(April 2011) Confessions of a qualitative girl in a quant-filled world at RIM

In recent uxWaterloo events we’ve heard from Adam Baker on how Google uses large-value sampling to drive design decisions and  heard Sam Ladner discuss the merits of qualitative vs. quantitative methods. Now, come and experience some of Tammy teWinkel’s reality at RIM in trying to deliver qualitative user experience insight to quantitative-based communities. Can qualitative data be used with quantitative data? What works; what doesn’t – for the corporation? What works, what doesn’t – for the user experience group? Ultimately, what works for the user?

Tammy is a user experience researcher, currently enjoying professional life as a User Experience Architect at RIM. Tammy has been with RIM for three years, but before that has had the opportunity to work in a number of different environments including software development companies, agencies, and, as a consultant with small interaction design firms. That experience has provided the opportunity to practice user experience across a wide variety of applications, services, and technologies providing deep insight into the practice and process of making software more usable for people.

Tuesday April 19, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo

RSVP

Creative Thinking Hacks with Scott Berkun

Wednesday March 2, 2010
12:00 to 1:00 pm
Quarry Integrated Communications
1440 King St North (large building on the riverbank, next to the bridge)
St. Jacobs
[Map and Directions]

March has turned into another bountiful month for uxWaterloo. While we have not yet announced details for our regular meeting in the third week of the month, today we’re excited to announce a special lunch hour event on Wednesday March 2.

Scott Berkun should be no stranger to uxWaterloo attendees, as he gave a talk on The Myths of Innovation at our February 2009 event. Actually, “gave a talk” does him a disservice. Scott’s presentation was entirely based on questions from the audience, and the event was an entertaining dialogue in which Scott shared his thoughts with a thoroughly engaged audience. And the event has a special place in our hearts here at uxWaterloo, as a photo that Scott took of his audience found its way into his 2009 book Confessions of a Public Speaker.

For Scott’s March 2 visit, the theme is creative thinking hacks, and Scott has again suggested that the event be driven by questions from the audience. To that end, if you have any theme-related questions that you’d like Scott to answer, please feel free to add them into a comment on this post or bring them to the event. In fact, bring your lunch to the event too.

We have a couple of organizations to thank for their parts in making this event happen.

First, our friends at Communitech are bringing Scott to town for their Tech Leadership conference on March 2, and we appreciate their help in bringing Scott to this special uxWaterloo event.

Second, our friends at Quarry Integrated Communications generously offered to host the event at their lovely riverside offices in St. Jacobs. There’s plenty of parking there, and the atmosphere in the recently renovated space is quite suitable for the “creativity hacks” theme of the event.

Register today: seating is limited!

We’ve moved to uxwaterloo.org

January event: Practical Advice for Accessible Design

One of the most challenging design spaces in software is accessibility.  Users with disabilities face challenges reading, navigating, and interacting with the modern Web applications. Even with the help of assistive technology (AT) they face renewed discrimination by being denied the same experience in social networking, video sharing, and other applications that are critical to our web citizenship.

As the population ages, access legislation strengthens throughout North America, and AT users become more vocal, accessibility considerations become harder to ignore. For user experience and design professionals, this should be a call to action!  The reality is designing accessible applications is foreign to many of us, highly nuanced, technically challenging, and difficult to assess/critique.

This presentation by Ali Ghassemi and Dariusz Grabka of Desire2Learn will seek to make accessibility a lot less scary, and introduce you to some best practices that the company has developed for designing accessible web software.

This month’s event is being held at the office of Desire2Learn, located in suite 400 at 151 Charles Street West, in Kitchener. That’s the digital Hub in the old Lang Tannery building — use the entrance beside Balzac’s Coffee. There’s parking off Charles Street.

Please register if you want to attend, as space is limited for what is sure to be a great event.

December event: Product potluck 2010

For our December meeting we’ve featured a product potluck event for two years in a row now. If that’s not a tradition, I don’t know what is! And so, after an autumn schedule that has featured some high-powered visitors to our meetings, our meeting on December 16 will extend the potluck tradition with a relaxing and, we expect, enriching, evening of conversation and camaraderie. Please join us for a potluck with a twist: instead of food, we’re asking you to bring a product. Make it a product that you either love or hate, because we’ll be sharing stories with each other about these products. And the juicier the story, the better!

Some guidelines and tips:

• You’ll have a few minutes to introduce your product and describe what you love or hate about it.If the product you want to share isn’t something you can physically demonstrate at the event (like a particle accelerator, a Wankel rotary engine, or a table saw), then bring something that helps you talk about the product.
• If you’d like to share software or a website, a laptop would be best, but a printed screenshot will do the job if technology is scarce.This year, we’re meeting at McMullan’s on King — because what’s a potluck without food! (Note the UX Group is volunteer-run and without a budget, so plan to pick up your own tab.)

