Northern User Experience

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:

• Wednesday 21st January
• Wednesday 18th February
• Wednesday 18thMarch

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.

• Complex business / manufacturing systems
• Rapid prototyping
• Pragmatic / shoestring usability
• Design evangelism / internal communication
• ROI and selling the benefits of usability
• Testing and observation techniques
• Engagement and organisational culture
• Open source / agile development
• Heuristics - do we need a rethink?
• Ethnography
• Non-standard design (mobile / accessible etc)
• Accessibility / WCAG 2
• Information architecture
• Words and language
• Interaction design
• Usability in news media
• Internal business systems
• Perceived vs. “actual” usability
• Attractiveness and visual design
• Employee engagement & involvement (internal comms)
• Personas
• Internationalisation
• Talking the language of business

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!

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..

Dates

The dates are confirmed as:

1. Tuesday October 28th
2. Tuesday November 18th
3. Tuesday December 16th

Venue

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

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.

From what I understand, what the Northern User Experience group is currently

• a monthly get together attended by a very small group of people passionate about usability, user centered design and accessibility
• attended by the likes of a usability guru from Sage, and ex usability consultant at HSBC (now at Ability Net) and one of the original founders of Wordpress
• an offshoot a chapter of the Usability Professionals Association (UPA), the worldwide association for usability professionals and advocates
• an opportunity for attendees to discuss topical areas of the usability market, gaining insights from client-side specialists, agency side consultants, freelance consultants and developers

From my initial exposure to NUX, where apparent weaknesses are

(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!).

• a current lack of exposure as being the primary usability community in the north
• due to the lack of exposure, very low attendance to the monthly get togethers
• a lack of engaging reasons as to why someone should attend the monthly get togethers
• very limited content on this blog, meaning new visitors may not feel the group has the kind of credibility which it does actually have by the people involved (Mike I know that a profiles page is being planned which will certainly help this)

Potential ways to increase exposure and help build credibility

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.

• promoting the group and the monthly events through Manchester Digital
• promoting the group and the monthly events through the Geek-up Google group
• promote the monthly get together to the larger agencies in the north west, who have a vested interest in user experience
• providing links into external blog posts tagged with, for instance, NUX, therefore providing more regular content being available through this blog (for instance I have recently published an article on our User Centered Design process, which may well spark some commentary from people within the NUX group)
• promoting NUX on our own usability blogs, therefore increasing exposure to people interested in and reading about user experience and user centered design
• creating a podcast of each monthly event and promoting it on the blog, increasing the amount of engagement on this site and hopefully helping to encourage new visitors to come along and participate
• for when attendee numbers increase (or maybe not) videoing the monthly events and posting these up on the blog
• harnessing the increasing flexibility and power of Wordpress to provide an improved user experience of this blog, perhaps even using the blog to push some of the boundaries of what Wordpress can do - this could provide interesting online news and provide increased exposure of the group

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.

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.

http://www.eventbrite.com/home

Great to meet Chris, Mike and Rachel, and of course Jackie (but we know each other already, from Lancaster). I certainly found the conversation got my grey matter working, which I always enjoy.

Couple of sites to look at…

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/  - written by Joel Spolsky, which I really like. Great writing style (well, it would be he wrote an essay on that too) and some very interesting ideas.

http://www.ted.com/   - If you’ve not seen the TED talks, there are some great design related ones. Jackie, if you can tear yourself away from the cooking and homely arts this will be a great distraction - assuming you’ve not devoured them all already.

If you look at http://www.ted.com/index.php/profiles/view/id/60092 you’ll see my profile there with some of my favourite talks - no desperately design related, but what the heck.

Yes, I remember, I somehow accidentally volunteered to talk about designing for older people. I can also talk about personas (till the cows come home). I’m giving a one day tutorial on personas at HCI 2008 in Liverpool again this year (did it last year) so do tell everyone and I’ll be your friend forever. I’m also putting together a half day session for executives called “Design Matters”. I’d love to run this by a test audience, so before you get sick of the sound of my voice I’d love to try this out on you and get your views. Very much focussed on helping execs understand why design is important.

Looking forward to next month, see you then.

–Pete

We now have the next two monthly meetings scheduled in Upcoming. They are Wednesday, July 2 and Wednesday, August 6. Both are booked for Laterooms’ offices (thanks Hugo).

No firm agenda yet, but we open to ideas. Comment here or on the mailing list.

The June meeting took the group to Leeds, and Tero’s talk on how we define User Experience (slides to follow). In a free-roaming discussion we talked about the interplay between the various building blocks of user experience (usefulness, usability, desirability, findability, value, credibility), the value and pitfalls of metrics and the mysteries of brand loyalty.

A big thanks to Tero for arranging the venue and giving a really great presentation.

Next time we’ll be back in Manchester - agenda to be decided.