January 2021: UX research and ethnographic design for humanitarian technology

Eriol Fox has been working in the non-profit, humanitarian technology sector for the past two years immersed in how to build technology products and services that empower and give access to people in the global south or ‘developing countries’ often around difficult topics like Genocide, Democracy, gender-based violence and in difficult circumstances such as informal settlements (slums) and areas where radicalisation is high.

When we think about the future and progression of design, how do we think in a way that explicitly includes places and communities still ‘coming online’ and how technology and society operates differently across borders.

This talk summarises recent research and UX design for humanitarian projects and how to approach difficult topics when researching these areas or these countries along with some tips for those looking to work or learn more about how to conduct UX research in these places.

About Eriol Fox

Eriol has been working as a Designer for 10 years working in for-profits and then moving into NGO’s and open source software organisations, working on complex problems like sustainable food systems, peace building and crisis response technology. Eriol now works at Open Food Network and is part of the core team at Open Source Design (http://opensourcedesign.net/) and Human Rights Centred Design working group (https://hrcd.pubpub.org/).

Eriol is a non-binary, queer person who uses they/them pronouns.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

January 21 2021, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

December 2020: A Designer’s Guide for Mixed Reality, Ana Sofia Gonzalez

Mixed Reality is hot right now. What brings more value is having your custom Holograms, aka custom 3D models, in the experience.

MR is the newest trendy thing. However, what brings value is having your custom Holograms, aka custom 3D models, in context and experience. Why does learning this matters? It is similar as creating a picture in Photoshop and then you don’t know how to put it in your app or share it. With Mixed Reality becoming more common, as designers, we need to understand the file formats and how to make it easier for users to create their own content. But how does someone do that? It is such a complex process not many people know. There are so many CAD and 3D making solutions with different paradigms that I will break it down which ones work best for MR.

1) You must know which program you are using. Depending on the program, you will be using parametric geometry vs. polygonal geometry. The 3D standards use real-time rendering applications that require models to be represented as a triangulated polygon surface. Don’t worry I will explain these technical words.

2) Optimize your model to the device you will be using, either mobile, desktop, VR, or HoloLens

3) Convert it into the file format industry standard GLB

4) Upload to your MR product and/or device

These steps sound easy, however there are still a few limitations on every step. You will be finding challenges, or see why your 3d model takes too much to upload or why it is not rendered beautifully.

Also Ana Sofia will be taking on the diverse products of Microsoft Mixed Reality products in multiple platforms.

About Ana Sofia

Ana Sofia is a Senior Designer at Microsoft. She delights in democratizing innovative solutions. With over 8 years of experience in the tech industry, she includes diverse perspectives into her designs. She knows that adoption to innovations might be difficult. By sharing her insights on Mixed Reality, Artificial Intelligence, and Innovative Work Cultures, she helps others adopt innovation and retain users for over 20 year old products. Ana Sofia is also an advocate for D&I initiatives by being a chapter leader at Microsoft Latinx Employee resource group, creating allyships for minorities, and mentoring. When she is not working or volunteering, you can find her dancing and exploring unknown lands.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday December 17, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

November: How Design Makes The World, with Scott Berkun

Do you wish more people understood good design and valued good designers? Or that your organization gave more power and influence to UX roles? Author Scott Berkun’s new book, How Design Makes The World shows the way, with inspiring new stories about the importance of design, and tactics for helping everyone appreciate good design and why it matters in their work and daily lives. He’ll share lessons from the book and offer advice on how to make design and user research more influential in your organization.

As a very cool bonus, we’ll be giving away some copies of How Design Makes The World to lucky attendees.

Scott is a bestselling author and popular speaker on creativity, leading projects, culture, business and many other subjects. He’s a former interaction designer and project manager who worked for many years at Microsoft and WordPress.com. He’s the author of eight books, including The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and The Year Without Pants. His work has appeared, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Guardian, Wired magazine, USA Today, Fast Company, National Public Radio, CNN, NPR, MSNBC and other media. His popular blog is at scottberkun.com and he tweets at @berkun.

