Job: Front-End Engineer at Sortable

Location: Waterloo, Ontario

Our mission at Sortable is to make it easy for people to make decisions about which product or service to use, for example their next camera, phone, or tv purchase, or their next meal, movie, or trip. Sortable’s focus is making these decisions easy for ordinary people by handling all the data analysis and surfacing the best options in simple, beautiful interfaces. Sortable is a 7 person engineering driven startup, our fast growing websites are used by millions of visitors each month, and we need to expand!

We need talented frontend engineers to help us build simple and powerful web interfaces for mobile and desktop users. Designing interfaces that make complex tasks simple is what drives you. You live and breathe HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript — we’re talking clean, minimal markup, with fast page loads, and responsive layouts for multiple devices. At Sortable you’ll have the opportunity to build software that get used by millions of people. Join us to change how people make decisions online.

Skills

• Extensive HTML5, Javascript, jQuery and CSS3 experience
• Experience with Scala, Java or C#
• User interface design
• Mobile frameworks such as PhoneGap
• Ability to take responsibility and release features users love that drive our vision forward
• Top-notch communication skills – we’re a small team, you’ll need to fit in well
• Bonus: Worked at a startup before, active in open source, personal projects, active blog, linux experience, spending way too much time researching which product to buy

Environment

We use Scala for most of our development. In addition, we have written tools or services in Python, Bash, and Java. We want our team of developers to have fun and be productive, so we’ll expect you to bring your own ideas and suggestions as to what hardware and software should be used.

Other tools and services we use include: Lift, PostgreSQL, Redis, Mercurial, Jenkins, Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3) and Ubuntu.

Benefits

We offer competitive salaries (80-120k+ based on experience and ability), health benefits, equity in the company, and kick ass developer machines. If you’re interested in building the future of how people make purchase decisions with a group of nice, funny, smart people, then Sortable is the place for you.

To apply please view our front-end engineer job posting

(February 2012) The user experience of conferences

Thursday February 16, 2012
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Bauer Kitchen (private room booked under “UX Waterloo”)
Located in the Bauer Marketplace

What makes for a truly amazing conference experience?

Not everything we build as user experience designers is digital (service designers have known this forever!). Even if your own work to date has been strictly online, much of your knowledge is transferable to the real world. So this month, we put that idea to the test — by digging into the DNA of a successful conference experience.

Come prepared to share your own conference experiences, or to chime in with reactions to what others have to say. There’ll be no presentations this month, just informal discussion among UX peers. Have you been to a conference before? Let’s hear about it! Describe what you loved about the experience, and share some low points as well.

Your ideas could very well influence KW’s very own UX conference in September, Fluxible 2012.

RSVP requested

We’re meeting in a private room at the Bauer Kitchen, booked for “UX Waterloo”. Please note that food and drinks will not be supplied, but you’re free to place individual orders if wanted.

Please RSVP below if you plan to attend. Attendance will be capped at 20 people, so sign up soon!

(November 2011) An Evening of Serious Play at the New FELT Lab

Our November event is an exciting opportunity to get some hands-on play time with a variety of interactive technologies in the recently launched FELT lab, located in St. Jacobs. uxWaterloo is one of the very first groups to make use of this terrific new facility!

A digital sandbox for serious play

Founded by the University of Waterloo’s Research Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP), the FELT lab is designed to spark “research entrepreneurship” between UW students, faculty and industry experts. It focuses particularly on interactivity and responsiveness in digital display environments, and has numerous corporate partners who’ve brought some terrific toys to the table.

The lab is located in the offices of Quarry Integrated Communications, but has a separate entrance off King Street in St. Jacobs. Inside the lab, you’ll find a range of emerging technologies such as Christie Canada’s MicroTiles, GestureTek’s Cube and Kiosk, Float4’s interactive FX, and Kommerz’s Mixed Reality Interface (MRI).

And we’re going to have some serious fun!

uxWaterloo’s event will feature some hands-on creative, integrative thinking, and building. Guided by students from the REAP program, we’ll work in groups to brainstorm (and bodystorm!) unique combinations and innovative applications of the lab’s technologies. We’ll pitch our best ideas to each other while learning about all the lab’s capabilities and technologies in the process. And, we’ll be documenting the process and ideas on video, ensuring that our creative energy is captured for posterity.

Play! Create! Share! Learn! It’s going to be an awesome event!

Thursday November 24, 2011
5:30 to 7:00 pm
FELT Lab at Quarry Integrated Communications
1440 King Street North, St. Jacobs, Ontario
[Map]
Sign up now, as space is limited!

October 2011: Design workshop with REEP

Thursday October 20, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo

Sign up now, as space is limited!

The October edition of uxWaterloo features a hands-on design workshop for the Residential Energy Efficiency Program (REEP). We’ll work in groups to generate ideas for improving the user experience of REEP’s Green Home Planner, a web-based tool used by home owners to plan upgrades based on REEP’s audit of their home’s environmental performance. Bring your creativity and your curiosity!

