prototyping-leeds

Paul Rouke, Head of Usability & Conversion at PRWD will share some stories about the user engagement sessions he has conducted and the key learnings which have developed his view and understanding of the conversion world. You will also learn about some applied techniques that brands use to improve their site conversion rate.

Date & Time: Monday 6th Feb 2012 at 6:30pm

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)

Paul Rouke:

In 1999 Paul started working in the online space, joining as a web designer at Great Universal Stores, at the time the UK’s biggest home shopping business. Over the next 7 years he spent considerable time with end users understanding why they do what they do when shopping online and how site experiences can be improved so that they shop more often and spend more money than what they intended doing. In turn helping the online channel become 40% of overall revenue by the time he left in 2006.

Since 2006 Paul has run his own usability and conversion optimisation consultancy PRWD (PRoductivity Without Difficulty) in Manchester, working with clients including as Speedo, Lakeland, Bank of America, Monsoon Accessorize, Manchester Tourist Board, Stella McCartney, Booking.com, Speedy Hire and All Saints. Paul also works alongside digital agencies such as CTI, Ampersand and Building Blocks.

On any given day of the week Paul can be found either moderating user testing sessions, conducting expert site evaluations, writing user testing reports, speaking at conferences, delivering public and in-house training courses, providing in-house consultancy, having planning or presentation sessions with clients – or for about 2 hours every few months writing guest posts for Econsultancy, such as ‘WTF is usability best practice anyway?’ or ‘9 women x 9 hours = 9 usability insights‘.

You can follow PRWD(@prwd) and Paul(@paulrouke) on twitter.

Clare Davidson from SimpleUsability will be joined by Barry Hill, who has been using Jaws for the past 15 years. This session will give you the opportunity to see how Barry navigates his way through websites using Jaws assistive technology. We will then discuss how accessible these websites are and what changes should be made to improve the user experience.

Clare Davidson is a User Experience Consultant, working at SimpleUsability. Previous roles have included working at Lloyds Banking Group and Aviva.

The event will be held courtesy of SimpleUsability and will be held in the Round Foundry Media Centre.

To order a free ticket please go to; http://accessibilityinaction.eventbrite.com/

To find us on twitter use #nuxuk or you can find us on facebook by searching ‘Northern User Experience’

This is a free, public event

Full Details & Registration on Eventbrite

Presenter

@keithdoyle from Navopia

Giveaways

• One copy of Luke Wroblewski’s ‘Mobile First’ book
• Three copies of Balsamiq’s ‘Mockups for Desktop’
• One copy of Axure

Sponsor

Venue and refreshments provided by Simple Usability

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.

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).

If you have an idea that you feel passionate about or a topic that you think deserves discussion then we want to hear from you. If you are interested in contributing any thoughts then you can do by going to this questionnaire;

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGk2aE1ZWTVxa2JkdG8zel9vU0MxNnc6MQ

If you have expressed an interest in talking then a member of the steering group will be in touch to arrange this.

Thanks.

Charlotte Britton, MD of Optimum Exposure will make the final talk of the year for Leeds NUX. She takes her experience working with clients marketing strategies from the consumer point of view. Optimum Exposure is a social media and search engine optimisation agency / consultancy based in Leeds.

She will be talking about how social media has changed people’s behaviour of how they interact with companies online.  The overall presence is more fragmented and customer engagement is more crucial than ever before.  Find out what this means for your overall customer experience of your brand and how it impacts the customer journey and usability.

Tickets can be found here;

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2570785288

As normal use twitter hashtag #nuxuk

The event will be hosted by SimpleUsability Ltd, situated in the Round Foundry Media Centre. Directions and instructions as to how to get there can be found on the eventbrite page above.

Date & Time: Monday 5th December 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)

All aboard the Metro UI

If you aren’t aware of Metro now then you soon will be, and so will your users.  Microsoft’s new design language debuted to the mass market this year on the Windows Phone 7 and is soon to be joined by the Xbox and the next version of the Windows operating system.
Find out what all the fuss is about and how to make best use of it to ensure you stay ahead of the huge, worldwide opportunities that will become available over the next couple of years.  In this session we will deep dive into the interface and interactions of Metro on the phone, games console, tablet and PC and learn how to use it to create the best experiences for your users.

Ben Lowe

Ben Lowe is an Innovation Consultant for Tribal Group.  After many years working on the company’s Further Education MIS product (ebs) in many guises (including a number of years as a UXD concentrating on prototyping to development end of the UX spectrum) he now works as part of a dedicated Innovation Team within Tribal to future gaze technologies and functionality that will be of use to our customers in the education sector in the UK and abroad (HE, FE, private providers and as education providers in our own right) but always with his UX hat firmly pulled on at the requisite jaunty angle.

Twitter: @ben_lowe