Designing the User Experience at Autodesk

Notes from UX Camp DC

by Ryan Arnaudin

Recently I attended the UX Camp DC unconference. For those unfamiliar with unconference or BarCamp events, loosely this means that the agenda for the day is open and participant driven. Any attendee can hold a discussion, workshop, or talk on a topic of interest. I’d like to share some of the insights, tips, and takeaways from the sessions I attended.

The Mobile, Global, Digital Revolution

Hilding Anderson, Sapient Corporation

Most will agree: we live in a time of rapid change. Information abundance and the proliferation of digital tools and devices has been rapid, and often taken for granted.

Hilding argues that mobile is the next wave of change in the digital revolution. He drew similarities between this digital revolution and the industrial revolution:

• A painful [for some] restructuring of industries
• More competition as technology increases. Performance gaps get bigger. Existing corporations can be disrupted by startups.
• Out with the old, in with the new. Adapting is essential to survival.
• Luddites attempt to stall progress.

Takeaway: We are in the midst of digital and mobile revolutions. Familiarize yourself with the trends and implications to understand how this may impact your business or industry.

Designing for the Future You

Dana Chisnell

Dana challenged us to re-consider including age on personas. As demonstrated in an interactive session, age can tempt the designer to make assumptions and projections, or use stereotypes that may be invalid and could lead to a broken design.

Instead of age Dana suggests ranking personas from low to high on attitude, aptitude, and ability scales in relation to the technology. This will help you create and gage designs for your users without thinking about age.

Takeaway: If a particular piece of information does not help you design for your users and/or is prone to stereotypes and assumptions, don’t include it in personas. One suggestion: replace age with attitude, aptitude, and ability rankings.

VizThink

Dan Willis

CC BY-SA Todd Wickersty

Dan hit with an interactive and high energy session titled “VizThink”. Together we explored how visuals directly impact the details of a message by studying one of the masters – Dr. Suess. We also proved that anyone can sketch/draw and that it is an informative way to convey ideas.

Takeaway: Visuals provide both context and attitude to the content they accompany. Also, they engage your audience!

Critiquing Critique

Jared Spool

As designers we are familiar with having our work critiqued, and critiquing others’ work. By critiquing the personal websites of attendees we identified critique approaches that did and didn’t work, and Jared used this experience to offer further suggestions and insights.

A common pitfall was for the critique to become a group design session with everyone offering their opinions on how to design the site. Avoid this temptation! Critique is not design and should instead attempt to separate “what” from “how” and focus on the issues. Getting to the rationale is what is important; designers are good at coming up with designs on their own.

It will also take some pressure off the presenter to establish roles for the critique session. Jared recommends 'critic', 'presenter', 'facilitator', and 'recorder'.

Takeaway: Critique is about surfacing the problem, not generating solutions.

Remote Collaboration

Jason Wishard

As someone who works with colleagues around the world, I found this session to be a good reminder of what makes a remote team successful.

Team work:

• Stay social – make good use of email, Instant Messaging, Twitter
• Don’t be camera shy
• Have an “Open door” communication policy
• Transparency is king
• Communications must be actionable

Workspace:

• Task out your space
• Encourage focus - isolation and quiet

Virtual environment:

• Close/hide apps during calls and presentations
• Turn off notifications when appropriate
• Set status and expectations

Takeaway: Successful remote collaboration requires three pillars: a great team, an effective workspace, and a solid desktop environment.

Going out to Eat

Jimmy Chandler

Jimmy’s session drew analogies between operating a restaurant and designing software. Restaurateurs know emotions play heavily into their customer experience and are masters at exploiting this. There is a lot we can learn from them:

• Emotions change how we face and solve problems
• Emotions are critical to learning, curiosity, and creative thought
• Experience is more memorable than the product itself

Takeaway: Leverage customer emotion in the design of products and services.

On User Research at Autodesk University 2011

by Alan Millar

Autodesk University is a year-round educational resource for users of Autodesk products. Each year, right after Thanksgiving weekend, Autodesk University's flagship event brings together design professionals from around the world for classes, keynotes, product demonstrations, exhibits and networking events. And as it turns out, quite a few AU attendees also spend some of their valuable time improving the ease-of-use of Autodesk software.