About REEP

REEP is an environmental, charitable organization that has provided home energy evaluations in Waterloo Region since 1999. Over the past twelve years, REEP’s Certified Energy Advisors have shown 13,235 homeowners how to save 18,142 tonnes in greenhouse gas emissions and $4,531,000 annually on their energy bills. Participants have reduced their heat loss by an average of 25% through home retrofits based on REEP’s recommendations.

Download REEP’s personas and a product brief

To provide some context for this month’s design workshop, REEP has drafted 2 documents that describe their target audience and the product we’ll be working on. Download the PDF files below:

	Download the REEP personas
	Download the REEP product brief

(September 2011) Tom Robinson on designing for novices, experts, and others

We’ve all seen the frustrations of novice users struggling with a piece of software not designed for them. Novices need features to help guide them through complex software. On the other hand, features designed to help novices may slowdown and frustrate expert users. Before we can design for novices and experts, we need to know how both groups interact with software. Knowing what novices and experts need from software, and which group we should design for, will help us decide what features to include and exclude.

During this session, we will look at who novices are, who experts are, and who’s in between. We will then have an extensive group discussion about which level of expertise people design for and how they approach design for that group.

Tom Robinson is a PhD student at the University of Waterloo. He is researching how people learn to use computer software, looking at the stages of knowledge that people pass through as they learn. Previously, he worked at Maplesoft and TD bank as a GUI developer. He has a bachelors and masters degree in Computer Science, also from the University of Waterloo.

Thursday September 15, 2010
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Accelerator Centre
295 Hagey Blvd., Waterloo

RSVP

(August 2011) BrewUX 2: More beer, more pizza, and new friends.

This month we’re meeting once again at the Red Baron Lounge, located on-site at the Brick Brewery in Uptown Waterloo. We’ll have a couple of brief presentations about UX happenings around town — and plenty of time for meeting new faces, talking shop, and raising a few glasses together. This is a private gathering for UX Waterloo, in which you can sample just about everything the brewery has to offer.

Where and when

Thursday August 18, 2011
5:30 to 7:30 pm
Red Baron Lounge at the Brick Brewery
(Entrance at the side of the building near the front)
181 King Street South
Waterloo, ONT
[Map]

RSVP required

You must RSVP to attend, as this is a licensed event. We’ll be checking names at the door. Sign up early before it’s sold out!

Please thank our sponsor

Our thanks to Brick Brewery for sponsoring this @uxWat event! To show our appreciation, please visit Brick on Facebook and “Like” them, or tweet a quick thanks to @BrickBrewery on Twitter.

BrewUx July 2011

Job: Senior Information Architect at Kobo

Location: Kobo Inc., 135 Liberty St. Suite 101, Toronto, Ontario

Work downtown at one of Canada’s most exciting startups and help us design experiences on the web and for smartphones, tablets, desktops and eReaders

The responsibilities of the Information Architect include designing user interfaces, informing functional specifications, performing competitive reviews and creating flows, wireframes and process maps. You will be able to visualize concepts quickly and clearly and will work closely and collaboratively with the User Experience Team.

Key Responsibilities

• Conceive, design and prototype useful, usable, and compelling user experiences and user interfaces (represented by scenarios, paper prototypes, storyboards, wireframes, site maps, screen flows, etc.
• Document user interface requirements
• Apply domain knowledge, user interface design best practices, and knowledge of emerging UX related presentation/gestural technologies.
• Bring strong design, conceptual and problem-solving skills to translate conceptual ideas (business needs and user goals) into simple yet meaningful user interfaces.
• Assess data from multiple sources (product requirements, tech constraints, UX research, web analytics) and synthesize it in order to develop efficient user scenarios, taxonomies, classification schemes, navigation systems, design patterns, etc.
• Create and effectively present UX deliverables (wireframes, workflows, paper prototypes, etc.) to explain and negotiate design solutions to key stakeholders.
• Develop competitive assessments and perform site/application/device reviews.
• Help define, request and incorporate relevant and recent UX research and data from customer feedback to appropriately inform design decisions.
• Help define UX performance metrics.
• Upholding UX guiding principles and style in project execution.
• Create, maintain and share project documentation and UX guidelines after project execution.

Key Qualifications

• Minimum of 3 years in interaction design in a product development context.
• Embraces and champions a collaborative approach that brings good resolution decisions to tough design questions and issues.
• Ability to successfully execute multiple projects and tasks simultaneously.
• Ability to quickly visualize concepts through sketching or other rapid prototyping methods.
• Ability to help define site strategy, concept, content, and features.
• Willingness to try alternative approaches to a challenge.
• Experience developing user personas, functional specifications and wireframes.

To apply, please visit: http://hire.jobvite.com/j/?cj=oayLVfw8&s=uxWaterloo

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.

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]