We are taking December off to rest and recharge.
We look forward to bringing you more great speakers and events in the new year!
Let’s have a sharing and discussion session. In support of that, we’re putting a call out for short (5-15 minutes) presentations highlighting something interesting about the work you’re doing in UX. Whatever your role or level of UX experience, submit a ‘short’ today.
Here are a few ideas to consider:
Don’t worry, your short doesn’t have to push the boundaries of UX research or practice. This is a way for you to let the community know what you’re doing, open a conversation, and for us all to make more connections with each other.
September is a busy month in the UX community here in Waterloo Region. The fifth edition of Fluxible is happening!
Started as a two-day conference back in 2012, for 2016 Fluxible has grown into Canada’s UX Festival, a week-long affair that runs September 19 through 25! The Festival comprises Fluxible Conference, Fluxible Workshops, and Fluxible Meetups, with each providing some fantastic opportunities to learn and to meet UX folks in the community.
We think there’s something for everyone, and rather than create a single uxWaterloo event for September, we’ve decided to suggest instead that you look at the various Fluxible events and see which ones appeal the most. Go check them out!
User experience has become a familiar phrase to just about everyone in the technology business. For companies looking to distinguish their products in a crowded marketplace, UX is the not-so-secret weapon for turning potential customers into raving fans.
But how do you create a great user experience? How do you set up a team or an organization to deliver it? How do you even break into the field as a career?
All these questions and many more will be addressed on September 14–15 at Fluxible, the UX party disguised as a conference. This is the second edition of Fluxible, a home-grown event in downtown Kitchener that has already developed a reputation outside Canada for its solid content and quirky sense of fun. Last year’s inaugural event was a resounding success, with cheers of encouragement from the audience when asked if they want it again in 2013. Well, here we are!
This year, you’ll enjoy talks and half-day workshops from some of the most respected and knowledgeable experts in their fields. Topics include the culture of design teams, the power of metaphor in design, starting out in UX, design that drives action, Lean UX, and much more.
With a mix of excellent content and ample opportunity to meet UX practitioners from around the world, Fluxible provides an immersive and enlightening weekend for everyone. Add a healthy dose of live music, art, and hand planes — and a great experience gets even better.
Whether you’re an aspiring designer, a practicing researcher, a hiring manager or startup founder, or just someone with an interest in learning how to design great experiences, Fluxible has something for you.
And it gets better. Fluxible has provided a special “uxWaterloo” promotional code that unlocks a $200 discount off regular registration. Don’t miss this chance at an exceptional UX learning opportunity. Register today!
Startup Weekend returns to KW on September 20-22, 2013 at the Communitech Hub. If you missed it last year, here’s your chance to get involved with a fun weekend-long, hands-on experience in which new startup ideas take form and come to life.
Communitech is looking for some UXers to participate as mentors during the event. Lend your expertise to the participating teams, make new friends and connections, and help create something awesome. Mentoring doesn’t necessarily require a commitment of the entire weekend. For more information or to express your interest, please email KW (at) startupweekend (dot) org.
About Startup Weekend
Startup Weekend is a global grassroots movement of active and empowered entrepreneurs who are learning the basics of founding startups and launching successful ventures. It is the largest community of passionate entrepreneurs with over 400 past events in 100 countries around the world in 2011.
The non-profit organization is headquartered in Seattle, Washington but Startup Weekend organizers and facilitators can be found in over 200 cities around the world. From Mongolia to South Africa to London to Brazil, people around the globe are coming together for weekend-long workshops to pitch ideas, form teams, and start companies.
All Startup Weekend events follow the same basic model: anyone is welcome to pitch their startup idea and receive feedback from their peers. Teams organically form around the top ideas (as determined by popular vote) and then it’s a 54 hour frenzy of business model creation, coding, designing, and market validation. The weekends culminate with presentations in front of local entrepreneurial leaders with another opportunity for critical feedback.