When you bring 8074 users of Autodesk software and services together in one place, it stands to reason Autodesk researchers and user experience designers will also be there, analyzing as many users as possible. This year, 375 AU attendees participated in various user research activities that are critical to optimizing the user experience in Autodesk products.

Like Autodesk University, Autodesk research activities are year-round. At #AU2011, we conducted 140 individual activities such as interviews and usability studies, and 27 group activities ranging from focus groups to participatory design sessions. 

In a participatory design session the SWSS team conducted, we prepared worksheets, cards and mock-ups useful for gathering individual input, understanding how users organize tasks and group information, and how users react to existing comparative and internal solutions.

For some additional participatory research examples, read about ACAD Design Jams in Eunice Chang's recent post.

I've found that whatever the study type, participants in these activities seem to walk away feeling as though they've really contributed something to the future of Autodesk products, and frankly, we feel the same way. Consider this post a thank you to all 375 of you who participated in our research sessions at AU, and to the hundreds more who participate year-round in our user research activities. We can't do it without you.

Quotes from a few participants:

"I'd like to learn Revit in two weeks...like a curriculum where you could log-in or have it pop up and guide us along."

“You are showing novice and expert, but there is a lot of gray area in-between. The system should understand based on user activity what is most important to offer right away.”

"I want the cloud to tell me where I can find solutions to problems I have. I want to know what my options are beyond what my personal experience tells me. I want to step out and tap into everyone else's experience and draw that back into my project.

Ideally the cloud will make us more informed about the decisions we make so that we make better buildings and improve the products we deliver. It would not just act like a storage device, not just speed up some of our processes, but actually make us better at design."

And one from one of our researchers:

"This year at AU, our team had the opportunity to speak with over a hundred users. Their interest in Cloud and involvement in redefining their work was extremely interesting. I feel that we'll see big shifts occurring in BIM, Cloud, and distributed work. We are always interested in hearing from our users and encourage people to sign up to participate in our studies at www.autodesk.com/usability"

Thank you to all our users from the user experience design and research teams at Autodesk.

 

AU Report: AutoCAD Design Jams

by Eunice Chang

On the Monday before Autodesk University (AU) officially kicked off, the AutoCAD UX team was hard at work brainstorming and co-designing with end users. We were piloting a new methodology, coined the AutoCAD Design Jams, where we collaborated with users to envision the AutoCAD experience in five years. After breaking up into small teams composed of 2-3 users and 2 AutoCAD UXers, we developed concepts that focused on three main topics. The pilot was wildly successful. Not only did our participants roll-up their sleeves to build out and present concepts that would be useful for them, we also had a couple folks from the software development (SWD) team join in on the action! Some of the feedback we received from our participants after the Design Jams included:

• “What I enjoyed about the event was the ability to collaborate with likeminded peers in my industry and forward thinking product designers and programmers. This validated that Autodesk is not only actively listening to current customer feedback, but also looking ahead into future trends as it relates to computing technology.” - Shobit B., Principal
•  “I think that the session was nothing less than a rare and probably singular opportunity to voice our hopes and needs for future releases of the software. I've been using Autodesk products for 23 years and this has been the sole opportunity I've had to speak directly to team members who had direct effect on the user experience of AutoCAD.  – Curt M., Owner/Editor
•  “It was the coolest event I had in AU :-)”– Basam Y., Digital Design Group
•  “I had a great time dreaming the future and creating a wish-list of what I would want in AutoCAD.”– Arzan W.

And in the words of one of the AutoCAD SWD participants: “It was refreshing to talk with customers, listen to their experience, their problems and how they envision a solution from Autodesk… I personally feel empowered and energized when I know my work is helping somebody specific. The Design Jam Session gave me [this] rare opportunity.”

Given the positive feedback, we hope to run more AutoCAD Design Jams in the future and will continue to include SWD! 

 

Follow-up from "Agile UX Toolkit" tutorial at UPA 2011

by Desirée Sy and John Schrag

We would like to thank the attendees of our one-day tutorial at the Usability Professionals’ Association 2011 conference, “Agile UX Toolkit,” for their energy, participation, and terrific questions.

