A week in Minneapolis
It's been nine days since I've written here. I can't remember having a spare five minutes the whole week when I didn't went to head straight to sleep.
What a week! After flying in on Sunday, Ivan took me on a bicycle tour of Minneapolis to keep jet lag away. It was perfect weather and barely any traffic. The lakes just west of Minneapolis are glorious.
Monday was a nice, Bojhan and I settled in and visited the Mall of America, which has a pretty impressive Lego store.
We also had a chance to walk along the Mississippi river and past the historic flour mills.
Tuesday was the beginning of the usability study. It was a full day of observation and analysis. In the evening Ivan took us to watch a Minnesota Twins baseball game. It was exciting and really filling. Fun!
Wednesday was another early start with another full day of observation. It was great to watch Nick and Joe from the University work and collaborate with everyone in the room.
On Thursday, we analysed and prioritised all the issues we found during the previous two days. 140 issues! This took a really long time...
Friday, the camp started and everyone but me had presentations to give. I spent a good amount of time working on the Saturday presentation on the results of the usability study. I also watched Todds keynote again, and I loved it just as much as when I saw it in Bogota.
Saturday, we had a presentation to give. We were tweaking the slides up until the session was due to start! I'm not very comfortable sharing the stage with others and I wasn't used to using Google Drive to present. Even so it went surprisingly well! It was great to present alongside Angie, Bojhan, Ivan, Link, and Nick. I'm glad Nick made it to the camp, as he's so full of energy and valuable advice. After the presentation we could finally relax a little :-)
Sunday? Sprinting! Another early start. We spent the first hour or so finishing up the issues spreadsheet and then spent what little time we had discussing any tricky issues with people in the room.
I wish I had time to write up each day separately but at least I dumped it out of my head before I land in Zürich and back to normal work life.