Communitech – Connolly Design

October 24, 2016November 3, 2020

Facilitating and presenting at events this week

I’ve got a pair of events coming up that promise to be fun.

First up, I’ll be heading to Edmonton this week to facilitate a user story making workshop at the annual gathering of the Canadian Digital Media Network. It’s a workshop that I’ve delivered multiple times in the past, and in this instance I’m delighted to be joined by Bob Barlow-Busch. It should be a great experience, and I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and seeing a little of Edmonton.

Then on Friday Bob and I will deliver a presentation at Go North 2016 in Toronto. It’s an updated version of a presentation that we delivered in May at Comunitech. There are some impressive names in the list of keynote & fireside speakers and panelists, so it’s pretty cool to be delivering our “tech talk” at the event.

Update: Instead of presenting at Go North, it looks like I’ll be doing some startup mentoring instead. After running five successful editions of Fluxible, I certainly know at this point how challenging it can be to finalize the details of a conference program!

September 12, 2016November 1, 2020

Fluxible meetups start next week

The last few months have been busy ones of me. There have been a few side projects keeping me busy but that aren’t quite ready for the public eye.

And there is also, of course, Fluxible coming back for the fifth year. For 2016 we expanded our thinking to create a deeper and richer experience, and evolved into Canada’s UX Festival.

All the planning and work will pay off starting one week from today, with the first of our Fluxible Meetups. There’s a full week of these events happening, and it’s an exciting range of topics and formats. Best of all, most of these events are free! You should really check out the entire schedule, but here are some highlights.

On each day Monday through Friday we have a Brown Bag Lunch event at the Communitech Hub. These events cover hiring for UX, product management and UX, longitudinal user research, and a systems design approach to UX. My personal favourite, though, might be my friend David Jensenius talking about art and technology and UX in the arts. I love that diversity! For anyone who works nearby, it’s pretty easy to grab your lunch and walk on over for one of these sessions.

This year we have some fine site visits to Waterloo Region companies that are doing some great product work: D2L, TD, Shopify Plus, and MUSIC will all be opening up there spaces to share the ways that they work and look and some cool products that their teams have created. And all of them are definitely excited about hosting and event and sharing their work with the community.

We’ve partnered up with several organizations in Waterloo Region this year. Hacking Health Waterloo, Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region, Design Chats, UX Book Club KW, and Communitech all have their own UX-themed events happening. I’m thrilled that these organizations are on board this year, and love what they’re doing to build community!

Finally, we’ve decided to present a concert this year. Why? Well, music has been an integral part of Fluxible from the very first edition. We’ve featured a stylistically diverse range of performances as a part of each year’s conference. It felt natural to try a concert, just for fun. To that end, we’re presenting Stealth in a concert at the Communitech Hub on Thursday.

And all these events are just one stream of Fluxible 2016!

May 2, 2016November 3, 2020

25 short stories about user experience

Photo by Davis Neable

Last Wednesday, Bob Barlow-Busch and I delivered a presentation as a part of the Communitech Breakfast Series. It was titled Insights that lead to great UX, and the focus was on ways in which to use stories to fuel insights.

We structured the presentation in a way that put the focus on stories, with the bulk of the presentation being organized into 25 Short Stories About User Experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, the structure was inspired by a similarly-titled movie about Glenn Gould, as well as John Cage’s story-telling on Indeterminacy, and Oblique Strategies, an influential card deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. And, of course, there was the obvious appeal of telling stories about stories — everything goes meta.

The beauty of the structure for us is that it’s quite flexible — stories can be swapped in and out as needed to emphasize different things for different presentation contexts. In fact, there were stories that didn’t make it into last week’s presentation.

It was the first time delivering this presentation, and we were pleased that people who attended appear to have found it a valuable one.

August 22, 2014October 31, 2020

Tune in to 570 on the AM dial

This week I had a fun experience promoting Fluxible on the radio (and, yes, I’ll write more about Fluxible soon). Bob Barlow-Busch and I were on 570 News, joining Eric Drozd for the Tuesday #TechHour and a lunchtime discussion about UX in general and our experiences with Fluxible.

We were initially connected with the show by Chris Plunkett of Communitech, and we were thrilled at the opportunity to talk about user experience for an hour in the middle of the day on AM radio. Where else but Waterloo Region could that happen? Of course, Bob and I quickly realized that the two of us talking for a whole hour would wear a little thin. We recruited Fluxible 2013 speaker Steve Portigal, Fluxible 2014 speaker Brent Bisaillion, and UW Stratford faculty member Karin Schmidlin to join in as well. That made for a much more interesting range of voices!

Eric was a wonderfully engaged, and engaging, host. He made it easy to talk about the role of UX in creating meaningful products, and the hour flew by. And, as an aside, it was a far different environment than in my days in university radio, where the studios were filled with vinyl, carts, and reel-to-reel tapes!

If you missed it, you can listen to a recording of the show here.

Big thanks to Chris, Eric, and producer Neil Adams for making this happen!

September 22, 2010November 1, 2020

A dozen ears of corns and a bushel of tweets

Yesterday was a meeting of the community managers Communitech peer-to-peer group, held for the first time in their new space at The Hub. The speaker was Trevor Herrle-Braun, of Herrle’s Country Farm Market, who talked about how he has embraced the world of Twitter to evangelize his family’s market and its farm products.

While new to social media when he took to tweeting through @HerrlesMarket last spring, Trevor quickly developed an identifiable and authentic voice and has grown a healthy list of followers that today stands at over 500. His tweets go beyond announcing that fresh corn is available as he has found a way to engage the community deeply through Twitter. A couple of keys to success have been a great understanding of what will work for the Herrle family and business, and a decision to take on one thing and do it well. That one thing, from a social marketing perspective, has been Twitter. Neither Facebook nor blogging have been a part of the mix.

It was interesting to hear how a business as ancient as a family farm has embraced new technology to reach customers old and new.

On a related note, I’ve written in the past about some of the independent businesses that enhance the experience of living in Waterloo Region. Herrle’s is one of the places that my family has enjoyed for many years. The fresh produce is an obvious attraction, but the outdoor play area, corn maze, and generally friendly atmosphere all contribute to a great experience.

August 11, 2010November 1, 2020

Hiring at Karos Health

I haven’t really written much about Karos Health since joining the company a while back. I’m not sure why that’s the case, but I do have something to share today.

Last night Karos Health’s Rick Stroobosscher and I attended a job fair in Milton, Ontario. Organized by Communitech, the event brought several Waterloo Region companies together to meet with job seekers. We were in very fine company with respected stars like Christie Digital, Desire2Learn, and Research In Motion, as well as fellow startups like Kik Interactive.

Rick and I really weren’t sure what to expect at the event. What we found was a well-organized venue with helpful Communitech folks there to help us get oriented. The space was relatively small, which made it easy for job seekers to get to see everyone. And there were a great many job seekers there, with a range of skills, experiences, and interests. Rick and I were busy all night talking with people about what they are looking for and what Karos is about. Happily, we even talked to a few software developers who may be able to help us. We’re looking forward to future Communitech events like this one.

We’re looking for developers at Karos, and down the road perhaps other people. Have a look at our careers page and let us know if you think there’s there’s a fit.