As mentioned during the tutorial, here are a collected set of references mentioned during the tutorial, beginning with the refreshed series of slides:

• Slides from "Agile UX Toolkit"
  Desirée Sy and John Schrag, UPA 2011.
• “Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-Centered Design”
  Desirée Sy, JUS, May 2007. http://tiny.cc/agileUCD [OR link: Sy_agile-ucd.pdf]
• “Case Study of Customer Input For a Successful Product”
  Lynn Miller. Agile 2005.  http://tinyurl.com/4xx8zle
• Agile manifesto
  http://agilemanifesto.org/
• “Interaction Designers and Agile Development: A Partnership”
  Lynn Miller. UPA 2006.  [link: Miller_AgileAndID_partnership.pdf]
• “Using Formative Usability Testing as a Fast UI Design Tool”
  John Schrag. UPA 2006 [link: Schrag_FormativeTesting.pdf]
• “Escaping the Design Traps of Creeping Featurism”
  Dong-Seok Lee, David Woods, Daniel Kidwell, UPA 2006.
• “Using the RITE method to improve products; a definition and a case study”
  Michael C. Medlock, Dennis Wixon, Mark Terrano, Ramon L. Romero, Bill Fulton. http://www.lutin-userlab.fr/gamelab/IMG/doc/Medlock-RITE.doc
• More on confidence levels at:
  http://www.measuringusability.com/wald.htm
• “Formative usability investigations for  open-ended tasks”
  Desirée Sy. UPA 2006 [link: Sy_OpenEnded_usability_investigations.pdf]
• “Usability Testing with User Proxies: When is ‘Close’ Close Enough?”
  Desirée Sy. DUX blog.
• Slides from "Big Picture Design without Big Design Up Front"
  Desirée Sy. Agile Roots 2010.

 

Inspiration from the past at CHI 2011

by Ananth Uggirala

Inspiration from the past at CHI 2011

Last month, I attended the annual Computer Human Interaction (CHI) conference with a few of my colleagues in beautiful Vancouver. This conference was held at the Vancouver Convention Center, with picturesque views of the bay and mountains.

View from Vancouver Convention Center

In the last decade, CHI has become a place to showcase the latest innovations in interaction, like PaperPhone or MagicDesk. Researchers share new findings about how to design survey questionnaires, or how to conduct field studies in several countries simultaneously.  In addition to the ‘cool’ stuff, there are also a few talks that truly inspire and make you feel important as a UX professional. One such talk I was lucky enough to attend this year was, “What’s It Like to Design a User Interface for Six Billion People?”  by Larry Tesler, who was awarded the Lifetime Practitioner Award at the conference.

Larry is known for his invention of many familiar interaction techniques in all graphical user interfaces. These include cut-copy-and-paste editing along with their keyboard shortcuts, inserting, and overwriting text without entering a mode, among other things.

  Larry Tesler talking at CHI Conference

Invention of Cut-Copy-Paste

Larry talked at length about his career in the 60’s & 70’s at Stanford and PARC; how he hated modes and constantly thought of changing that prevalent interaction in computers. He and his partners developed various new interactions, which eventually resulted in the design of cut-copy-paste interaction. It was fascinating to hear how something considered so obvious today (cut-copy-paste) had taken several years to be conceived and accepted in the software industry.

Some of the objections Larry received to his cut & paste paradigms were:

1. Unfamiliar metaphor
2. User mistakes
3. Extensibility to other applications

As I took notes on this, I realized how we encounter similar objections to any new design which replaces an accepted interaction paradigm.  I also learned that great design needs perseverance, years of iterations & testing, and a vision for the future.

As he concluded the talk, Larry had the following advice to CHI practitioners. These are powerful takeaways!  I have them hanging on my desk as reminders, and have deciphered each of his points into actionable lessons for UX professionals:

Larry’s Takeaways:

• Unless you want a career in operations, build easy-to-use, bug free software.

Lesson: We all know that shipping products with bugs and hard-to-use designs will create a bad user experience for end-users. But, it also creates an unpleasant experience for company employees. Instead of working on innovative new projects, employees will be spending time debugging and fixing usability issues in the released product.

• Don’t be compatible with a bad UX.

Lesson:  As a UX professional, it is important to focus on end-to-end user experience for your products. This will involve crossing the boundaries of individual projects, understanding the ecosystem, and having the courage to not allow a bad UX in the ecosystem.

• Never confuse busy with productive.

