The Tuesday, January 11th meeting of the Rocky Mountain Internet Users Group (RMIUG) will discuss "Designing Usability Into Products: the Engineering, Art, and Psychology of Prototyping."

Most of us want our products and services to be not just useful... but usable to our customers. When done properly, usability studies can help reach that goal. But formal usability testing often gets the short end of the stick when budgets and timelines are tight.

Bill Pawlak is the President of Inovdesigns, a User Interface (UI) Design and Analysis company focused on making the world of technology easier for people to use. Bill has over 10 years of multidisciplinary experience designing, testing, and developing user interfaces for software, web-based, and mobile applications. He has applied his expertise to everything from very large, complex systems such as Air Traffic Control to desktop software systems to rich internet applications. Prior to founding Inovdesigns, Bill led Customer Experience efforts with Seurat Company for clients such as RE/MAX International, Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Microsoft, P&G, and Agilent. Bill's educational background is in Human-Computer Interaction and Industrial/Cognitive Engineering.

URL's of interest:
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Inovdesigns, http://www.inovdesigns.com

The meeting is Tuesday, January 11th from 7:00 - 9:00 pm (with optional 6:30 pm start for refreshments and informal networking). The meeting will be held at The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at 1850 Table Mesa Drive in Boulder. To get to NCAR from the Boulder Turnpike (US 36) or Broadway (US 93), take Table Mesa Drive west towards the mountains for approximately 2.5 miles into the foothills. NCAR is at the top of the hill. For door-to-door driving directions, go to MapQuest (http://www.mapquest.com/), click on Driving Directions, enter your starting address, NCAR's address, and voila! Park in the NCAR lot, go in the main door, and ask the guard to point you to meeting, which is held in the main auditorium, right off the lobby. The meeting is free and open to the public, but we may pass the hat to help defray expenses.

Our meeting location seats about 120 people. That is usually enough room to accommodate all attendees, but it's impossible for us to predict how many people will show up for any given meeting. Seating is always on a first-come, first serve basis, and in the event of more attendees than seats, we won't be able to admit additional people into the auditorium after all seats are filled.

The January 11 meeting is a joint effort with the Rocky Mountain chapter of ACM SIGCHI-- the Special Interest Group for Computer/Human Interaction, part of the Association for Computing Machinery professional group. Learn more about SIGCHI at http://www.acm.org/sigchi, or contact local chairperson Laurie Lamar, rm-chi@indra.com.

Thanks to our three sponsors who help make RMIUG
meetings happen:
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MicroStaff (www.microstaff.com) which provides Creative and Technical Talent
for Web, Interactive Media, Marketing Communications and Software
Development projects, is the sponsor of food and beverages for RMIUG
meetings.

ONEWARE (http://www.ONEWARE.com) -- a Colorado-based software company that provides semi-custom web-based applications, sponsors the RMIUG meeting
minutes.

Copy Diva (http://www.copydiva.com) which provides
marketing project management, marketing communications
consulting, and web content development is the AV
sponsor for RMIUG.

Consultants and companies are invited to bring Internet-related Product
information, brochures, and business cards which will be displayed on an
information table.

There are email mailing lists set up for this group. To subscribe or
unsubscribe, see http://www.rmiug.org/maillist.html You can also reach the
RMIUG "Executive" Committee at rmiug-comm@rmiug.org. Our web site is at
http://www.rmiug.org/

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Please note that RMIUG is hosted at NCAR and we are their guests. NCAR has security regulations in effect
that we must follow in order to use the facility. If any RMIUG attendee is unwilling to follow these simple
regulations, I would ask that he or she not attend and instead read the minutes after the meeting.

Here are the NCAR security policies that must be followed:

1. No weapons.
2. Must sign in at front desk and provide name.
3. Cooperate with security folks including providing ID if requested.
4. We are guests of NCAR so cooperation and courtesy are expected when dealing with NCAR staff.

If there are any questions or concerns with this policy, please contact me directly. Thanks, Josh Zapin
(josh@r...).
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