nux | Northern User Experience

NUX Event in Manchester Monday 6 September 2010

20/07/2010 in Events

After our summer break, we’re back in September with the following two items:

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

NUX Event in Manchester Monday 5 July 2010

09/06/2010 in Events

The next event will see us have a chance to disuss two great items:

Exploring Users’ Values, Motivations and Emotions, presented by Sarah Thew
Does Technology make any difference in our social life, presented by Alistair Sutcliffe

Exploring Users’ Values, Motivations and Emotions

Requirements Elicitation is a technical and analytical process, but it is also a highly social and potentially emotive activity. All but the smallest software developments can have a wider organisational impact and the potential to change people’s working lives in positive and negative ways. Users’ reactions to such changes are shaped by their own personal values, motivations and emotions. Exploring and understanding such information can help requirements analysts in:

Developing a deep understanding of users’ long term goals, working practices, preferences and problems
Making design decisions
Building a rapport with users
Anticipating user wants and needs

Sarah Thew has been exploring these ideas during her PhD, carrying out a series of interviews with novice and experienced analysts investigating if and how they consider users’ values, motivations and emotions. These interviews contributed to the development of a method to support analysts in considering and exploring values, motivations and emotions during the requirements elicitation process, which she is currently evaluating.

About Sarah Thew

Sarah is a PhD student at Manchester Business School.

Does Technology Make Any Difference In Our Social Life?

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.