Lesson:  In this fast paced, at-the-moment, connected life, it is easy to get busy. Set goals to achieve by the end of the morning or afternoon or week.  Tune out your email, social networks and phone. 

• You don’t have all answers. Team up.

Lesson:  Different skill sets are required to build great products. It is important to share your ideas and thoughts with team members, collaborate to achieve great results.

• If everyone else thinks something is impossible, it’s a great topic for research.

Lesson: Most often, UX professionals fall into the trap of doing research on the obvious. Research is meant to understand the unknown and uncover latent needs on projects.

• To fight an uphill battle, choose a short hill.

Lesson: Don’t give up if the problem is too challenging. There is always a small chunk of a big project you can achieve.  Start with the small chunk and reassess after completion.

 

---

References:

1 Lahey, B., Girouard, A., Burleson, W., and Vertegaal, R. PaperPhone : Understanding the Use of Bend Gestures in Mobile Devices with Flexible Electronic Paper Displays ?” in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

2 Xiaojun Bi, Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka & George Fitzmaurice. Magic Desk: Bringing Multi-Touch Surfaces into Desktop Work. in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

3 Sauro, J. & Lewis J.R. When Designing Usability Questionnaires, Does It Hurt to Be Positive?" in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

4 “From Basecamp to Summit: Scaling Field Research Across 9 Locations”, Jens Riegelsberger, Audrey Yang, Konstantin Samoylov, Elizabeth Nunge, Molly Stevens, Patrick Larvie, in Proceedings of the Conference in Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011)

The Forgotten User

by John Schrag

 

I’ve really enjoyed hearing all the new ideas being tossed around here at the Usability Professional's Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. My colleague Desirée Sy and I had presented a tutorial on the topic of making your UX practice Agile, so I was on the lookout for more Agile/UX materials. With this in mind, I went to see a poster presentation by Jon Innes of UX Innovations and fellow Autodesker James McElroy , called “The UXI Matrix”.

Jon and James presented a method of charting and making visible the state of an Agile project in terms of its usability, to help a team monitor and control its UX work. The chart had many features, but I was particularly interested to see how they charted the stories in the backlog against all the different user personas. A series of checkboxes showed which features were related to which personas. The chart also showed a tally of how many actual human beings representing each persona type had been talked to by the team. This mapping had some interesting effects; it suggested when personas might need to be merged (when they share all the same stories), and warned when potential error loomed (when a given persona was under represented in actual human contact). And it showed when the needs of some personas were being ignored by the project --- none of their stories were getting done.

This ‘forgotten user’ idea struck home later that day when I was using the hotel bathroom on the conference floor, and found a smartphone that some poor fellow had left behind. There was no one else in the bathroom, so I poked around on the phone to see if there was some way to determine who owned it, and to get a message back to him. I had no luck; the phone was very securely locked up, protecting the owner's private data – but also preventing the phone from being returned.

I realized that I was a forgotten persona --- the "honest guy who finds a lost phone". I represented a rare but critical persona, with a single workflow. The phone designers had focused instead on thwarting another valid persona: the phone/identity thief. I imagined a feature on the phone that would allow me leave a voice mail for the owner (that would be emailed to him, or that he could pick up from his phone service provider) so I could let him know that I was leaving his phone with the hotel concierge. 

Some smartphones (such as the iPhone) have a feature to help the owner track it down, and even to display a message to whoever might have found it. But these features are designed for the phone owner, not the honest finder.

So ask yourself: in your designs, do you consider the people who interact rarely but critically with your designs? It's something to think about.

No, I did not ‘pause’ my workout!

by Veronica-Meuris

I’m here at the Hyatt Regency hotel in Atlanta, Georgia this week for the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) conference. I woke up Tuesday morning bright and early, geared up for a great day of tutorials and discussions. Before that though, being a creature of habit, I headed to the fitness centre for my morning workout.

At home, my workouts alternate between running and elliptical training so here in Atlanta, I thought I’d switch it up a bit – I tried the recumbent bike. They have a reclined position whereby your legs are out in front of you, and have nice large padded seats and back support.

