UX Camp London

Photos by Adam Charnock

This weekend saw the first, and most definitely not the last, UX Camp London at the eBay / Gumtree office in Richmond.

I was lucky enough to have acquired one of the 40ish tickets that were available for the one day event for user experience designers.

It was an early start to say the least, having booked myself on the first train out of Glasgow Central, the 4.25AM west-coast service to Euston. I had sprung for a First Class seat with the intention of making myself comfortable and having a pleasant nap through the trip. Unfortunately it seems that Virgin have designed their seats to cause near constant pain in either your neck or back, with a handy lever that lets you switch from one to the other. The sleep I did manage wasn't the most rejuvenating, but I'm glad I got it.

When I arrived at the riverside venue it looked like most people were already working their way through a pastry or coffee and chatting excitedly about the day ahead. I spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd, and was glad to catch up with a number of people who I had met at the UX London conference earlier in the year.

Before things got started there was an opportunity to take a look at the Wall of Deliverables, an idea pinched from this year's IA Summit. Before the event we had been asked to bring along our favourite UX deliverables. There was to be an open vote throughout the day and at the end the one with the most votes would win a prize. I took along a print out and URLs to an HTML wireframe and an interactive prototype. Alas, I didn't win, but I did manage to get a couple of votes.

Just after 10AM, Cennydd Bowles (one of the unorganisers) introduced himself and described what would be happening over the course of the day. After describing the barcamp type structure of the day he directed the group to the schedule wall, where each attendee could note down the topic of a presentation they had prepared, or a discussion they'd like to have. The schedule filled up quickly and people moved to the rooms that had been made available for our use.

Over the course of the morning and afternoon I moved from presentation to workshop to presentation. Some of the highlights being:

• Are we nearly there yet? A closer look at user journeys - Cath Jones
• What I’ve learned about UX freelancing - Leisa Reichelt
• Using questionnaires effectively in UX
• Saying no is part of our job; what happens when you keep saying ‘OK’ - Simon Doggett
• Design Games 101; better ways for collaboration, facilitation and ideations - Andy Budd

One of the best sessions was an ad hoc workshop on design games by Andy Budd from Clearleft. I've been running prototyping workshops with our clients for a few months now. They usually focus on introducing clients to the design process and design thinking. We present issues we've discovered through user research and play design games to try and solve them.

One game I've wanted to introduce into our work is design the box, where you give your client a blank box and ask them to imagine this is the packaging for their business or website. The idea is that you can leverage people's in-built understanding of packaging and merchandising to get at concepts to guide experience design. Andy's workshop was great hands-on fun, and I was quite chuffed at the box our team knocked out for Gumtree, see the photo above of me trying to explain why we chose the things we put on our box.

While the presentations were informative and inspiring the chat between sessions was equally enjoyable. I caught up with UX people from companies like Rightmove, Skype and Just Giving, freelancers and masters students. 

If there's one thing that stands out about the UX community it's a collective desire to share and collaborate with other people in the industry and in general. Leisa enapsulated the reason she shares so much on her blog brilliantly when she said that everything about her work that she shares with the world comes back in some positive way.

So, please enjoy my slides, and until the next UX Camp London, we'll keep on researching, designing and sharing.

By Andy Bright
Published: 24 August 2009
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UX London Redux

On Wednesday night I met up with the great and the good of London IA for a redux version of the much lauded UX London conference that took place back in June. The event was a loose recreation of stand out seminars and conferences from the original, presented by people who had attended and watched by those who (like me) hadn’t been able to make it first time round.

Christian Petzny on Dan Saffer. When brainstorming, “Reduce the problem down to a haiku or bento poem.”

Tom Coombs on Donna Spencer and Jared Spool. Musings on  optical illusions, and the importance of clarity of language in navigations.

James Box on Wireframing 2.0. Electronic wireframes - quick and easy to create, and perfect for clients and developers. Good thing tictoc already use them!

Frances and Jane from IG Index rounded off the night with a heated game of D-UX-tionary. Playing boys against girls our team scratched our barnets over terms like ‘mash up’, ‘personalisation’ and ‘open source’. The boys had to draw “radio buttons”. Clearly, the match was fixed.

