Call for panelists: Agile UX

I recently organized a new meetup for User Experience professionals in the Northern Virginia and DC metro area called Nova UX. For our September 19th get-together, I'm organizing a panel discussion about Agile User Experience, or to quote Ratcliffe and McNeill's popular Agile Experience Design, looking at "the digital product development life cycle in the context of the agile project framework and look at how we can inject design into the process."

We'll be exploring questions such as:

• what is this Agile UX thing? 
• how does it compare to other design processes? pros and cons? 
• is it "better"? is it something I should try? why? 
• what are some example of teams using this process, and what have they learned? 

If you have experience either participating in or leading a creative team working within an agile framework and would like to participate on this panel, I'd love to hear from you. If on the other hand you completely disagree with the agile approach to design, I'd love to hear from you too! My goal is to have a rich discussion with specific ideas attendees can take away and think about with their teams.

If you're interested in being on the panel, please send me an email at jim at addthis.com with a quick description of who you are, what you do, and your experience with design process management.

Thanks! Looking forward to an exciting discussion.

Details:

• This meetup will be held in the new AddThis HQ in Vienna, VA (Tyson's Corner area) 
• Event details and RSVP

Adding new AddThis Pinterest feature to Blogger blogs

Today AddThis released a new, easier way to share to Pinterest, as well as some of the fascinating stats we've seen for this very popular service.

Adding Pinterest to your Blogger blog is easy – in fact some ways, no effort at all on your part. Here are some basics to start:

• If your visitors already use Pinterest and have shared using it anywhere on the AddThis network, Pinterest will show up as one of their "preferred" (personalized) services automatically, no work required. Huzzah!
• If you'd like to explicitly add Pinterest to your site so it always shows up, read on.

Installing AddThis in Blogger

First, let's head over to AddThis and pick the tool we'd like to use.

Be sure to pick "Blogger" so you get the right code that automatically takes into account Blogger's multiple posts on your home page and other nuances specific to this platform.

I like to use the large sharing icons at the bottom of my posts, so let's grab the second choice in the list. 

Then, installing the code is as simple as clicking "Install Blogger Widget". If you have more than one blog, Blogger will ask you to confirm which one should get the widget.

Tip: Leave "Title" blank, unless you want to give the sharing tool a label like "Share this post"; personally these days I don't think it's necessary, as most folks recognize Facebook and Twitter for what they are.

That's it. By default, AddThis will use "preferred services" for each of the icons, so your visitors will see their favorite options, including Pinterest, or a default set of the most popular services.

Hacking the code

If you'd like to instead make sure that specific services show up such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, all you need to do is edit the code inside the widget you just installed. 

First, select "Layout" to edit the widgets and layout of your blog. 

Look for a widget called "HTML/Javascript" – it will be called that because you left the title of the widget blank, otherwise it will be called whatever title you provided – and edit it.

Scroll down through the code in the content field until you see code like what I'm showing to the left. I've changed each instance of "addthis_button_preferred_x" to "addthis_button_facebook", etc for each service I wanted to specifically display.

If you'd like to show the Pinterest "Pin It" button, use "addthis_button_pinterest"; if you'd instead like the 32x32 Pinterest icon, use "addthis_button_pinterest_share". That's it- enjoy!

New NoVA UX Meetup Group

UX hexagon by Peter Morville

The company I work for, AddThis, is based in McLean, VA, about 30 miles outside of Washington DC. In the city there are a number of excellent ongoing technology and design meetups, such as Refresh DC, DC Tech, and Tech Cocktail. 

I thought it would fun, though, to create a meetup specifically for user experience professionals here in Northern Virginia. So, my fellow UX-ers, I'm pleased to announce NoVA UX, a new group for interface designers, visual designers, developers, writers, usability professionals, and the myriad other disciplines that make up what we do.

AddThis is moving into fancy new digs nearby here in McLean later this summer, so I'll be setting up an inaugural event hopefully in August. In the meantime, all UX-ers are welcome to join the group for what I hope will be many future fun and enlightening get-togethers. Hope to see you there.

• Check out NoVA UX

A New Name and a New Look for AddThis

This is an exciting day for Clearspring, now AddThis. We've changed our name and launched two new tools for website owners and bloggers to use on their sites to increase traffic and conversions- the Welcome bar and Trending content box. The Welcome bar is actually an incredibly powerful little tool, cleverly disguised as a simple greeting bar. Check out it's companion API doc.

I'll be talking more about the site rebranding and redesign process over on the AddThis blog next week, but for now I couldn't be more excited about our new look, new collateral, new.. well, everything.

I wanted to give a special shout out to my team – Jeff, Foo, and Matt – who did a phenomenal job. Thanks guys!

Check it out, let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more soon.

AddThis and Visual.ly Create

I was playing around with Visual.ly's infographic generator this morning; it allows you to illustrations derived from Twitter and Facebook API data.

My Twitter statistics aren't very interesting, so here's a look at AddThis through the eyes of our Facebook Page, over the last 30 days.

The infographic includes interesting demographic and geographic statistics, and some analysis of how our followers (thanks, all of you!) interact with the page.

You can create your own Twitter or Facebook infographic here:

http://create.visual.ly/