The bike itself was very comfortable but the touch display design was an entirely different matter. At intervals while biking, I pushed the ‘increase intensity’ arrow to make it harder to pedal. Every time, and I mean – every time I did this, I unintentionally paused my workout. After the 6^th time, I left the intensity button alone and just pedaled faster to get my heart rate up…

The ‘increase intensity’ arrow is nestled between the ‘decrease intensity’ arrow and the ‘Pause’ button. The problem seems to be the size of the ‘Pause’ hit zone. It’s enormous and extends considerably into the ‘increase intensity’ zone.

 

What’s maddening about this design and or its implementation however is that yes, it’s hard to be exact when you’re tired and wanting to decrease intensity or to pause your workout. So – increase the hit zones that address this use case then. Alternatively, swap the order of the intensity arrows so that the ‘Pause’ and ‘decrease intensity’ buttons share their enormous hit zones that when pressed (intentionally or accidentally), give riders a chance to slow down and catch their breath.

Riders though who are still raring to go and want to keep increasing the intensity are probably better able to access a hit zone the size of their finger. After all, they’re presumably feeling good and have the ability to be more precise in what they’re pressing – if they weren’t in full control, they wouldn’t be increasing the intensity!

Now, I know it is bad form to spy on people working out beside you but I couldn’t help myself – after my 6^th false start, I was frustrated. I watched the man beside me encounter the same problem – he too had to tell the bike that, ‘yes, he wanted to resume his workout’ after unintentionally pausing it 9 times over the course of 30 minutes. He appeared equally frustrated and left shortly thereafter.

Tomorrow, it’s the treadmill for me, no doubt about it.

A Technology Galapagos at CHI 2011

by Erin Bradner

I was at a conference last month and found myself in a room teaming with people engrossed in technology. Two people were using smart phones, others were tapping on PDAs, and one was using a word processor. None of this is blogworthy until I tell you that the transfixing technologies in the room were all digital antiques curated in a makeshift gadget gallery. On display was the world's first portable word processor from 1978 with only six keys on its keyboard. Another curious artifact was an early touchscreen PDA featuring buttons designed to be played like a trumpet. But what drew me in was the world’s first touchscreen smart phone, a dinosaur that predated the Apple iPhone by 14 years. That phone, designed by IBM, is the origin of several user interface patents in the iPhone today. 

Image from the Buxton Collection Sampler. Image Source CHI 2011

This anachronistic smattering of digital curios was part of a private collection shipped to the Human-Computer Interaction Conference (CHI 2011) in Vancouver, B.C. The owner and curator of the collection was the inexhaustible gadget hound, Bill Buxton. Throughout the conference Buxton gave non-stop, guided tours of his collection for anyone who walked by. Think Darwin in the Galapagos. Meandering through the collection he would point out the design quirks, elegance and ingenuity of each device. I noticed that he rarely got two gadgets into a thought without referring to a larger innovation taxonomy that seemed self-evident to him. While walking and talking, he would grab two dissimilar devices from opposite ends of the room, hold them next to each other and explain that they were in the same family; one was simply the miniaturization of the other. Next he would scoop up a specimen and explain how it was the cross-fertilization of species from the PDA genus, the tablet genus and a trumpet.

Over time, as Buxton spoke, I noticed that his rapid-fire audit of the distinguishing traits of each gadget included complimentary terms like wonderful, inventive, and inspired. Yet never, while I was there, did I hear the words big idea, giant or genius. Then, standing somewhere between a Reverse Polish Notation calculator and a foot-operated mouse, he blurted out a Darwinian truth. I can’t quote, so this is the gist:

That’s how we do it. As designers, we slice up a given design space along the various dimensions of size, speed, permutation, etc… we amplify and attenuate, expand and contract until we find something interesting and suspiciously doable.

 Something clicked for me then. Perhaps the collection of digital doodads catalogued before me wasn’t as it appeared to be. It was not a systematic progression of gadgetry punctuated by paradigm-shifting sparks of the Genius Inventor. It was a mashup of form factor, features and user interface. It was the work of legions of tireless designers actively seeking under-populated niches in a design space and growing ideas there – then cross-fertilizing and mutating and growing more and more ideas.

Economic or ergonomic, it also struck me that some form of natural selection had to be in play.