Apart from this ego busting defeat it was a fantastic night. As a newbie everyone made me very welcome, so big thanks to all the organisers and speakers.

By Jo Kerr
Published: 14 August 2009
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Sore feet and social media

Today's event, in conjunction with the Marketing Industry Network, about using social media for business was a huge success, I've been watching the comments and feedback on Twitter (using the hashtag #usnfb). Take a look at what people thought, and I'll write a proper report tomorrow. Huge thanks to all the speakers (Guy Stephens from Carphone Warehouse, Kyle Macrae from Blether Media, Heather Gorringe from Wiggly Wigglers and Craig McGill) and the delegates - you made it an extremely enlightening and enjoyable event!

By Kate Wooding
Published: 1 July 2009
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Report from OFFF 2009

Sitting in an airless, dark hangar with 3,000+ other people, in microwave-like heat, listening to some “show OFFFers”, I was trying to decide whether I should stay here and die or go out to the beach and have a swim...

After being at FITC in Amsterdam last year (a much smaller conference compared to OFFF), and at OFFF this year I have been keeping a record of all the weak/strong aspects of every presentation I have seen (mostly development/programming-related), which I have decided to turn into a short guideline about how to make a good presentation.

Rule One: Intro

The first 5-10 minutes is always the crucial part of the speech – I’d compare it to the very first 10 seconds of contact between two people – if your attitude is good and words interesting enough, people will stay and listen, otherwise they’ll leave shortly, interrupting everyone. How to engage the audience then?

Stand up

Some presenters were sitting, some were standing. Stand up – you’ll definitely make more impact on the audience and strengthen your body language, communicating much more.

Do not talk too much (crap) about yourself

Keep your intro bit as short as possible, do not go into unnecessary details. Some presenters talk a lot about their private stuff or get into their private issues. The audience is not a support group thus it’s better to introduce yourself briefly without getting into personal trips. People really don’t care how cool you’re telling them you are, they will see it themselves.

Speak clearly, slowly and loud enough

It's a good idea to ask the audience if they can hear you well, sometimes the room acoustics may be difficult and you may lose some listeners. It’s best to ask people that can’t hear you to raise their hands and then ask the soundman to adjust the volume.

Rule Two: Have a concept and be prepared

Some speakers started off beautifully but once they got deeper, they got into too many details and then somehow got stuck – and then nothing else happened till the end. People don't really want to see/hear about the same stuff for hours, so try to change the subject from time to time, make it diverse, interesting and engaging. The audience can clearly tell if the speaker has thought his stuff through.

Ask yourself what might be interesting to other people and if/how they can benefit from it

Try to show something more than people can see on your website, show some unedited footage/mock-ups, sketches, "the making of" films etc.

Try to make your entire presentation tell a story, have the beginning and a definite end (i.e. surprise with a sudden ending). If you see you’re running out of time, skip some less important parts in the middle but keep the end bit.

Also try not to repeat yourself too much, saying the same phrase 2-3 times is usually enough.

Deal calmly with technical issues

If it comes to the worst (i.e. you've lost all your data/your hard drive got eaten) – improvise, but never make a fundamental mistake by making excuses (unless you make a joke out of it).

Rule Three: Entertain

Stefan Sagmeister came up onto the stage dressed in a rather funny woman’s polka dot costume. I’ve been seeing Brandon Hall wearing some kind of a chef’s suit. Whatever the outfit was, it always piqued my curiosity. What’s that all about? Entertainment.

By putting on something special you are showing you’ve made an effort to wear something other than a t-shirt. That pays back in the extra attention you receive. Beware though, it’s easy to exaggerate and be too fancy, stylish hats and glasses will make a celebrity out of you. So uncool!

Ka-boom!

Try to surprise audience by showing some shocking/unexpected/impactful imagery (even ones that are in contrast with what you're talking about). Generate a wide spectrum of emotions, from laughter to concern.

It’s important to avoid over-excitement – if you get overwhelmed, you’re likely to lose your clarity.

Interact

Get responses from the audience, ask them to raise their hands etc. Form questions in a way that will give you an immediate estimate on something important, but avoid obvious questions – otherwise people won’t interact.

