UX Oxford
This event is sponsored by:
Every month we invite a speaker to come and talk about their experience using UX principles in their design projects. It is a relaxing and informal atmosphere. Come and join us for drinks, meet up with peers and listen to inspiring talks.
17
Tom Fletcher will talk about designing for the BBC World Service and discuss the UX issues working with 27 languages and 8 scripts, working with unique fonts, right to left languages and cultural and technical restraints.
Tom will talk about the work he is doing with the BBC Responsive site and the agile MVP approach.
About Tom Fletcher:
Tom Fletcher is a UX Designer for BBC News and World Service. Responsible for User Experience design across 28 news language sites and supplying info-graphics and data visualisation for the services' 24/7 news output. With experience of working across mobile, connected TV, tablets, web and responsive. In addition, Tom works at General Assembly, London where he is the Instructor on the User Experience course attended by a wide number of mature students from the start up and corporate worlds
Twitter: @tbfletcher
16
In the long distant days of studying people and cultures, armchair anthropologists read accounts by travellers and missionaries and based their theories on those second-hand accounts. Ethnography was born from the realisation that there’s no substitute for getting into the field and doing it yourself. Talking about ethnography in business, we usually concentrate on cost, thinking of years long fieldwork in far-off places.
During this talk Jaimes will argue instead that we should think of “sustainable closeness”, and that startups often learn to operate in this way, siting themselves as closely as possible to their customers, setting up camp rather than phoning it in.
Jaimes will discuss what can we learn from both ethnography, startup (and the similarities) that can help product development teams of all stripes stay continuously close to the customer
15
‘Making it work on mobile’ has never been an inspirational expression of design intent. At best it has always been a perfunctory nod to the influence of a disruptive delivery mechanism. Some kind of awkward realisation that if you’re not thinking mobile, you’re not thinking now. If you’re not doing mobile, you’re not doing now. While everyone else is skateboarding to the park of opportunity, you’ll be left alone in the library of also-rans, thumbing a pdf of ‘The Browser Wars’.
Suppose we think mobile first. Be brave and challenge the established publishing models. Affect change in your organisation. Demonstrate the elegance in the fluidity of a truly responsive framework. Components, patterns, breakpoints and control. Viewports, interfaces, gestures and control. HTML, CSS, Javascript and control. Making it work on mobile isn’t so bad after all.
But we’re doing something terribly wrong.
UX Oxford is proud to be part of Digital Oxford Week
14
Is social media the ingredient that will increasingly enable organisations to achieve what they want to achieve or is it all a load of hype that takes lots of resource but has little tangible impact?
This is the question we posed to Rob Salmon, the Director of Digital Marketing at Torchbox. Rob - who is a member of the IAB UK’s Social Media Council - has worked on social media activity with the likes of Yahoo!, Samsung and Carling. He’s worked in digital since 1997, is a former Sports Editor at AOL UK, led the team that delivered iPint, one of the UK’s most downloaded free apps and is ever so slightly infatuated with Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.
As well as looking to answer the question we posed, Rob will look at the good, the bad and the ugly of the social media world and share his thoughts on the relationship between social media and user experience.
If you’d like to give any thoughts on stuff he should cover, please do get in touch at twitter.com/rsalmonuk
13
Although we live in the era of connection, our organisations still operate like factories. Every day we face denial about change, silo-centric thinking, and a culture of shame, leading to disappointing user experience outcomes and increasing business risk. Our organisations can’t stay competitive in today’s customer-driven, collaborative, multi-channel environment without making fundamental changes to the way they operate—and yet, executives don’t have a plan for dealing with change. This is our context as UX professionals: however experienced we are at our craft, we can’t be effective until we become agents of change.
If we want our organisations to see their reality more clearly, we need to leave our comfort zones and learn from other disciplines, like service design, content strategy, and the lean startup movement. Just like user experience, each of these disciplines has a distinctive approach to confronting the problem of overwhelming systemic change—and we need as much help as we can get. In this talk, you’ll learn how help your organisation to change the way it operates by allowing yourself be vulnerable. It’s scary, but it works.
