User Experience – Connolly Design

September 6, 2018November 1, 2020

Let’s all meet at Fluxible!

A person standing in front of a screen, presenting to a group seated in chairs

As I wrote previously, Zeitspace is sponsoring Fluxible, Canada’s UX Festival. UX is an important part of our work and our point of view at Zeitspace!

While the Fluxible Conference and Fluxible Workshops are major parts of the week, there’s more. Fluxible Meetups are happening from Monday through Friday, and feature a variety of topics and a variety of formats. And they’re all free!

Each day at noon there’s a UX Brown Bag Lunch session happening at the Communitech Hub. Topics include behavioural economics, ethical design, and UI design refactoring. There are also several site visits. Oracle NetSuite, D2L, and Shopify Plus are each opening their doors to a Fluxible Meetup on an interesting topic. What a great opportunity to meet folks at those places and see what they’re up to.

A perennial topic of interest for many UX folks in Waterloo Region is hiring (or getting hired!). Check out the panel discussion Perspectives on portfolios from the pros to sharpen up the way you think about portfolios.

And a cool old tradition returns as Fluxible teams up with uxWaterloo for a presentation by Google’s Meagan Timney at their Kitchener office. Though based in California, Meagan is originally from London Ontario, so having her back in Southern Ontario is pretty great.

There’s more, so be sure to check out all the Fluxible Meetups for details. There ought to be something for just about eveyone.

This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.

January 15, 2018November 1, 2020

Make the Leap of Faith for Fluxible Conference 2018

A crowd of people leaving an auditorium

It’s been quiet here at Fluxible headquarters over the last few months — almost too quiet — with little in the way of announcements. But that doesn’t mean we’ve been inactive, and now it’s time for us to share!

For our first public disclosure of 2018, we’ve decided to be just like your favourite cool band and drop a new album with absolutely no notice. Well, not literally a new album, of course, though it’s certainly within the realm of possibility that we’ll do that one day.

No, what we’re doing instead is announcing that Leap of Faith tickets are now on sale for Fluxible Conference 2018. What, exactly, does that mean? It means that you can register at the lowest possible price, but you’ll need to do so without us having released any information about our 2018 program.

We’re able to provide a little context, though. Fluxible 2018 is happening from Monday, September 17 through Sunday, September 23. As with last year’s exhilarating presentation of Canada’s UX Festival, there’s plenty going on.

For our seventh edition in 2018 we’re presenting a week-long user experience festival, this time made up of four parts. There’s the Fluxible Conference, which is the core of the festival, happening the weekend of September 22 & 23. There’s a day of Fluxible Workshops on Friday September 21. There are Fluxible Meetups happening from Monday September 17 through Friday September 21. And finally, there’s the Fluxible Education Summit, happening in partnership with Wilfrid Laurier University on Friday September 21.

And now you have a little context in order to make that Leap of Faith.

And, in case you didn’t have enough incentive to buy early, this offer is at our lowest rate, but it’s only for a limited time. Sales close on February 14 — Valentine’s Day — so why wait another minute? Get your Leap of Faith Ticket right now. And if you don’t do it for yourself, do it for someone you love! You’ll thank us later for having made your Valentine’s Day such a great success.

This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.

February 23, 2017November 1, 2020

Take a leap of faith and love Fluxible

A person on a stage in front of a sceen showing a presentation

Fluxible now has five past editions that we can look back on with pride and fond memories. From a two-day conference in 2012 to a week-long festival in 2016, the Fluxible experience has grown richer and deeper each year, with a large community of attendees having joined us along the way.

This year, we’re again presenting Fluxible as Canada’s UX Festival, with another full week of events in three streams. We’ll present a program of Fluxible Meetups (September 18–22), a day of Fluxible Workshops (September 22), and the crowning two-day Fluxible Conference (September 23 & 24). We’re back at the CIGI Auditorium for the weekend conference, and the Communitech Hub for workshops and many meetups. In addition to all the terrific food, presentations, conversations, workshops, music, and more that you’ve come to expect, we have a few fun surprises cooking that we’re sure you’ll love.

And we’re trying something different this year for registration.

We know that many of you start budgeting for conferences and events earlier in the year than we, in the past, have announced details of our program and tickets sales. That has made for some uncertainty in planning your year. For 2017, we have a new approach that we hope addresses that.

We’re introducing Leap of Faith ticket sales for Fluxible Conference.

Why Leap of Faith? Because we’re opening up ticket sales without having announced a single speaker! How could we possibly expect anyone to register for Fluxible Conference without knowing the details? Well, with five years of Fluxible Conferences to look back on, we think we’ve established a solid record of delivering great programming married to a great experience. We believe that in making the Leap of Faith and registering now you’ll be rewarded with another terrific conference. Plus, you’ll have done so at the best price, as we’re offering our lowest cost tickets for Leap of Faith tickets. But it’s for a short time only, as we close Leap of Faith ticket sales on March 17.

So show your love for UX in general and Fluxible in particular by making the leap of faith and buying your Fluxible Conference tickets now!

This post originally appeared on the Fluxible website.

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!

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.

February 9, 2016October 31, 2020

Hiring season at Boltmade

It’s co-op hiring season, and at Boltmade we’re been deeply engaged in finding students at University of Waterloo who can join us for a four-month work term this coming summer. We’ve been a long-time employer of development co-ops, and have more recently been hiring for our UX team. That’s the side of things that has kept me and my colleagues busy.

