This is a quick press from the hotel room in foggy San Francisco. Today ends my first ever attendance at the RSA Conference. I am here because I know only 6 months worth of anecdotal information about the so-called “Secruity” worker. Since my company sponsors a bunch of stuff here, I talked them into letting me come along.
I had a goal: recruit some non-customers for user research. I thought it would be reasonable to talk to 4 or 5 people a day for 15 minutes each in a structured 10 question interview that would be fun and not too intrusive (these guys are super freakish about security and privacy — go figure)
I enlisted the help of the team to tweet enticing messages — like: @uxsuccess is giving away cool #UX Lab Rat T shirts if you can find her #rsac
The Tripwire Twitter Feed at RSA 2011
Soon, I had some people tweeting to meet me to answer my ten questions in exchange for a really sweet shirt:
1. What is your job title?
2. What is your bosses job title?
3. If you were at a cocktail party and someone asked you what you do for a living, what would you tell them? (Probe here)
4. What do you do first thing in the morning (job related)
5. What do you have to get done before you break for lunch (what? you don’t break for lunch?!?)
6. What do you have to do before you clock out for the day?
7. Tell me a story about a time you proved your value to your boss and the company.
8. What do you hate most about your job?
9. What do you love most about your job?
10. Anything else you want to tell me?
I also stalked the outskirts of the conference with my trusty LiveScribe pen and a backpack full of UX Lab Rat Shirts to give away to interviewees…
Really Sweet UX Lab Rat Shirt
I made my quota! By 2PM yesterday I had talked to 25 people, handed out 15 shirts, and promised to mail 10 shirts to people who had no more room in their luggage!
All in all, it was a pretty good experiment. I learned quite a bit about these folks that will be digested and fed into our Design Personas when I get back to PDX. I also collected enough business cards and twitter followers to start a data-base of UX research participants. If people were interested, I signed them up in a Survey Monkey form that lives on the corporate site (but you have to know the URL to get to it) www.tripwire.com/uxlabrat
OK! I’m gonna get out in the Fog for our last day 
.
Great news. Lots of excitement. What were the big buzz phrases that were being thrown around there? I imagine there’s a lot of talk about recent events with wikileaks and Egypt.
–Matthew
Posted by Matthew S. | February 18, 2011, 1:13 PM“cloud” — elicited groans someone said it by the end….. “wiki-leaks” my fave session — “why letting employees use their own phones on your network might be a problem” … All in all, I was fascinated to hear people touching the issues of people behavior in maintaining security….
Posted by juliebooth | February 19, 2011, 7:26 AM