Second Days

Why is it that second days of a conference always feel busier than the first day? Here it is after 2:00pm and I'm just getting around to my first post of the day. Whew. I'm sure the increased activity has something to do with more people registering on the second day or participants arriving late. (It certainly couldn't have anything to do with hanging out until midnight with Paul Erickson from the U. of Nebraska and the aforementioned "crew" from Broward County Schools, could it?) The exhibit hall has been busy busy busy this afternoon. Thankfully, Jan came to relieve me from booth duty a little before 2pm, so I got to sneak across the street for lunch at Burger King and steal a few minutes to blog.

I started off the morning with a focus group for Project Caliper. David Yaskin & I have run two of these at the conference, one yesterday focusing on the higher education institutions, and one today oriented around K12. One of the great things about Users Conference is that we can get groups of our users together and get feedback on the products themselves. We've run focus groups on new projects, like Caliper and on existing feature sets like the Discussion Board, Online Gradebook, and Assignment Manager & Digital Dropbox. These encounters are key to helping us make product design decisions. Also, this year is the first time we've set up a usability lab at Users Conference. Our product development team is conducting usability testing with conference participants.

I've been busy in the Building Blocks booth. We've had a steady stream of traffic flowing through. For those out there in the blogosphere who aren't familiar, Building Blocks is Blackboard's open architecture that allows developers from academic institutions or other software vendors to extend the Blackboard products. There are still plenty of people who don't know a lot about Building Blocks, so Jan, Bob, and I wind up giving a lot of overviews. However, what's really amazing is the number of people who do know Building Blocks inside and out. It seems like every five minutes I'm pointing a user at Bob Alcorn, our Senior Architect, because they're coming to the booth with a technical development question that's out of my league.

Up later this afternoon: David's formal presentation on Caliper.