After a very long hiatus, the next meeting of the Northern User Experience group is on 6th April 2010 at the offices of Code Computerlove Jutland House, 15 Jutland Street, Manchester, England M1 2BE.
One suggestion for the agenda is
Any other suggestions, comment here or on the mailing list.
I’m posting on behalf of Rob Knight, our lead technical architect at PRWD.
Rob will be giving a talk at Tuesday 20th Jan’s meeting, on the subject of the interaction between usability professionals and software developers in delivering projects.
The talk will cover the common pitfalls that both sides can make in failing to understand the perspective of the other and how this can be addressed. It will also cover the interaction between common User-Centered Design processes and modern software development processes such as the various types of Agile development.
Rob is hoping to keep it fairly short (15 minutes or so) and cover a few practical points that should be useful to everyone. Hopefully it will be a topic which can stimulate some interesting debate too!
See some of you next Tuesday!
Categories: Design · Meetings · Usability
Tagged: agile, UCD
**UPDATED**
Unfortuntely for February we will need to meet in a local pub or another free meeting place, as MDDA can’t facilitate all the groups who want to use their meeting rooms on the 17th Feb 2009.
We can choose a suitable venue at January’s meeting on the 20th..
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Following feedback on suitable dates, and the fact that Wednesday’s would be difficult for some of the regulars, the next 3 monthly meetings will be on Tuesday’s on the dates below:
Jon could you add these to Upcoming as offered when you get chance? Cheers
Update: These are now added to Upcoming. See the Upcoming Group. — Mike Little
I’ve had confirmation from MDDA regarding the use of their facilities in the early part of 2009. To fit with their schedule of staff and other user groups using the offices, they have suggested the 3rd Wednesday of each month.
So the next 3 months dates would be:
Can anyone who normally comes along shout up if this causes a problem – I know the last 3 months have been on a Tuesday, but based on us continuing to use the facilities FOC we’ll need to be flexible on the day of the week that we meet.
I plan on confirming to the MDDA wc 5th Jan so I’ll wait till then for any comments.
Merry Christmas one and all!
I though it would be useful to make available the list of subjects which we came up with at October’s meeting, where lots of ideas where brought forward.
Perhaps this list will be useful in getting people to consider doing a mini presentation as part of one of the 2009 monthly meetings.
In particular, subjects around ROI and commercial benefits of usability, complex business/manufacturing systems (MRP, ERP), usability for internal business systems, employee engagement, talking the language of business and open source, agile development methods are the type of things that are very close to our hearts at PRWD. We could therefore provide some presentations on these types of topics in due course.
Its a comprehensive list, but shout up if there are more suggestions for topics!
Categories: Meetings
Tagged: business case, event, manufacturing, ROI, topics
I’m delighted to confirm that I’ve had final clarification from Manchester Digital and Manchester Digital Development Agency that we can use the Portland Street offices (for FREE) for our next 3 monthly meetings. Thanks to John Keys at the MDDA for his assistance on this..
The dates are confirmed as:
For people who aren’t familiar with these offices take a look at the location details for MDDA.
I have also been speaking with Shaun Fenson, head of Manchester Digital, and he is keen to explore how the NUX group can be more widely promoted to the Manchester Digital community. Perhaps we can discuss this at the next meeting.
As usual it will be worth someone adding these dates into Upcoming if possible.
See some of you on the 28th October!
Paul
Categories: Meetings
Tagged: manchester digital, mdda, meeting
It looks like we have (just) enough people to proceed, so following an unplanned summer break NUX is back, back, back.
We will be meeting 6.30 at the Waterhouse pub, just near St. Peter’s Square metrolink (walkable from piccadily station).
http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/pubs/pub-details.php?PubNumber=2103
Judith will be talking about personas and how she uses them in her work. There’s been a lot of interest from the group on this, so for those that can’t attend, we can put the presentation and any other content here on the blog.
Since the group is currently homeless again, we can also discuss possible venues (MDDA and so on) and decide whether we prefer meeting a) somewhere with a projector or b) somewhere that serves beer.
See you there.
Following my 1st meet-up on the 6th August, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the group and its current exposure in the north-west.
(Please note this isn’t intended to come across as being critical of anyone involved in the group to date, and I know it is run purely in peoples spare time and simply out of passion!).
Below I have listed out some ways in which I would be very keen in helping to implement in order to increase the exposure of the NUX and therefore strengthen its credibility. I am sure this will provide benefits across the group, both in the effectiveness of this blog and in the scale of the monthly meetings.
I know these initial ideas would take varying levels of time to implement, but although I am new to the group, I am extremely keen in seeing the Northern User Experience grow in exposure and credibility over the long term, like I’m sure others are.
As a side note, if London can end up with having a large event focussing on the BBC user experience with a BBC UX representative, then why not have ambitions of this kind of coup for the North West!
What does everyone else think?
Thanks to everyone who came along to Sage yesterday, and nice to meet some new people too. Apologies for the misleading 8pm start time posted in a couple of places….
I really enjoyed the discussion on measuring user behaviours and metrics for usability: it was great to have some input from people (particuarly Steve & Mike) who’ve done some of this with web analytics, and get some extremely valid context and caution from Judith. The stuff about measuring usability improvements (KPIs, A-B testing, and cash!) was good too, as was the discussion on surveys.
Our next meeting is due to be on 3 September. I won’t be able to be there, unfortunately, but Judith offered to kick off a discussion on personas, and Manchester Digital Development Agency was suggested as a possible venue that definitely sounded worth investigating.
Categories: Meetings · Usability · User Experience
Following some research with my colleague who found our site, he suggested EventBrite as another place we could list our events. It’s free to list free events, so looks like it might be another opportunity for us to be found.