I just spent the last week out in the States. I flew out to Dayton, Ohio on the Sunday where I spent the week through to Friday and then jumped on the plane to New York for a couple of days.

The reason for my trip to Dayton was that the LexisNexis UX department had their second annual UX week. This involved bringing together members of the team from across the States and Europe to participate in activities and talks on a range of usability subjects.

I hadn’t expected to go. I have handed in my notice with the company, leaving on the 1st of June, so thought I’d miss out and have to stay in London to focus on finishing off my project commitments. As it turned out I was able to get on top of this and so given the chance to fly over and take part.

As a result, I was suddenly put in the position of having to give a presentation on the Monday, after lunch, on the subject of accessibility. Given the short notice I spent the flight over writing up my notes for the slides in a word document, then when I got to my hotel at 4:30pm local time I set to work putting it all together in a flash presentation. Luckily I was able to use the Monday morning to wrap it up, adding the finishing touches. I’d hoped to cover more, including a review of the global product and perhaps some images to break it up but needless to say I ran out of time.

However, I think the depth of the information made the presentation credible, even if i struggled at times to remember the flow (having not had time to practice and review). I will upload the presentation to my site shortly so that it available for download.

The rest of the week was fun. Lots of things to keep us busy including, on the Thursday, a visual design competition. I had originally come up with the idea as a test across all disciplines. The test covering all aspects of interface design. I thought it would be interesting to see how each discipline coped with having to handle over areas of the process. In my mind I thought it would show that visual designer were the most prepared to handle other roles and could take a project from concept to completion.

The reality was that only visual design took part so it really just became a visual design test. In my mind it was a chance for us to step away from branding convention and try something new. I reality, on review it seemed that the designers couldn’t break away from existing visual styling. To be honest I was disappointed with the results. We only had 2 to 3 hours to come up with something but that is no excuse. It was a great opportunity for everyone to showcase their skills but it never materialized.

The resulting presentation at the end of the day to the whole of UX was fairly predictable too. I think people missed the point of the exercise and couldn’t see past ‘brand’ conventions. My design that had an underlying LexisNexis feel but tackled the brand in a completely different way:

• focused on ‘the grid’ removing the use of red
• tackled the poor navigation of the existing interface
• incorporated some marketing techniques
• introduced new graphical elements for a web 2.0 feel

As Carl pointed out, the other designs were essentially cut and pastes of other interface designs with the appropriate content overlaid.Click here to see my design.

On a social level it was great to see everyone, meet those I’d only spoken to by phone, and then get the chance to say goodbye one last time.

Before returning to London, I did a short stop over in New York, staying with my friend Andy just off 72nd & Broadway.
It didn’t look like we were going to make it at first. I had a car all week, a ford explorer, which I dropped at the airport on Friday afternoon but when we checked in all flights to New York were canceled. I ended up hiring a mini-van and driving everyone to Cincinnati so we could make a flight to JFK! On the way we passed a major crash on the opposite side of the freeway with cars flipped all over the place. Nasty.

Got in to NY at 10 and cabbed it to Broadway. Made it to Andy’s for 11 and went out to his local. Just like Cheers, everyone knew his name. Ha. Despite this we managed to drag ourselves down to a bar and watch the FA cup final the next morning.

That afternoon I went for a run round Central Park. Did a loop of the perimeter and then round the reservoir in the middle, clocking up about 16km. The result of this is that I have broken 500km since I started with Nike +! Pretty good going I reckon. Hopefully I’ll be well clear of 1000km before the end of the year.

Saturday night I met up with the other LexisNexis guys and went out for dinner at an over priced restaurant called Smith & Wollensky. They do steaks, the cheapest which is about £30. They might be big but you don’t really need that much food anyway. Plus, the wine was even more of a skank. I bought a bottle of house red and a white, and the price was roughly £60!! So much for America being cheaper the the UK. That really left a sour taste in the mouth. Especially when there are so many great, cheap places to go.

That aside I had a fun night. We met up with Andy again and went to a few bars in the West Village. The night turned vague toward the end, which I think was about 4am?

The pity of the trip was that I had so much work to do for Caroline Sylge’s website that I spent the whole of Sunday working until I got the plane back to the UK.

