• Agile User Experience, presented by Sam Sutton
• Design Exercise, facilitated by Peter Bagnall

Please note, we will be starting earlier than usual at 6.45pm

Here are the full details:

Agile User Experience

Waterfall is dead, at least according to some. But in a software development world that is moving more and more to using Agile methods, where do traditional user experience practitioners fit in? I will be attempting to answer that question both from my own experience working within Scrum and Kanban, as well as looking at emerging best practice from leaders in the field of Agile UX.

About Sam Sutton

A passionate advocate of both agile development and user centered design, Sam has spent the last 3 years working as a designer within a Agile software development house, as well as working on projects as a freelancer. Sam has recently made the move to working full time as a freelancer, as Superdeluxesam. You can get in touch with him at www.twitter.com/superdeluxesam or sam@superdeluxesam.com.

Design Exercise

Pete Bagnall will be leading NUX’s second design exercise in September. The focus will be on high level design, rather than detailed design this time – looking at what information users might require, what the process through their task is like and therefore what functionality will help them achieve their goals. We’ll also look at how this competes with the business goals, and approaches for preventing conflicts between business and user goals, and between the goals of different user communities.

Clients often want guidance on which features they should include in their systems, and how to prioritise them. This exercise will help to show one method of answering those questions in a more rigourous and objective fashion, giving clients reassurance that it is based on more than the designers opinion. Being aware of what information is required to support a feature also helps to uncover dependencies between feature sets, which can help in planning development schedules.

Turning user goals into informational and functional requirements is a vital part of goal directed interaction design. Without this even the greatest interface design is likely to fail.

There will be an opportunity to discuss any techniques you use, so do feel free to bring you methods along!

About the Speaker

Pete Bagnall is an independent Interaction and Software Architect, at his company SurfaceEffect Ltd. He has had a varied career in the software industry from network research at BT’s research labs at Martlesham Heath (now Adastral Park) to working as an Interaction Designer in Silicon Valley. He’s taught courses for Lancaster University and presented workshops in design methodologies at the BCS annual HCI conference. More details can be found on his website www.surfaceeffect.com

Let Us Know You’re Coming

It helps if we have an idea of numbers, so if you want, you can let us know you’re coming at the Upcoming website. It is fine to just turn up on the night if you want.

Use Our Twitter Hashtag

If you want to tweet about the event or Northern User Experience, our twitter hashtag is #nuxuk

Join the Mailing List

Use the form on the right to add yourself to the mailing list and find out about events in the future.

Time

The event will be from 6.45pm to 9pm

Venue

Code Computerlove
Ducie House
Ducie Street
Manchester
M1 2JW

The entrance is on Peak Street, look for the robot above the door.

Sponsor

The venue has been kindly provided by Code Computerlove, a digital communications agency based in Manchester, England.

Future Events

• October 2010 (Leeds): agenda tbc
• November 2010 (Manchester): Communication theme for World Usability Day
• December 2010 (Manchester): Christmas social
• January 2011 (Leeds): Interaction Architecture for Startups and Digital Agencies
• February 2011 (Manchester): agenda tbc
• March 2011 (York): agenda tbc

Find out more about future events

First Alistair Sutcliffe gave a talk on ‘Does Technology Make Any Difference In Our Social Life’

www.slideshare.net/nuxuk/does-technology-make-any-difference-in-our-social-life-4693984

The book Alistair referred to is: Dunbar R.I.M. (2004), The Human Story, Fabe & Faber

Then Sarah Thew presented on ‘Exploring Users’ Values, Motivations and Emotions’

www.slideshare.net/nuxuk/exploring-users-values-motivations-and-emotions

Posts about the event

consequencing

You can also search on twitter for #nuxuk

The Brewery Tap is right by the train station and there’s an NCP car park across the road (LS1 5DE). We’ll be meeting between 7 and 9. They do sell food if you need something to eat. The address is 18 New Station Street, Leeds, LS1 5DL.

www.brewerytapleeds.co.uk.

If you want, you can let us know you’re coming here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/5744243/ – but it’s fine to just turn up on the night if you want.

The meeting is open to anybody interested in user experience or discount usability testing.