We’re excited to be presenting this event along with our friends over at ProductTank Waterloo.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday November 19, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

October 2020: Designing streets for people

Our uxWaterloo events are most often about digital experiences, but there are obviously more kinds of experience than those.

For the past several decades, street design has largely centred on the user experience of one particular way of getting around – the automobile. So what happens when that focus expands to include a whole range of user experiences? The needs and expectations of pedestrians, cyclists and transit users can differ significantly from those of drivers, leading to new street designs that create options for how people move and get around the city.

Hear from City of Kitchener staff on new approaches to street design, including current plans for a downtown cycling grid that is safe, comfortable and convenient for all ages and abilities. And of course, COVID-19 has impacted street design just like everything else in society. Hear about expanded patio space and pop-up bike lanes too!

This talk is led by Darren Kropf, an Active Transportation Planning Project Manager with the City of Kitchener. Darren specializes in Complete Streets and bikeway design. He lives in Kitchener and can often be spotted taking his kids around the neighbourhood on his cargo bike, frequently stopping for ice cream along the way. Darren spoke at Fluxible 2019 and led a cycling tour of the city.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday October 15, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

September 2020: UX Community Shorts

Wondering how others in our area are doing UX?

This month, we have a great line-up of local (and not-so-local) UXers, who will share their experiences and learnings from the field. Topics this month range from behavioral barriers reviews, remote design, data-driven UX, design for virtual marketplaces, and designing in a company with low UX maturity.

It’ll be a great night with lots of ideas.

Join us and hear from:

Joanne Lau: Working in a company with low UX maturity
Barnali Banerji: Data driven experience design – Using UX analytics
Laura MacNeil: carib.farm – A virtual marketplace
Jeff Bos: Remote UX design and evaluation – Case study
Janna Cameron: Behavioural Barriers Reviews

Online event link will be shared closer to the date.

Please register for this free event

Thursday September 17, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Join remotely from wherever you are!

August 2020: Informal (Remote!) Pub Meetup

Hi everyone! As part of our usual summer tradition, uxWaterloo is hosting an informal happy-hour session where we can all connect and catch-up… remotely!

How’s that going to work, you ask?

We’re being given an exclusive sneak-peak at a new remote video tool from a promising start-up in Toronto called Rally. The tool recreates the experience of an informal gathering, where people can move freely between tables, while also hearing the general chatter of everyone in the room. It’s simple, impressively natural, and loads of fun. You’ll get it right away.

What’s even more fun is we’re going to have the founders of the start-up join us to share a bit of their story and some of the key design decisions that led them to where they are today with the product. They’re excited to hear from the uxWaterloo community about our experience using the tool for the first time.

As you can imagine, the Rally team’s servers are running red-hot, so we have a limit of 50 people for this session. Get your spot now!

We’ll follow up closer to the date with a link.

Please register for this free event

Thursday August 20th, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Join remotely from wherever you are!

July 2020: Fostering Trust in Your Brand and Beyond, with Margot Bloomstein

In this session Margot Bloomstein, Principal of Appropriate, Inc., explains how designers can build trust.

In today’s economy, organizations need a new strategy to earn trust, act with transparency, and help consumers and citizens make confident decisions. But undermining confidence is cynicism: it erodes trust in the media, government, public institutions, and consumer brands. To regain the trust of consumers and citizens, marketers talk about empathy and authenticity. But how do you get beyond those buzzwords? Give more control to your audience—and they’ll put more trust in you.

We must empower our audiences to earn their trust. Our tactical choices in content and design can engage, educate, and ultimately empower people. Drawing on examples from retail, publishing, government, and other industries, learn how voice, volume, and vulnerability can inform your design and content strategy to earn the trust of your users. Let’s address the tough questions: How do brands develop rapport when audiences let emotion cloud logic? Is there a place for vulnerability in corporate strategy? And what’s the role of command and control consistency in the creative work of a corporate enterprise? These questions can drive design choices in organizations of any size and industry—and the way we respond can empower users and rebuild our ability to trust in society itself.

