Thanksgiving has kind of snuck up on me this year.  It’s been an immensely busy year.  I’ve conducted a lot of research.  I also proposed, organized, and led vUE 2011, VMware’s first gathering of its cross-company user experience community.  vUE was held in the first week of November.  I took a few days off afterwards, and suddenly I’ve hit the research doldrums.

Mid-November through mid-January are research doldrums.  Collecting data is hard in that eight-week period.  You can’t get research participants for several days around Thanksgiving, and then people start dropping off the face of the planet in mid-December for the end of the year, and aren’t reliably back in the office until at least a week into January.  You can do some research during this time, but it’s difficult and time-consuming to collect the data.

I’m using these research doldrums to do a few things.  I’m making sure that my wiki is updated with all of the documents I’ve created lately, and making sure that all of the other wiki pages that I should update have everything that they’ve got.  I’m writing up a post-mortem document from vUE that discusses what happened, what we learned, and where we can make improvements for next year’s event.  And I’m beginning to plot out next year’s research, so that I can hit the ground running in January.