Meeting Rashmi Sinha

Rashmi Sinha - founder of consulting firm Uzanto, former lecturer in HCI at UC Berkeley and a well-known Information Architect based in US - is visiting India next week.

Some of us at IndiaCHI, who work in Delhi [Shilpa, Saurabh, Navin, Mani and I] will be meeting her this Monday evening at Barista, South Ex. If you’re in the city around that time and would like to join us, we promise a free cappuccino for you. Be there by 6.30 sharp to claim the free gift.

Mani asks if there’s an agenda for the meeting. Well, we’ll leave it to Rashmi to set the tone and direction but there’s no harm in thinking about things we can talk about.

- There’ll be a lot to learn from Rashmi’s experiences of promoting the discipline. She has planned and managed plenty of events and communities in the past. She’s the founder of Bay-CHI East – a community of usability professionals in her area that organises talks on web usability. She’s also involved with the AIFIA initiative.

- We can talk about her work in user research, personalisation, online communities and ROI for usability. She has written a lot on these issues and her resources on usability ROI are frequently cited.

- Then, we can ask her some big questions like:

a. How does she view the field of user experience? What are its major components according to her, how are they related, which of them are emerging [or merging] and where does she see them leading.

b. IA. No, not the definition, but what according to her is the scope and what are the limitations of Information Architecture.

c. Why is there still no credible, full-proof statistics on ROI on usability, even for specific projects?

d. Why are UX professionals so under-recognised and under valued? How fast is the perception changing? And what does she think about Tog’s new label.

That’s a pretty big agenda and sorry if it sounds like curriculum for a full course on the subject :). About sharing our experiences, I’m sure we’ll get time for that too.

And oh, did I mention that we could ask her how Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Alan Cooper, Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett and Christina Wodtke look like in real life? We already know [courtesy Shilpa] that Peter Pirolli is a dish :)

Related Links
- Rashmi's consulting firm, Uzanto.
- Her personal website detailing her work and interests.
- Pictures & bios of Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Alan Cooper, Peter Merholz, Jesse James Garrett, Christina Wodtke [bio] and Peter Pirolli.