Margot Bloomstein consults, writes, and speaks about content strategy and how brands build trust through content—especially right now, as we all embrace a new normal for trust, transparency, and empowered communication. The principal of Appropriate, Inc., she’s the author of the seminal Content Strategy at Work and Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, coming in March 2021 from Page Two Books. For 20 years, she has helped shape the content strategy industry by leading workshops, keynoting conferences, and consulting for communications, marketing, and UX teams in a range of institutions. Margot’s work in message architecture-driven content strategy informs the communication of the American Montessori Society, messaging at Sallie Mae, crisis response at Harvard University, and cultural tourism in the state of Nevada. Her clients also include Fidelity, Lovehoney, Scholastic, and Lindt and Sprüngli. A participant in the inaugural Content Strategy Consortium and featured speaker at SXSW, Margot is a popular keynote speaker at corporate events, conferences, and in private workshops around the world. She also produces BrandSort and teaches in the graduate program of FH Joanneum University in Graz, Austria. She advises Women Talk Design, a network of underrepresented speakers in design and adjacent industries, and actively participates in discussion around content, design, and trust on Twitter at @mbloomstein.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday July 23, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

June 2020: The atomic unit of design is the team, with Peter Merholz

At the heart of most agile development frameworks are small, cross-functional squads. And in those squads resides a lone designer, collaborating with a product owner and engineers. This model has lead to the quest for the Unicorn designer, the broadly skilled individual who can do interaction design, visual design, and maybe even content and research as well!

This trend has potentially terrible ramifications on the practice of design in companies. In this talk, Peter will explain why the Team, not any one designer, is the Atomic Unit of Design Organizations. Drawing upon his experience from shaping teams at Adaptive Path, through his work as a VP of Design and now management consultant for design orgs, he’ll walk through the process of intentionally creating a strong, diverse team, what behaviors and norms enable a team to behave at their best, and explain why the Team Lead is the most important role in your design organisation (yes, even more than Head of Design).

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday June 18, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

May 2020: Successful Leadership, with Aaron Irizarry

The way organizations are approaching product development and emerging technologies is constantly changing. At the same time, our practice as designers is evolving with new tools, techniques and approaches, all surfacing at a pace that can be hard to keep up with.

What does this mean for us as leaders of teams (big or small)? How can we lead teams in progressive orgs going through digital transformation or orgs that are slower to adapt? By focusing on developing certain skills, disciplines and characteristics within ourselves as leaders, we can prepare ourselves for the challenges we face when leading our teams and working with our partners.

We also set ourselves up to be leaders who can coach, nurture and elevate our teams to be best equipped for the challenges they face as they execute on their work. In this webinar, Aaron will share insights, tools and techniques (from personal success and failures) for growing your own leadership skills, overcoming leadership challenges and successfully developing your teams.

Takeaways include:

• Gauging and improving our EQ as leaders
• The role of vulnerability and transparency in successful leadership
• Adaptive communication and leadership styles for different types of team members and partners
• Leading through enabling autonomy
• Creating personal norms for successful leadership

Bio

Aaron Irizarry, aka “Ron”, is the Head of Credit Solutions Design in Capital One’s Commercial Bank. Aaron is also the co-author of Discussing Design: Improving Communication and Collaboration through Critique. More importantly, Aaron loves connecting with people through food, is a lover of heavy metal, and a lifelong Dodgers fan.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together in a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday May 21, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!

April 2020: Stop Solving Problems

We’re excited to welcome Steve Portigal back to uxWaterloo for our April session. Steve has presented here before, and has also presented at Fluxible Conference. What does he have for us this time?

The old maxim says we should “find a need and fill it.” While at some level that is certainly true, in this era of fetishized disruption, organizations seem to gravitate to being in the problem solving business. Steve will review several different mindsets for creating products and services, consider their benefits and risks and challenge you to go beyond a fixing mentality.

Note that this will be a live streaming event. For what I hope are obvious reasons we won’t be sitting together is a physical space!

Please register for this free event

Thursday April 16, 2020
5:30pm to 7:00pm ET
Live streamed to wherever you are!