A blog by Mark Connolly
We had a great uxWaterloo event at Felt lab yesterday, and Paul Goodwin and his student team from REAP were wonderful hosts. There were plenty of interactive display toys to play with, and lots of opportunity for “thinkering” with like-minded people who attended.
Darin White has a nice summary in the form of a photo essay over at his always interesting makebright place. We’ll have more at uxWaterloo soon, too.
Thanks to everyone for coming out and making the event a success.
Last Thursday the uxWaterloo meeting for October featured a new kind of activity. While we had done design workshops in the past, we had never previously had a design workshop focused on a real-world problem.
REEP Green Solutions, a Waterloo Region not-for-profit organization focused on the environment, is working on a web application that’s intended to help consumers understand the case for making upgrades to their homes that will increase energy efficiency. REEP approached uxWaterloo for help, and Thursday’s design workshop was the result.
Working in small groups, workshop attendees brainstormed initial designs to deliver a compelling user experience for the application. REEP team members provided input, answered questions, and otherwise provided context for the design work. They had previously provided personas to work from, and a high-level functional description of their vision.
While the timeframe was ridiculously condensed — the meeting was only 90 minutes from start to finish — the workshop was a great success. Everyone seemed to have a great time, with many interesting ideas emerging from the action. The REEP team was excited by the ideas they saw and heard, and are already thinking about next steps.
Last week was a bit of a blur as March roared in with the usual commitments at work keeping me busy and several extra-curricular activities added to the mix.
Wednesday started with Communitech’s Tech Leadership conference, an annual event that provided a great opportunity to meet people and engage in conversations. It also featured a pretty impressive lineup of speakers. I have to confess that Geoffrey Moore’s keynote presentation was a slight disappointment; while he’s a dynamic speaker, the material didn’t seem to add much in the way of new insights to what he has previously published. This particular crowd has to have been pretty familiar with the concepts of crossing the chasm.
The next session for me was with Scott Berkun, whose talk on the Myths of Innovation picked up on the theme of his book of the same name. I’ve heard Scott speak before and knew that I would enjoy his talk, and I did just that.
Following Scott’s talk, I travelled with him and my uxWaterloo conspirator Bob Barlow-Busch out to Quarry Integrated Communications in St. Jacobs, where Scott had agreed to do a special uxWaterloo lunch time talk. The theme was creative thinking hacks, and the format was completely open and driven by questions from the audience. It’s the same format that Scott used when he last spoke to the group, and it works well.
Wednesday evening was spent at Design Exchange Waterloo, where I acted as an industry panelist along with a couple of members of the local design community, Graham Whiting and Tammy teWinkel. The event featured enlightening presentations and lively conversations with many students. The hardest part was deciding which teams to give awards to, but after much deliberation we were able to arrive at decisions. The next event will likely be in the fall, and I’m looking forward to it.
Thursday was, of course, TEDxWaterloo. I hadn’t planned on attending, but some last minute schedule changes and the timely appearance of tickets changed that. As with last year’s inaugural event, it was a day of stimulating and inspiring presentations from some distinguished speakers. It was all terrific, but the most delightful surprise for me was Ben Grossman’s presentation on the hurdy gurdy, an ancient musical instrument with which Ben made some striking music while he was on stage. Moreover, between the two sets of talks, Ben provided wonderful background music that, for me, enhanced the many conversations that I had.
Sprinkled throughout the week were a few meetings with some of my fellow Ignite Waterloo organizers as we make plans for our next event. More news on that later.
It’s been a busy month, with the most recent Ignite Waterloo event and planning for uxWaterloo keeping me busy outside of my day job. I haven’t done a blog post here in a while, and I thought I’d start to catch up by letting you know about an event that I’m peripherally involved with.
Design Exchange Waterloo 2011 is a student-organized, design-focused forum that’s happening from 6:00pm to 9:00pm on Wednesday March 2 in room 2218 of the Tatham Center at the University of Waterloo. The DXW website is currently light on detail, but I can share a little more information that I know about. The coolest thing about this forum is that includes ten groups of students from four different areas (Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Engineering, Faculty of Environment, and School of Computer Science) presenting their design work. There also will be ample opportunity to discuss design, incubate ideas, and connect with a diverse group of students and industry professionals through their shared interest in design.
To that end, the organizers are hoping to see people from the off-campus community join the students for what looks to be a lively event. I can say from my own past experience that it’s well worth attending. At the last event, back in 2009, I even met a student whom we subsequently hired as an intern at Primal Fusion, an outcome that may have been unusual but which was more than welcome all around.
Here’s a my understanding of the agenda for March 2:
Should be an interesting event.
I’ve been involved in organizing Ignite Waterloo, which produces a series of events in Waterloo Region, since the first event in 2009, and it’s been amazing to watch the events grow in popularity since that inauguration of the series. We now easily attract well over 200 people to these things, and, as I was telling someone last week, we have relied pretty much on word of mouth and social media to spread the news about our activities. Of course, there’s much more hard work than that to get an event off the ground — and there are many people who make it happen — but it’s been a big hit with audiences and speakers alike with very little traditional communications.
The next Ignite Waterloo event is scheduled for Tuesday February 8 at the Communitech Hub in Kitchener, and even though we only announced the date and venue on January 11, we’re already pretty much sold out. Still, try to get a ticket if you want one and see if you can get lucky.
