War Stories, Live (New York Edition)!

After the great experience in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, I was pretty excited about last week’s Interviewing users book launch party in New York. We had a ton of food and drink and pudding and donuts and cupcakes. We gave away 20 free copies of the book, had the second-ever live War Stories.

In New York, none of the storytellers had written for the War Stories series here; so even though they obviously have been telling these stories at various points in their careers, this was a first for all of them. I’m so appreciative they trusted me enough to take the risk. I think they really pulled it off (and was gratified to hear feedback from people through the evening and afterwards on Twitter).

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courtesy of Glen Jackson Taylor

Our storytellers:

  • Tammy Sachs, founder and CEO at Sachs Insights, described some surprisingly erroneous racial presumptions about mothers versus their children.
  • Whitney Quesenbery, an independent consultant, related the insightful mishaps when trying to show a demo to visually impaired users.
  • Miles Begin, co-founder of the Design Gym, told us about a drastic failure to build rapport in a healthcare setting.
  • John Payne, Principal at Moment, shared a story about trying to do fieldwork- as part of an IxDA event with 25 participants – at Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. You can read more about this on the Moment blog (part 1, part 2, part 3)

Thanks to Rosenfeld Media for donating 20 books for both this party and San Francisco, and Allan Chochinov and SVA Products of Design for hosting us. And of course, thanks to everyone who came out and had a good time!

More pictures (courtesy of Glen Jackson Taylor – thank you!) follow

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