Freshly liberated from the cult of the Genius Inventor, I went downstairs to lunch. As luck would have it I found myself sitting across the table from Jim Lewis, the Human Factors Engineer from IBM who designed the user interface for a phone I held in my hand only minutes before in the gadget Galapagos upstairs. I felt compelled to confront Jim immediately with a pressing question: “If you’re not a genius, if you’re not a giant, if the UI for the world’s first smart phone didn’t spring fully formed as a big idea, then how did you design it?” I let him finish his lunch and then I asked. I’ll recount that conversation in my next DUX post.

 

 

Questionnaires & Answers at CHI 2011 in Vancouver

by Karen Mason

I attended CHI in Vancouver a few weeks back. Authors can submit papers on original research to CHI. If your paper is accepted, you have 20-minutes to present it at the conference within a session where other papers and notes are presented.

One of my favorites was, "When Designing Questionnaires, Does it Hurt to be Positive?" [pdf], a paper presented by Jeff Sauro (and co-authored by Jim Lewis). It received the CHI Honorable Mention award.

It asks the question: Are both positive and negative items necessary in questionnaires?  Great question. I’ve often thought that you needed to mix it up to get an unbiased, more balanced result. My intuition was that results will be biased towards the positive side if we don’t give subjects the option to respond with a lower rating.

“By providing a mix of both positive and negative items…, we are not predisposing our users to give us a positive response. We reduce the possibilities of biases: Acquiescent and Extreme response.”

• Acquiescent bias: Users have a tendency to just agree to whatever statements we have.
• Extreme response bias: User haphazardly circles the most favorable response for all.

  

Sauro & Lewis did a study where users were randomly given either version of these questionnaires:

• Standard System Usability Scale (SUS), which uses alternating positive and negative questions
• All Positive System Usability Scale, which uses all positive questions

It turns out you get virtually the same results, but when using the alternating positive and negative questions, your results are more prone to error. The 3 M’s:

• Misinterpretation: users interpret the question incorrectly
• Mistakes: user understand the question, but accidentally agree to the negative items when they meant to disagree
• Miscodes: researchers forget to alternate the items back

It is interesting to note that 18% of subjects who completed the Normal SUS responded favorably to both positive and negative questions.

Recommendations:

• It’s OK to keep using Standard SUS for existing questionnaires, just be sure to check for errors.
• For new questionnaires, the recommendation is to use all positive questions. The negatives (3 M’s) outweigh the positives in alternating positive and negative items in usability questionnaires.

Audience question:

• Q. Did anyone try grouping positive and negative questions separately, vs. alternating positive and negative?
• A. Jeff answered that a user might still forget to switch mindset when the questions switched to negative. And more importantly, it doesn’t matter, so just use all positive.

Jeff has also posted a video of their presentation on YouTube.

Agile UX: A one-day tutorial preview in Toronto, Canada

by John Schrag

Designers at Autodesk like to be involved in the larger design community, by attending and speaking at conferences. At the upcoming Usability Professional’s Association conference in Atlanta, Georgia, my colleague Desirée Sy and I will be presenting a one-day tutorial called “Agile UX Toolkit”. And because we believe in usability testing and iterative development, we are going to prepare by doing a dry-run of that course at our office in Toronto, Canada. We’re inviting any UX professionals in the Toronto area who are interested to attend, practically for free. If you are interested in attending, please send an email to me at [email protected] and I will let you know how to register. Thanks!

 

Agile UX Toolkit:

As more organizations adopt agile development practices, UX practitioners want to ensure that the resulting products are still designed with users in mind. This tutorial teaches basic, proven methods to integrate user-centered design practices into agile teams.

The tutorial is for experienced UX practitioners and managers who work on agile teams, or who will be transitioning to agile. Prior experience with agile methods is not needed, and the course does not focus on a particular agile methodology.

The morning teaches new skills for planning design on agile teams, and the afternoon focuses on agile adaptations to usability testing and research methods. Research methods covered in this tutorial focus on eliciting observed user behavior (such as contextual inquiry, and formative usability testing).

 

Details:

Date: Friday, May 6^th, 2011
Time: 9AM to 5PM, with lunch and morning/afternoon breaks
Location: Autodesk, 210 King Street East, Toronto
All materials provided

 

Registration:

Although the course itself is free, we are asking attendees to chip in $20, which will be used to pay for lunch, and coffee and snacks at the breaks. To register and find out how to chip in, send an email to [email protected].