It’s fascinating to see the wide range of academic disciplines that we’ve seen in the applications for our UX position. There are, as expected, many great applications from within Systems Design Engineering, but also from Software Engineering and Mechatronics. There are Computer Science applications, of course, which isn’t really a surprise, but we’re delighted to see applications representing many departments and programs in the Arts faculty — DAC, English, Anthropology, Psychology, Fine Arts, and more.

Because of the diversity of sources, it can be a real challenge to evaluate and compare candidates, but as we like to say, that’s a great problem to have. We’re excited about seeing who joins us in May.

Of course, we’re also looking for full-time software developers to join us at Boltmade. Check us out and let us know if you’re interested!

November 17, 2015November 1, 2020

A visit to the CanUX conference

Along with Bob Barlow-Busch, I recently attended the CanUX conference in Gatineau, Quebec, across the river from Ottawa. This was my third time attending the event formerly known as UX Camp Ottawa. As always, Cornelius Rachieru, Tanya Snook, Barb Spanton, and their team put on a fine event, with an interesting lineup of speakers presenting in a great venue (Canadian Museum of History, formerly the Museum of Civilization). It was a special treat to see our friend Brent Marshall delivering his Fluxible presentation to a fresh crowd.

Running Fluxible has made attending other events a bit odd for me, as my attention is always on evaluating experiences that might work well at our own conference. One thing that Fluxible 2016 attendees are almost certain to see is pre-event Friday dinners that will make it easy for UX people in town for the conference to meet each other in informal groups. CanUX set up several of these this year. Bob and I enjoyed lovely evening in Ottawa talking shop with a small group of CanUX attendees and want to bring that experience to Fluxible.

It’s great to see the UX community in Canada thriving in multiple locations, and see such thoughtful events being staged. Hats off to the CanUX team for delivering another successful event.

May 14, 2015October 31, 2020

This is a recommendation?

Netflix is a service with which I have a love/hate relationship. Even with the comparatively slim pickings offered by the service in Canada, the monthly fee provides pretty good value. And, of course, the offerings became more compelling since they got into creating their own content, some of which is terrific. And being able to watch on multiple devices is a terrific feature, especially with playback synced across them.

I’ve never, though, enjoyed the experience of finding videos to watch. Scrolling through titles can be slow and imprecise. There’s no way for me to easily recall the videos that I want to watch; the “My List” feature reorders videos, making it hard to find something that I thought I had added. The “Suggestions for You” that it makes can sometimes seem cryptic — what, exactly makes for “Exciting Movies”? And I regularly find unhelpful recommendations along the lines of “Because you watched [title of video]” where the first listing is something else that I watched recently.

Here’s a different unhelpful pair of recommendations that I ran into some time ago. Having watched a Robert De Niro movie called Stone (part of it, anyway), Netflix thought that I’d be interested in a movie called Stone Cold, as well as The Stoning of Soraya M. As far as I can tell, the movies have little in common other than similarities in their titles.

I get that this isn’t necessarily easy, and my response is mostly bemusement as the recommendations generally don’t add a lot of value for me. It just feels like discovery of what to watch is an untapped opportunity.

April 27, 2015November 3, 2020

User story mapping at Felt Lab

Last Friday I visited the REAP Felt Lab to provide an introduction to user story mapping in a lunch-hour workshop. I’ve been a big fan of story mapping ever since I was introduced to it in a workshop by Jeff Patton back in 2008, and I was delighted when he finally released a definitive book on the topic last year. I highly recommend User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product to anyone who wants to learn more about this powerful technique that can help product development teams focus on users and their needs rather than on features.

The introduction that I delivered comes straight from Patton’s book, and the folks at Felt Lab were thoroughly engaged by the experience. It was a full house, and each team learned a lot during the surprisingly challenging exercise of creating a story map about their morning routines.

Unsurprisingly, the same engagement and enlightenment were visible during a similar uxWaterloo session back in March.

If you missed these events, keep an eye on the schedule for The Boltmade Sessions, as there’s a good chance that we’ll deliver another iteration of the workshop there.

March 10, 2015November 3, 2020

Precise imperfection in the Yahoo Weather app

The Yahoo Weather app has been widely, and deservedly, praised as an example of a beautifully conceived and executed native app. I agree with those assessments, and use it on my iPhone most days to try to understand how many facets of Canada’s weather I might expect to experience in the coming hours and days.

There’s one detail, though, that stands out as gratingly wrong for me. It’s such a small detail that to point it our seems petty, but in an app that otherwise is of such high quality this tiny detail stands out.

While I can configure the app to use metric measurements for temperatures and wind speeds, it uses a mix of imperial and metric in the text summary of the forecast. The imperial measurements are shown first, with a precisely calculated metric equivalent shown in parentheses. In the example shown here, that makes for an awkwardly presented result of “High around 35ºF (1.7ºC)”. Wind speed presentation is similarly awkward.

The word “around” shouldn’t be followed by such a precise measurement. Beyond that, the text summary should just show me the metric measurements if that’s what I’ve configured.

On an unrelated note, I’m looking forward to seeing some warmer temperatures showing up in the app…