If you’re hoping to attend, please help us make an appropriate reservation by registering. Thanks! Everyone’s invited, so spread the word.

5:30pm, Thursday December 16

Location to be announced shortly.

Let’s meet at McMullan’s on King, which is at the corner of King St N and Princess St in Waterloo.

Our Google event is full

Wow! When we were planning our November 16 event on Lessons from designing at Google, we thought that there might be a good turnout. Well, we’ll certainly get that, as more than 80 people have registered already. As a result, we’ve had to close registration because the space simply cannot accomodate any more people. And, as it’s a workshop with group work on the agenda, it isn’t practical for us to move to another location.

Thanks to everyone who has shown interest, and be sure to check out our event the following week on User Experience at Research in Motion. It’s not full yet, but is filling up fast. Grab a reservation while you still can.

11th Annual Human Factors Inter-University Workshop

Here’s an event that may be of interest to uxWaterloo folks.

November 13 is the date for the 11th annual Inter-University Workshop, hosted at the University of Waterloo. The purpose of this day-long workshop is to bring universities and industry together to explore current issues in human factors and ergonomics. It is intended to be quite informal and presenters will discuss past research, work in progress, and ideas related to human factors engineering. Please join us for a great schedule of student speakers!

For those who cannot make it to attend the workshop, all the presentations being webcast by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. Show your support by virtually attending one or more of these presentations.  It is a free, day-long webinar, open to all.  You can come and go as you please during the day. The webinar starts at 8:45am EST and ends at 4pm EST. There are 15 different speakers throughout the day. The schedule is found at: http://hfes.uwaterloo.ca/iuw/?page_id=17

To register for the FREE Webinar on November 13, go to:  https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/707607051

To register to attend the workshop, go to: http://hfes.uwaterloo.ca/iuw/?page_id=62

Date and location

Saturday, November 13, 2010
8:45 am to 9:00 pm
Davic Centre, DC 1301
University of Waterloo

November 2010 event: Lessons from designing at Google

November has turned into an exciting month for uxWaterloo. We now have a second meeting in addition to our previously announced November 24 meeting on user experience at RIM.

Imagine an ideal design for your friend. Now make it work for your parents. Your entire neighbourhood. Your town, province, and entire country. Then throw in a couple of continents’ worth of users for good measure. Adam Baker, a user interface designer at Google, will conduct a hands-on workshop about “designing for everyone,” inspired by lessons learned working on Google Search. He’ll guide a discussion of techniques, tradeoffs, design language, and ways of understanding so many users that you couldn’t possibly truly understand them.

Adam is currently a designer at Google.org in San Francisco, working on projects related to climate change adaptation and public health. While at Google he’s contributed to a variety of projects from search UI to public data visualization to web annotation. A Canadian native, he previously directed design at Marketcircle in Toronto, and worked in UX evangelism at Apple.

We have not yet finalized the location for this event, but we wanted folks to have a chance to get it into their calendars since it’s not that many weeks away. Location is shown below.

Time/location details:
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
Meeting Room #2
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo
[Map]

November 2010 meeting: User Experience at Research In Motion

We have a special treat for November.

Joey Benedek, RIM’s Director of UX Research, will discuss how RIM approaches designing the Blackberry user experience. Joey will discuss the importance of the UX to the Blackberry development process, basic outline of the process and the key disciplines that play a role. Come hear how the UX process was applied to the development of Blackberry6 with specific examples from the recent release.

Joey joined Research in Motion as Director if UX Research in the summer of 2009, just in time to kick off the Blackberry6 development effort. Prior to RIM, Joey spent 9 years at Microsoft spending most of his time in the User Experience organization for Windows finishing his career there as the UX Research manager for Windows 7. Originally from Canada, RIM has provided a homecoming for Joey who completed his graduate work at Carleton’s HCI lab.

Time/location details:
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
Meeting Room #2
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo
[Map]

October 2010 meeting: designing mobile readers at Kobo

For today’s meeting we’ll hear from James Wu, UI Architect at Kobo, about making the transition from designing for a web/desktop to designing for a mobile user experience. Issues that he’ll address include smaller screen, touch screen, gestural UI, wildly different user contexts, and unreliable connectivity.

Kobo is a company dedicated to enabling people to “read any book, anytime, anywhere, and on the device of their choice”. To that end, they’ve created a suite of products that run on iOS (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad), Android smart phones, RIM BlackBerry smart phones, and even their own well-regarded Kobo eReader.

James has a great depth and breadth of experience, and is an engaging and generous speaker.

Time/location details:
Thursday, October 21, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
Meeting Room #2
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo
[Map]