Whether entrepreneurs found companies, find a cofounder, meet someone new, or learn a skill far outside their usual 9-to-5, everyone is guaranteed to leave the event better prepared to navigate the chaotic but fun world of startups. If you want to put yourself in the shoes of an entrepreneur, register now for the best weekend of your life!
Last month we held a design workshop to brainstorm designs for a software tool that supports rural healthcare workers. This was in support of Tula Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit, and an organization it supports named TulaSalud.
Ray Brunsting, our guest from Tula, was quite happy with the design ideas that emerged and would like to go further. If any of you would like to continue with the design work that was started at the workshop, Ray would love to hear from you. Of course, this would be on a voluntary basis, but I can say from my own experience that working on a project like this is quite rewarding.
Can you help Tula on this design project? Please let us know, and we’ll connect you with Ray.
Some of you may remember Sam Ladner’s presentation to UX Waterloo back in February, in which she mentioned a research project on mobile technology. Sam’s delighted to announce that she’s starting the recruitment phase of this project. More from Sam below.
Call for Participation in Research on Work/Life Balance and Mobile Technology
Are you a smartphone user? Do you want to know more about how this device is affecting our lives? We want to talk to you!
Ryerson University is seeking to recruit smartphone users to participate in a social research study on mobile technology. Hosted at the Ted Rogers School of Management, this project asks the simple question: what happens when workplace technologies like the BlackBerry come into the household? The research team is looking to recruit people who have used a smartphone for work and personal use for the last six months, preferably in the Greater Toronto Area.
The research will be publicly available. We will be sharing white papers and conference presentations with the community at large. Those interested in mobile technology will learn more about how individuals use their phones at home, the kinds of content they typically use, and what frustrates them about current software and hardware design.
All participants will remain completely anonymous.
Participants will be visited at home by a researcher, who will conduct an interview and will spend time visiting and observing the participant’s home experience with their smartphone. All participation is strictly confidential.
Recruitment will begin in April, with field work happening throughout the spring and summer. Participants from across the country will be considered, but those in Southern Ontario are preferred. The project is being lead by Dr. Sam Ladner, postdoctoral research fellow, and co-principal investigators Dr. Catherine Middleton and Dr. Ozgur Oturetken.
Learn more at mobileworklife.ca and on Twitter @mobileworklife.
uxgroup.wordpress.com has been home to uxWaterloo for many years. We’ve recently graduated, so to speak, to our own domain, uxwaterloo.org. This is the last post that you’ll see at the old WordPress site, and it’s really here for the benefit or those who have subscribed to our old WordPress RSS feed, since everyone else gets automatically redirected to the new site. Please take a moment to head over to the new site and resubscribe there (or here,as the case may be!).
Update: Our new RSS feed can be found here.
This week, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) is asking its members to chip in with a small donation to the organization. Well, that’s us folks! Please take a moment to learn about the goal of this fundraiser and then, most importantly, to make a small contribution. Through the support and generosity of IxDA (and of course Communitech, our local sponsor), the UX Group has grown from an initial experiment two years ago to a community of over 200 people — at absolutely no cost to our members.
This blog post by the IxDA board explains the goal of this fundraiser in detail. Here’s an overview:
For the price of a cup of coffee you can help IxDA deliver our next-generation platform to serve the needs of the interaction design community. We can’t do it without your help.
Since its inception as a mailing list in 2003, IxDA now supports over 10,000 discussion list subscribers, 80 IxDA Local Groups from around the world, an annual conference (with a regional conference on the way in South America), several budding community initiatives and over 12,000 people affiliated via LinkedIn. Despite our ambitions, our current technology infrastructure is no longer able to support our needs, nor expand to meet our future ones.
Please chip in! Visit IxDA’s website to make your contribution. It takes only a few minutes.
Have any specific topics you’d like covered at one of our events? Know anyone you’d like to see make a presentation? Interested in presenting something yourself?
We’d love to know your thoughts on this. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog posting so everyone else can chime in with their responses too. Or, if you prefer a more private channel, fire an email to our coordinators Robert and Navid.