Who knows when I’ll next head state side. I hope it’s before my new jeans wear out!

I’ve just watched the cricket world cup highlights. Wow! What a game. The game featured was England v The West Indies. Brian Lara’s last international game. I’m sorry to see him go although I never watch cricket so it really doesn’t make any difference but I hear he was an entertaining player in a game that could do with some excitement. But today’s game was worthy of a place along side such memorable occasions as Liverpool winning the champions league and Great Britain winning gold in women’s curling 6 years (I think) ago.

It may not have been worth anything but at least England went out in style and showed that there is quality in the team despite the bad press and critisism. Michael Vaughan lead the team well totting up a good innings. Then came along Kevin Pietersen who made a century but fell at the next. Finally it look like the windies had got the best of england but  then the crowd were silenced as Paul Nixon put in a quality performance falling short of the target by 3 runs with 3 balls to play. I have to say having started to believe england had it them to win I thought we’d thrown it away at the end but Stuart Broad saved the day hitting a four which pushed england 1 point ahead and winning the game.

Who knew cricket could be like this! Excellent!

If you happen to have a spare 5 minutes I suggest you check out my friend Carl Hubbers’ blog. He is currently ‘on tour’ with his kiwi mates sailing round the Caribbean following his fellow country men as they surprise everyone with their knowledge of cricket, even beating the English in the first game.

Despite spending every day on a boat he has managed to update his blog daily with tales of their tomfoolery. Check it out…

Things have been buzzing for me since saturday. I went down to the local running track and re-calibrated my Nike+ system. As mentioned before, I knew it was falling well short of the correct distance. As it turned out I was losing 700m over 10km! That is quite a difference. As I was recalibrating I could see it was short roughly 7m over 100. The process actually involves a minimum distance of 400m which is the same as one lap of the inside lane of the track. You have to run it once (I did twice to be sure) and then a walking version.

The result has been astounding, and inspiring too. Having got things set I left the track and did 11km over a fairly flat course. On that run I broke the 40 minute mark. I knew I could from my run in Battersea Park. That was good.

On Monday I went out at lunch and did a river circuit, holborn - temple - tower - westminster - temple and back to holborn. It worked out about 15.3km and I finished in 59min something. Wow! That was sweet. I was averageing under 4 minutes per km over 15km! Previously it was taking me that long to do about 12.5km.

So I went out at lunch today with the intention to just clock up some distance for one of my challenges but didn’t think I was up to a big or fast one. As it went I felt better and better although I didn’t think I was pushing it. This time I went out as far as Vauxhall Bridge and back. The distance when I got back to the office was (I think) 17.1km. The time was just over 1hr 5min! When I uploaded my run it clocked my 10km at 37′37″. Holy shit. That is unbelievable! I remember when I was happy to do a 10 minute mile, which seemed a long way at that! My 5km was 18′31″ too. If I can keep this up I’ll be well happy. The other thing was that I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself either so I hope there is room for development yet. If I can translate that time in to a triathlon I feel confident I could break the top 10.

Anyway, that’s enough of my bragging. Sorry. I am just buzzing about it. If you didn’t know, 15 years ago I weighed about 18 stone (252 pounds) and did no excercise to think of. I could just about muster the strength to run for a bus!

Have you noticed? I’ve now got my Nike+ stats appearing in the right-hand column. Sweet! Thanks go to Mark Rickett for the creation of the plugin.

I had some trouble getting it to work initially. First I didn’t notice it was pointing to a different directory to the one it needed to. That fixed I then had to manually add the php in to the sidebar. No problem though. So now it is all working I just need to go in adjust the code out put to match my style sheet. It currently uses strong tags which I have set to Georgia and don’t use in that context. Hopefully that should take long. Beyond that I might even fiddle with the php to see if I can get the average pace of each individual run to show. Another great feature would be surfacing my challenges. You can show your goals but I don’t have any. I just have a bunch of challenges which I’ve got going with some friends.

I’ve also come across another Nike+ piece of php which pulls your info from the site and actually presents each run in the format of a graph. When I get a chance I thought I might create an actual Nike+ page to hold this too. If can remember where I got the script I will add a link.