November features a full slate of local events that I’m looking forward to.
StartupCampWaterloo is, at this point, well-known in the technology community. I’ve always enjoyed attending the events, and have presented there in the past as well. At the tenth edition on Nov 10, Rick Stroobosscher and I will be talking about, and showing, what Karos Health is doing. As an aside, this is right in the middle of Entrepreneur Week, a yearly “innovation festival dedicated to entrepreneurial spirit”.
I’m particularly close to a couple of organizations that have three fine events coming up, and I’m going into carnival barker mode here!
uxWaterloo has not one, but two, events this month. The first, on November 16, is Lessons from designing at Google, a workshop presented by Adam Baker, a user interface designer at Google. Closer to home, we’re excited to have Joey Benedek speaking on November 24 about User Experience at Research in Motion. Both these visits have been in planning for some time, and we’re happy that the stars aligned to bring these exceptional speakers to the group. Register soon, as these have become two popular events.
Another group that I help organize is Ignite Waterloo. We’re putting on a fourth event on November 18. and are pretty excited about the talks that we have lined up. Be sure to get your tickets if you haven’t already, as tickets are moving fast.
Somewhat farther afield, in Guelph, the fifteenth edition of DemoCampGuelph is happening on November 17. It’s always a good time, as past posts here should indicate. Happily, I’ll be just sitting back and enjoying the talk and beer at this one!
Plenty to do!
Since hearing Trevor Herrle-Braun speak at the Communitech Community Managers peer-to-peer group, I’ve been thinking a little about how I use Twitter for messaging.
Like many people, I exchange tweets with friends and colleagues, and occasionally with people whom I know only through Twitter. Being busy with other things tends to limit these interactions for me, though, which reduces my engagement compared with someone like Trevor.
I tweet about events that I attend, including regular events like uxWaterloo and DemoCampGuelph as well as one-off events like the talk by Google’s Alfred Spector last spring. (I also write at this blog about these things, as it turns out.)
One of the staples of my own tweets has been quotations that are, at least for me, inspiring or insightful. In large part that’s a result of my own reaction to seeing great quotes tweeted others. Jim Estill, whom I met while working at Primal Fusion, has been a steady source of such quotes and I’ve often re-tweeted his. John Maeda is another great source for me, with many of his best quotes being his own excellent aphorisms.
The last few weeks I’ve experimented with a higher volume of these quotes. Some of them get re-tweeted by others, so it feels like a worthwhile thing to do.
I discovered, though, that managing my collection of quotes in a text file was getting a little unwieldy. This past weekend I set up a prototype repository to manage the quotes more effectively. I had a few simple requirements. For example, I want to know which quotes I’ve tweeted and when I tweeted them. I also want my quote repository to automatically format my quotes for use with Twitter; I set it up to format my tweetable quotes using real opening and closing quotation marks (like “this” and not like ‘this’) and a tilde character (~) separating the quote from its author.
So far the prototype seems like a good tool and has met its modest goals. As I use it I’ll iterate on the design and implementation and make changes that reflect my usage patterns. Being a designer, that’s about what you’d expect me to do, right?
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.
Last week I had the good fortune to facilitate not one, but two Marshmallow Challenge events. Briefly, the Marshmallow Challenge has the deceptively simple goal of building a tower using spaghetti, masking tape, and string, that will hold a marshmallow highest above a table top. Of course the lessons learned and the experience of building the tower, rather than just reading about it, are revealing and meaningful. The two big ones are to question your assumptions and to prototype early and often to learn as much as possible.
The first event, on Thursday, was the September meeting of uxWaterloo. The competition was close, and the teams all had a great time. After declaring a winner, we watched a video of a TED talk about the Marshmallow Challenge. That was really just a starting point for some enlightening discussion about the experience of building towers and about the ideas explored in the video. My favourite moment of the night was the realization that when designing for user experience, the user isn’t a marshmallow that can be plopped on at the end. Tower-builders that take that approach rarely succeed, and a user interface that doesn’t involve users early in the design process will often fail as well.
The second event, on Friday, was at VeloCity residence at the University of Waterloo. Having experienced the uxWaterloo event, I knew that VeloCity should go well, but I was still taken aback by the large number of students and by the enthusiasm and positive energy in the room. The event structure was the same as for the previous night, and the students dived in and seemed to have a great time with the challenge. Needless to say, I had a fine time as well, and enjoyed the conversations immensely. A major bonus for me was that Dan and PJ from tinyHippos were their as well, their young family in tow, to talk about what’s important in building software products at a startup.
Thanks for the invitation, Jesse.
This week I’ll be enjoying the September meeting for uxWaterloo (the snappily, and concisely, renamed User Experience Group of Waterloo Region) on Thursday at the Accelerator Centre. We’ve got a fun design workshop planned, which should be a great opportunity to work together with UX folks and maybe we’ll all even learn something, too. Come on out.
Looking farther down the road, Ignite Waterloo has announced the date and location for the fourth evening of talks, conversation, and general good cheer. November 18 is the date, and the new location is the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts. We’re excited about the new venue, and hope to deliver another great event. If you’re interested in being a speaker, head on over and sign up.