• 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

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!