Last November, Robin Good hosted an online session at the Corporate Learning Trends and Innovations Conference (This is actually a Ning Social Network), where instead of just him spewing out facts and opinions, he allowed his 150 member audience to tell HIM what they have found to be some of the best collaboration tools out there. The result is pretty interesting, and exposed me to a lot of online tools out there that I wasn’t aware of.

Reading Bill Buxton’s work on Sketching User Experience has been really inspiring. Here is a musician, turned researcher, turned information designer (in the broadest sense of that designation), tuning me back into the design dialogues in the context of user experience design. His writing is not the most earth shattering thing on the planet, but like any well written and designed book, it frames the issues surrounding into digestible chunks, and I was very inspired by what I have read so far. It has managed to address the complex processes and concepts behind user experience design by drawing from design, business, academic, and anecdotal sources. Precisely because the book reads so effortlessly, I can appreciate the amount of work that has gone into this text.

Having the daunting task of consulting with Northern First Nations on our first design iteration, and having lost the opportunity to work on a marketing project with a remote community (due to cost, I suspect), I am looking for good collaboration tools, testing them out, and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. All of them have room for improvements, and all have their strengths. Suddenly, I have the urge to start sketching again.