Reward

You can bring some prizes to give away at the end, throw t-shirts or something else, people will adore you and you'll keep them sitting till the end.

Rule Four: Impress, motivate and educate

You’re talking to hundreds, be responsible and make people amazed. Get them to strive to go further every day.

Gijs Gieskes was showing his amazing DIY instruments, unfortunately some of them didn’t work, so he went online to show the videos of them. That didn’t work either as the network lag was too long for the videos to buffer in a reasonable time. So don’t rely on the internet connection as it may be flaky and you won’t be able to play your Youtube videos, try to have all your files available locally.

Use full screen mode when possible, it’s nicer to view a video without unnecessary context. For the same reason try not to use fancy backgrounds for your slides, it's distracting and takes the focus away from what you're saying.

You can write your own software to handle your presentation, it’s very well received by the audience as it proves that you’re really prepared.

When things go wrong, let it go. If your code still doesn’t compile after the third attempt and neither you nor the audience can fix it, leave it. It’s better to say sorry (weakness is a strength) than desperately trying to attack the frozen beef with the plastic knife.

Make full use of your operating system or application by using keyboard shortcuts, auto completion (coders) and other techniques. There are two main benefits of this approach: firstly, you do things faster, so the audience doesn’t need to roll their eyes when you type SuchACoolFunctionNameWhichIsOnlySeventyFiveCharactersLong; and secondly, you teach people how to do repetitive things more efficiently.

If you show source code, always use monospaced font, dark background and white text usually works better than the opposite, especially in hard lighting conditions. Delete all commented code that you won't use in your demonstration.

Finally, have fun and love what you do.

By Tomek
Published: 11 May 2009
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Scotland on Rails

tictoc will be presenting at Scotland's first Ruby on Rails conference taking place on 4-5 April in Edinburgh.

I'll be presenting a talk called 'Deploying Rails with Litespeed: a developers best kept secret!'. Deploying Rails applications is still a sore point for developers, especially when you start hosting multiple sites. I'll be spreading the good word about Litespeed and how it has made our lives easier at tictoc.

There's a decent line up of speakers with some big names from the Rails community, full details over at Scotland on Rails.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 February 2008
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RailsConf: Day 2

Day two of the European Rails Conference kicked-off with the main man himself, David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH). The creator of Rails talked on how the framework and community has changed over the last three years from the position of the young upstart, who was at first laughed at and ignored but is now taken seriously as a real alternative for big business.

This reiterated a theme for the whole conference about how Rails is now being considered and used in more and more Global 1000 companies. I was talking to a guy from IBM who was saying how he has been successful in pushing the Rails platform for internal projects within the company. Both IBM and Sun were main sponsors of the conference, which tells us how these big companies are sitting up and paying attention.

DHH then proceeded to demonstrate some of the new features and refinements in the soon to be released version 2.0 of Rails. A nice overview of this can be found over here.

Making Rails More Artificially Intelligent

The first session of the day started with an interesting talk from the guys at http://bee.com.es on how to use algorithms to solve 'intelligent' problems and make your applications smarter. The talk focussed on two key areas bayesian networks and genetic algorithms. It's a fascinating field and is growing ever more important as it provides methods that help make sense of the ever increasing volume of information on the web, such as improving search results, filtering spam and creating personalised suggestions (such as products or music of interest).

Full Text Search with Ferret

Programmers seem to love giving their creations odd and sometimes silly names, such as Ferret. Ferret is actually the search engine we use to provide the onsite search capability of our websites, so there could be a vaguely tangible link with searching and 'ferreting' through a site... Anyway, this talk was on some of the more unknown/advanced features of the search engine. There were some useful tips that will be working their way into our implementation soon.

Rubinius - Improving the Ruby Ecosystem

Rubinius is a brand new code-base for the Ruby language. Most of the core functionality is actually written in Ruby, so it will be possible to easily go in and directly modify the core functionality. New features like modern memory management and garbage collection mechanisms should provide significant performance improvements. Applications can also be compiled into packages in a similar way to Java to enable easier distribution and productisation.

