Tag: uxWaterloo

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July uxWaterloo beer gathering

A group of people enjoying UX conversations and Beer at Brick Brewing

The last year has been a busy one for uxWaterloo. We’ve had some great speakers and workshops, and our meetings always feature great discussions around a range of UX topics.

For our July 19 event we decided to kick back with an evening of informal conversation and beer. We met at the Brick Brewery in their hospitality lounge, where the beers were a welcome antidote to the hot and humid weather, and the discussions as rich and varied as always.

We’ll be meeting there for August as well, and while there’s no guarantee that the weather will be as hot and beer-appropriate, there’s always the great company and chance to meet new people in Waterloo Region’s UX community.

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March roars in like a lion

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.

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Designing the BlackBerry user experience at RIM

Joey Benedek presnts at uxWaterloo

Following our November 16 event with Google’s Adam Baker, the November 24 meeting of uxWaterloo featured a terrific presentation by Joey Benedek, Director of User Research at Research in Motion, on designing for user experience at the mobile pioneer.

Joey focused on examples from BlackBerry OS 6 in a presentation that was funny, frank, and insightful in its examination of the challenges that RIM faced in this major upgrade to the user interface of its iconic products.

Joey gave some specific examples of how user experience techniques were applied to specific design challenges. For example, a diary study, in which user participants kept a diary and recorded how they worked with BlackBerry, was used to inform the design of universal search in OS 6. Card sorting, another classic technique, was used to understand how to organize the configuration of options in OS 6.

He was pretty direct about the need to deliver a major improvement in the BlackBerry user experience in a short amount of time — the overhaul was accomplished in just nine months. He was also pretty direct about the company’s logic-driven culture, and how an understanding of, and level of comfort with, the UX organization’s process and data helped make the case for what needed to be done.

Joey provided some great observations that may challenge the perception of RIM in some quarters. As Joey put it in response to a question, “There’s no confusion on our part about whether people are enterprise users or consumers. They’re all humans.” Later, he added “We don’t pick users. We pick contexts of use,” and “I’m a fan of the classic usability test”.

Overall, it was a treat to hear from Joey, and we all appreciated his presence at uxWaterloo.

Julie Rutherford has provided a more detailed summary over at the uxWaterloo site.

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Designing for everyone at Google

Groups of people at tables working on a design exercise

As expected, it’s been a busy month. As a result I’ve let some obvious blog posts slip. Time to catch up!

Last week’s uxWaterloo meeting was a particularly interesting one, as it featured a design workshop facilitated by Adam Baker, a user experience designer at Google.

Adam divided the large crowd (over 70) into groups of four and gave each group a design to complete as well as a constraint. It turns out that there were only two designs being worked on amongst the groups, though there were several constraints.

After a short period of design activity, Adam directed that pairs of groups merge. At this point we discovered that half the groups were designing a user interface for specifying a pizza to buy, while half were designing a user interface for specifying delivery instructions. We now had groups of eight, and needed to integrate our designs for pizza and delivery UIs into a whole design. We also had to handle new constraints, as each former group of four brought one to the new group of eight.

After another short period of design, the groups were merged again, resulting in larger groups of 16 or so, and a larger group of constraints in each group. The larger groups engaged in a final period of design work, after which each group shared their results with the larger meeting crowd. At this point it became clear that the constraints were quite varied: design for someone just like you; design for iPad; design for an old BlackBerry for use on a train; design for 9-year olds; design for blind; design for first-time users; design for 100 pizzas delivered to 100 locations, etc.

The exercise was a practical demonstration of some of the challenges for user experience at Google, where designing for everyone (many millions) carries with it many specific and even opposing requirements.

Adam followed up with a fine presentation in which he identified some of the design considerations that are important when designing for search at Google. He likened it to travel in the “back country”, where a premium is placed on solutions that are lightweight, field-repairable, multi-purpose, few frills (are fast), degrade well, and are adaptable.

Famously, Google places an emphasis on measurement, which informs design rather than dictating it. Amongst the kinds of questions they ask, and look to measurements for answers, are “How long…”, “How many…”, “How ofter…”, and “When…”. Nothing earth-shaking there, but the rigour with which they approach measurement is striking.