12
As people interact with information across a growing number channels both digital (such as computers, tablets, phones) and physical (from print to the built environment), a new form of design is becoming increasingly important. The most successful businesses of today and tomorrow will be those who can provide cohesive experiences to their customers across the numerous channels that those customers demand. While designers are ideally suited to deliver on this challenge, we must expand our mindset and develop new tools in order to succeed.
This talk aims to achieve just that. You will learn about three characteristics of cohesive cross-channel experiences—division of labour, consistency, and continuity—and how to put those principles into practice using two design methods: the cross-channel blueprint and the experience map.
11
Robert Stevens will be giving a practical talk on how to use facial coding to measure the affect of interaction design.
Robert is the Director of Bunnyfoot, co-founding one of the biggest UX consultancies in the UK. As a digital UX specialist he has pioneered UT in a non-digital environment, having a lot of success in print marketing communications.
10
In this talk, James and Jesmond from cxpartners will share their top tips and tricks for designing the best user experiences for classic UX deliverables such as home pages, product pages, search results and checkout processes. The talk will share best practice, cheat sheets and typical user and business requirements to bear in mind when designing these deliverables.
James and Jesmond are User Experience Directors at cxpartners, a Bristol-based user experience consultancy. They are co-authors of 'Smashing UX Design: foundations for designing online user experiences' (Wiley, 2012,http://amzn.to/NYjLoA)
9
Lee will talk about the barriers we face when trying to sell in research, and some possible solutions. He will also discuss how we can manage the difficulties posed by small or zero budgets, and how we can be more innovative in how we approach our research. Is it really all about interviews and usability testing?
Research can be boring. Boring for clients who don't see the point, boring to conduct when you're using the same old methods for every situation, and boring to produce the same old deliverables.
But it doesn't need to be.
8
Great design requires great skill in both creativity and logical thought. Currently there is a trend towards the application of analytical or ‘scientific’ thinking in UX. This has resulted in a backlash from some designers, who see it as a dehumanising influence. In this talk I’ll explore how designers from different backgrounds can end up at odds with each other simply because of the type of language they use. I’ll then focus on (1) dispelling some common myths about quantitative research, and (2) consider how a more scientific approach to design needn’t be at odds with creativity.
7
Why do the most serious usability problems we uncover often go unfixed? – A how-to for experienced and advanced practitioners.
As a profession, one of our most important motivations is that we want products to get better. But even when our recommendations are welcomed and apparently highly valued, they often aren’t acted upon—especially, it seems, when the problems involved are serious.
This talk offers some reasons why this happens, and suggests what we can do to improve our track record.
6
As sites grow and approach middle age they can amass all sorts of cruft: forgotten sections of content that used to be relevant but now only confuse, baffling navigation that never quite gets you where you want to go, and silos of PDFs and Word documents that might as well be labelled “Here be dragons”.
Band-aid follows hack follows band-aid, but eventually there comes a point where an organisation has to say "Enough!" and for the sake of its audience tear it down and start all over again. The Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society reached this point last year and Garrett talks about the journey they embarked on to clean up the cruft and put their supporters and contributors back into the heart of everything they do online.
5
User Centric Design is a nice theory, but how do you get your organization to embrace it? Ian has undergone a long hard slog to get UCD thinking and techniques incorporated into web projects, and will share some of those experiences with you. On the way, he'll cover a range of techniques from persona generation through page recognition tests to full-blown task-based usability testing.
4
As a company, O2 has always focused on generating real customer insight and applying this to technology to deliver great products. But history has shown that while some are great, others are mediocre and some plainly miss the mark. Why is this and what are we doing to improve things? This will be a an honest assessment of the good the bad and the ugly around implementing customer centred design into a big organisation from someone who is actually doing it.
3
Surveys, focus groups, contextual interviews, ideation, card sorting, tree testing, customer journeys, wire framing, prototyping, 79 pages tested with 91 users and 15 stakeholders. Delivered in 6 months with a lot of laughing, occasional despair but no breakdowns.
2
During his talk he will discuss: his approaches to mobile experience design for multiple products, channels and markets, refining the design process in recently launched consumer products.
1
The Ashmolean Museum recently underwent a remodel. Henry Kim will be talking about how they went about organizing, labeling and "herding" people through the exhibits, what research did they use, how decisions were made, how the physical landscape posed challenges to the "users" of the museum.