One concern is that the Ruby platform will become splintered with two different versions of Ruby, however the Rubinius project assures us it will keep full compatibility with the original Ruby. An interesting note is that Rubinius has a complete RSpec test suite based upon the original Ruby functionality. The same test suite is also used by JRuby thus following the same standard specification.

Scaling a Rails Application

The final session of the day was by one of the developers behind the hugely popular Twitter. Whilst not something directly affecting us at the moment, it was interesting to gain some insight into their system. Unfortunately the presentation wasn't as prepared as it should had been and contained a few mistakes.

One interesting point was the announcement that Twitter will be open-sourcing a daemon component called Starling that they use to offload long-running processes to maintain browser responsiveness for the client.

Keynote Speeches

There were two keynote speeches worth mentioning, the first by Dr Roy Fielding called “The Rest of REST” which dealt with using REST as an architecture of developing modern web applications. Roy was one of the original authors of the HTTP protocal - something the entire internet is now reliant upon. Although rather academically orientated it was interesting to hear some of the history behind such a core component of the internet.

The last keynote was a talk by Craig McClanahan from Sun. Craig is the creator of the original mega Java framework, Struts. Being a popular speaker within Java circles he gave a very energetic talk on how he has enjoyed the power and productivity gains from using Rails, even so far as admitting that it feels painful having to go back into Java - quite an admission from a hard-core Java guru! 

Photo credits Duncan Davidson and Patrick Lenz.

By Tom Beddard
Published: 28 September 2007
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RailsConf: Day 1

This year the European Rails Conference was held in Berlin with over 500 like-minded developers from around the world gathered to discuss, network and learn about the Ruby on Rails framework and Ruby in general.

Having been to a few physics conferences in the past I'm used to being among groups of techies who feel more comfortable communicating with computers than those around them, so I was quite surprised that there was a real buzz and enthusiasm at the conference. Maybe it was because few people were older than their mid-thirties and the vast majority were Apple Mac users. Everyone seemed to be excited about being able to use technologies that enabled them to do cool stuff on the web.

Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec 

The three day event started with two half-day tutorial sessions. The first was about the relatively new Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) technique that aims to provide a more meaningful testing framework for your application whilst also defining a natural language specification of what it should do and how it should behave; the business and technology sides of a project should refer to the same system in the same way. I'll be posting another article about this and the RSpec framework in more detail shortly.

Adobe Flex and Rails 

The second tutorial session was an introduction on how to use the Adobe Flex platform with Rails applications to create a rich dynamic user experience in Flash. Adobe is really pushing the Flex platform as option for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) despite the increasing sophistication of Web 2.0 Javascript libraries such as Prototype/Scriptaculous and jQuery/UI. An interesting shortfall was that the speaker couldn't really give definitive examples of 'killer' flex applications out there already, which confirms the feelings of many that Flex is still a niche technology.

Keynote: The Art in Rails

The first day ended with an inspiring keynote by Dave Thomas, one of the key figures within the Ruby and Rails community. His talk "The Art in Rails" was based on the analogy that software engineering is like art in that a programmer can suffer the same problems as an artist, such as writers block, knowing when to stop and satisfying the customer.

His solution to the first problem is to use exploratory testing to rapidly prototype ideas in order to work around conceptual blocks - even work through the problem the old-school way using bits of paper and a pen.

The second problem of knowing when to stop can be controlled by breaking the development process up into fixed chunks of time and functionality, which are refined through iterations. The result of each iteration should be an application that can work with the functionality defined so far, which is a core concept of Agile Development.

His final point on knowing how to satisfy the customer was illustrated with a selection of famous portraits. A great artist will look beyond the surface of their subject, which might not directly reflect reality but does capture the meaning and personality of the person within. In software terms this means getting into the nitty-gritty details with the client by asking why again and again. Often a client's initial project request is quite different to what they actually want and need.

Dave wrapped up by saying that there is art in engineering and there is engineering in art; Ruby is the canvas and Rails the paint. He ended by suggesting to everyone to
Treat your next project as if it were a work of art”

- quite a challenge!

Photo credits: Duncan Davidson and Zeno Crivelli

By Tom Beddard
Published: 19 September 2007
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