All in all, it was a highly successful night, and there may be similar uxWaterloo events in the future. Stay tuned.

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A busy calendar for November

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!

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User Experience in Waterloo Region

This piece first appeared this week as a blog post on the newly launched Communitech web site.

We’ve kicked off a new season of uxWaterloo events last month with a design workshop. As it turns out, Communitech is launching a new web presence this month as well, which makes this an opportune time to write about designing for user experience (UX).

Many articles and books have been written on the topic of user experience, and there might not be a universally accepted definition of what it is. It’s reasonable to say, though, that designing for user experience in a software product will often address the following:

  • Functionality: what does the product do? Is it useful?
  • Interaction design: how does someone actually use the product?
  • Information architecture: how is the functionality in the product organized and presented?
  • Visual design: what does the product look like? Is it appealing?
  • Usability: how easy or hard is it to get something done with the product?

Getting these pieces in the UX puzzle right isn’t easy, but the results can have a major impact on a product’s success.

Waterloo Region is well-known for its innovative software and hardware companies, many of which devote dedicated resources to designing the user experience of their products. For some of the user experience researchers and practitioners who call the region home, getting together at a uxWaterloo meeting is a monthly activity.

uxWaterloo is, among other things, a Communitech peer-to-peer group devoted to building a community around the practice and understanding of creating a great user experience. While we’re primarily software-focused, we touch other areas on occasion as well. At our monthly meetings we explore a variety of topics through guest speakers, workshops, and even just discussion sessions at local pubs. In the last year we’ve explored table-top interfaces, guerilla usability techniques, personas in product design, and more. The atmosphere is friendly and folks are generous and willing to share their knowledge.

So here’s an invitation to all designers, product managers, developers, technical writers, and other interested folks to join us at a uxWaterloo meeting and help us to continue to grow our vibrant community around a common interest in user experience.

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Marshmallow-centred design

A group of people build a tower with spagehetti

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.

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uxWaterloo this week and Ignite in November

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.

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Mental models matter in product design

At the June meeting of the UX Group of Waterloo Region June Meeting last week we had a fine presentation from Amy Gill on her research into think aloud usability assessments, in which users are asked to verbalize their thoughts while using a product and performing one or more tasks. There was a lot of great discussion on the topic and on related issues, as many folks who were in the room have experience running test sessions with users.

I’ve had experience on both sides of a test, though not everyone thinks that UX professionals make for good test subjects. When the discussion touched on mental models, I was reminded of an experience that I had as a test subject for a software product.

On one of the first screens that I saw, there was a reference to David Allen’s Getting Things Done and how the product being tested related to it. As I have used GTD for many years, that immediately set my expectations and a particular model snapped into place in my mind. That model was the lens through which I looked at the product for the rest of the session, during which I struggled somewhat with fully grasping the product and how to use it. After the session ended, there was some discussion, and it turned out that the GTD reference was not intended to have been there, and that the product is not meant to be a GTD implementation. Such was the power of the wrong mental model, though, that I simply could not see the product in any other way, despite many other cues in the user interface that contradicted my model.

While the details of interaction design, visual design, and information architecture all matter, if the resulting product is conceptually unclear or leads to an inappropriate mental model for users, the product will be challenging to use. It’s critical to get the mental model right.

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Yet another demonstration that beer and user experience go well together

We had a great discussion (or, rather, series of discussions) at this month’s UX Group event at the Huether Hotel in Waterloo last night. We started off talking about iPad, which was certainly in the spirit of our announced NUI discussion, but soon wandered off down various interesting conversational side roads. From business models, to retail user experience, to music and movies in the digital age, and more, it was a terrific night. Thanks to everyone who came out and made the event so special. And here’s to a speedy recovery for co-organizer Bob Barlow-Busch, who was too ill to make it out. You missed a good night, Bob!

The current plan is to try to assemble a group post that represents our collective take on the evening. Check back at the UX Group blog for more on that.