Northern User Experience

You can download the presentation on prototyping with mobile first which took place in Leeds on Monday 23 January 2011

prototyping-leeds

A new event on 12 January which might be of interest to NUXers…

http://mad-bradford-eorg.eventbrite.com/

MAD Bradford is a monthly event which will bring together employees, business owners and university/college staff that are involved or interested in creating media, using new development/production tools, and various ways of working in the media and digital industry.

Each event will start with a keynote speaker, and the related topic of this keynote will lead into Open Spaces collaborative discussions with break-out rooms available for smaller groups to go off on tangent discussions.

This first event will primarily discuss the nature of the speakers and the development of a simple, sustainable organisational model for MAD.

This is a free, public event

Date & Time: Monday 9th January 2012 at 7pm

Venue:  Code Computerlove
Ducie House, Ducie Street, Manchester, M1 2JW (The entrance is on Peak Street, look for the cartoon robot sign above the door)

When Psychology Met User Experience (Redux)

A year ago, Chris Atherton was a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Central Lancashire, teaching and researching visual attention. Since then, she’s interned at Skype, consulted for a startup, and advised curators at the British Museum about improving the user experience of exhibitions. Chris generally prefers not to count her chickens until they’re hatched, but hopes that by the time you read this she will have started at Numiko in Leeds as a user experience architect. Expect anecdotes, wireframes, and some surprising explanations about how academic psychology segues into UX.

If you are attending please register here  http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2646231951
(please note: you don’t have to register to attend but registering allows us to anticipate how many people to expect).

Just a quick pointer towards a vacancy that’s arisen here at Sage for a Senior Usability Specialist. The job is based in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and the description is below.

If you’re interested, send your CV and covering email to joinus@sage.com.

“An exciting opportunity has arisen within our Small Business Division (SBD) R&D team for a Senior Usability Specialist. This is a key role for someone with passion and flair for usability to continually drive the maximum benefit of the discipline to our customers, through our products.

You’ll be expected to champion usability within the R&D and Product Management teams, while driving the development of your team’s usability capability and skills. This means that strong communication and influencing skills are essential to ensure maximum benefit is gained from the usability discipline throughout the SDLC. You will also act as an authority on usability representing the SBD team across the UK region.

You will have Usability experience across the SDLC, ideally in multiple platforms (e.g. desktop, web and mobile), and your excellent theoretical and practical knowledge of user-centred design will mean you are comfortable engaging directly with users.

You will have a direct role in the design of our products which will require a solid understanding of usability issues and best practices combined with a genuine creative flair for design. You will work hand-in-hand with Business Analysts, Developers and Testers, refining and iterating your designs to provide the best possible user experience for our customers.

We’re looking for someone who is highly motivated to achieve, a strong leader and good team player, with a solid experience in usability engineering throughout the product development cycle. You’ll have a proven track record in the software development lifecycle, coupled with experience in rapid prototyping and user-centred design.

We see usability as a key differentiator for our product in the market and are increasingly placing it at the centre of everything we do. Our usability specialists are therefore in a unique position to influence the direction of our products.

If you want to join a respected team working on a strong product with a growing customer base, this could be the role for you.”

The NUX Yorkshire Steering Group met the other week and has an exciting schedule of events planned. More will be posted as speakers are confirmed. The plan is to:

• Change the times to 6:30 to 8:30, so that it’s easier for people to go to the events straight from work
• Events to be held at Simple Usability in Leeds
• Meet (usually) on the fourth Monday of the month (so it doesn’t clash with the Manchester events)
• Meet every other month until the autumn, and then monthly from the autumn onwards

Events will be announced here, on the nux-discuss email list, and on the nuxuk twitter feed

Just to avoid any possible confusion, there is no meeting tonight. We’re going to postpone the session Sam was going to do into the new Year instead.

More news on that as we firm up plans.

There is a vacancy for a user experience architect at Aviva. If you want details, I can pass them on to you. Contact me at keith.doyle@extremeusability.co.uk.

This event has been changed – new details here