If you want to be notified of future meetings by email, you can complete the mailing list form on the right.

Hashtag: #nuxuk

Update: The venue has changed to Code Computerlove’s Ducie Street office – “there’s a sign with a picture of a robot over the door”

One suggestion for the agenda is

• Book club – this month looking at Ambient Findability

Any other suggestions, comment here or on the mailing list.

If we get enough people interested this will be going ahead in the usual place, the MDDA offices, so please add a comment if you’d be interested in joining us.

The abstract is here…

This talk will give an overview of the EPSRC/ESRC Foresight project ‘Developing Theory for Evolving Socio-Technical Systems’ (TESS). The project is based on Robin Dunbar’s Social Brain Theory that explains the evolutionary constraints on human relationships and social organisation. With the spread of Social Networking Sites such as Facebook and MySpace, will we be able avoid those constraints to keep up with more friends and be more social, or is the downside, invasion of privacy, stalking, and a less social world ? The TESS project is researching these issues by studying social networks and work-related groups. I will describe current research on social networking sites and how this fits into the wider picture of social mediating technologies such as Twitter, Wikipedia, etc.  Investigating the questions- does technology really change the way we behave in our social life, how do we adapt and use these technologies, and what impact might technology have a social capital?
For more information on the project http://www.mbs.ac.uk/research/DTESS.aspx

About the speaker

Alistair Sutcliffe has been principle investigator on 15 EPSRC and European Union projects on requirements engineering, multimedia user interfaces, safety critical systems and cognitive modelling for information retrieval. His research interests span a wide area within Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering. In HCI particular interests are interaction theory, and user interface design methods for the web, multimedia, virtual reality, safety critical systems and methods for usability evaluation. His research also covers application of cognitive theory to design, and design of complex socio-technical systems. In software engineering he specialises in requirements engineering methods and tools, scenario based design, knowledge reuse and theories of domain knowledge. Alistair Sutcliffe is a leading member of both the international HCI and requirements engineering communities and chairs / serves on a number of committees.

This is a half-baked idea so I’m not exactly sure what we’d design just yet. A few of us tonight expressed irritation at banking websites, so some aspect of that might be one idea, but I’m sure we can come up with something more exciting than that. Or some common widget or tool which you always find frustrating that you’ve always wanted to fix.

Ideally it should be something none of us have designed before.

So if people are generally up for this start thinking of things we can revolutionise!

Specifically: eye tracking to test the use of thumbnails in search results.  Though the blog report is fairly brief, they did come to specific conclusion.

Our studies showed that the thumbnails did not strongly affect the order of scanning the results and seemed to make it easier for the participants to find the result they wanted.

There is a real time eye tracking video and some heat map images in the article too.

Go read the original and let us know what you think in the comments.

– Story from Official Google Blog.

It’s focused on helping business owners understand the importance of usability for both their internal and external facing websites and systems, with the aim of improving companies bottom line through the likes of improving staff efficiency and the conversion rates from marketing budgets.

A few details below:

• Title: Usability: What’s The Use?
• Date: 28th January 2009
• Time: 6.00pm – 9.00pm
• Venue: CUBE (Centre for the Urban Built Environment), 113-115 Portland Street, Manchester M1 6DW
• Cost: FREE!
• Official Event Page: http://usabilitywhatstheuse.eventbrite.com/

Further details and a brief overview are below:

For the digital sector, usability and user experience are more than new fads.

These topics, and their perceived value to businesses, have been talked and written about many times, but lets get it straight: just exactly what is the use of usability to a company looking at improving their performance, ROI and staff efficiency?

In this FREE event Paul Rouke, User Experience Director at PRWD, and 2 guest speakers Judith Garman of AbilityNet and Pete Bagnall of SurfaceEffect, will be providing a range of real-life examples and industry insights which will help reveal some of the tangible benefits businesses can gain by embracing usability and user experience.

Through the course of the evening you will see why usability can play a significant role in the likes of e-commerce websites, B2B websites, lead generation sites, intranets, internal software systems and the development of bespoke web and software applications.

The event will be followed by drinks, some food and networking.