Dana Burland

This summer is our summer of landscaping. There are jungles to cut back, perennials to transfer, patches to sprinkle grass seed and an above ambitious project to stone pave our side yard into a patio. I don’t know how to stone pave a patio. Ben doesn’t know how to stone pave a patio. And yet I’m confident by fall we’ll have a stone paved patio. I pitched this project to Ben like I usually do, as if I were throwing a handful of hot spaghetti at the wall. Ben sifted through it all and analyzed what was involved. The side yard fence would need to be straightened. Because it’s worth doing once and doing once right. And the fence should be stained, too. Because it’s worth doing right and doing right and stylishly. So the plan was together to dig around the the fence, straighten it, stain it, and stone pave our side yard into a patio. But after a week or so later when we discussed again, Ben said the project was going to be even more involved. We’d have to tear up the side yard...

A real, real, real nice coincidence of my user experience conference being in D.C. was that my bestest girlfriends could drive down from Pennsylvania to meet me afterward. From Friday night 'til Sunday morning we played all around the D.C./Georgetown area--and it was so great. Saturday morning I got time to sneak in a triathlon training run with Jill along The National Mall. I haven't been able to run with her since Chicago in 2013 and it really felt like the good old days again. Then we shopped and shopped and ate tiny desserts from Dean & DeLuca because we needed to refuel from the shopping. That night we had an amazing dinner at a swanky French restaurant, Le Diplomate . We giggled over wine, weird cheeses and radish slices with salted butter, and got beauty tips from our waitress who had the most perfect eye-lined cat eyes. We stayed until well after dark and after Thai coffees with a shelf of sweetened condensed milk sitting at the bottom. Now all...

Watch out world, I’m certified! I took five courses in different user experience topics and passed an exam for each one to earn my Nielsen Norman Group UX certification . Nielsen Norman Group has been the leading voice in user experience since 1998. They conduct research, evaluate interfaces and guide critical decisions to improve the bottom line. NN/g staff provide testing and feedback for hundreds of companies across a multitude of industries—and regularly write articles on web trends that impact the way we all use and understand websites. While at the NN/g training in Las Vegas this past December I took and passed three courses, and finished the final two in Washington D.C. this past week. Here are the tracks I took, and details on what each taught me: UX Basic Training I learned about the importance of a user-centered design and the benefits of testing user experience at each stage in a project. I got a baseline for what user testing is, isn’t and what methods to ...

There are a lot of hands in the pot and eyes on the screen of steelcase.com . That site gets the most traffic and has the most stakeholders and content owners of all our web properties. And rightfully so! It’s the big daddy! With that comes a lot of ideas, questions and concerns about how to make the site better. This use to make my job difficult. Now it makes it thrilling. I blogged about how I use user testing sessions to solve issues on the site with user feedback. Sometimes we have a singular smaller question, or we want to test an approach we’re not using today. Or sometimes we just need to look at the truth through data. In those cases, I’ve been A/B testing. A/B testing lets me compare two slightly different versions of a web page at the same time to see which one performs better. I manage a software that splits users visiting the site into seeing “experience A” or “experience B”, which usually vary as slightly as one different button color or text link. After two t...

It may have snowed and sleeted all weekend covering us in three more unwanted inches of winter fluff—but we’re coming out of hibernation on a bang. Ben had long been contemplating getting his MBA and after some research and number crunching has decided to go for it. His GMAT training class starts next week, and by mid-summer he’ll submit his application to Grand Valley’s MBA program. Hopefully, likely, certainly given his smarts and determination, he’ll start the program in late August. I'm one week into a 11-week training program for the Grand Rapids Triathlon. I'm hopeful the effort now will lead me confidently to the starting line of the sprint tri on June 12. Between now and then I’ll be reunited with my long-lost perfume de chlorine and cooking up copious amounts of steamed vegetables. Here’s hoping Ben won’t be taking his summer GMAT test in a parka and the river I’ll swim in will be thawed by June.

We did ALL the Chicago things while in the Windy City this past weekend. We walked around Millennium Park, took pictures in the Bean and walked up and down the Magnificent Mile. We drank swanky drinks at the top of the John Hancock Center, ate ridiculously good ramen at Ramen-San and stuffed down some deep dish pizza. We saw the city by boat. In the snow. But still beautiful. We ran along the lakefront trail and passed long-distance running Olympian Desi Linden. And by “passed” I definitely mean in the opposite direction. And. AND. We saw the Blue Man Group, which was so great and so, so fun.