and User Interface conundrums. There's been a bunch of times when I've been stuck and another perspective has saved the day. It's an experiment, which may or may not prove fruitful…but with your help it can be practical convergence of designers with possible solutions and differing perspectives.
Technically, it will be a Ustream/LiveStream/justin.tv session with chat and Skype (audio) call in. Unfortunately technical and bandwidth issues will limit video to 360x240 initially. I'll supplement with a skitch.com image thread for high resolution images that everyone can contribute to. Any technical suggestions welcomed.

The first UXhour will be at:

• UTC: Sunday 19th July, 23:00
• US EST: Sunday 19th July, 7pm
• US PST: Sunday 19th July, 4pm
• Australian AEST: Monday 20th July, 9am
• NZ: Monday 20th July, 11am

Sorry Europe, I realize this will be Monday 01:00 for many of you.

Watch this space and please share your suggestions! It should be a lot of fun.

* Credit goes to Matthew Sanders, a UX guy much more experienced than I, for coming up with the name. Thanks Matt, hope that's OK!
** Note to those reminding me that the UI&us podcast has one, and only one episode to date: hopefully this live approach will be encouragement for more podcasts

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What is a Browser, etc

This may be old news, but I saw the following video referenced by a Techcrunch story.

Google folks asking passerbys "What is a browser?":

Less than 8% knew. Most seemed to confuse it with the search engine. I particularly liked the men who offered an incorrect answer, authoritatively. This one should make the Mozilla crew happy:

Interviewer: What made you use Firefox? Some guy: My friend came over to my house and erased all my other browsers and installed it and said "You're using this now."

We're in a Bubble If you're reading this, you must be in the tech bubble with me. What are some other questions we could ask the average person in Times Square and expect 90% to get it wrong?

What is web 2.0? What is bluetooth? What is firewire? What is a byte? What is Wifi? What is a server? What is ADSL? What is a social network?

What did I get right and wrong? Any others you can think of? What other concepts do we take for granted? (I'm not even talking platform-specific ones like Mac OS X's 'disk image')!

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