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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Glasgow UX book club at tictoc

Over the last year User Experience (UX) book clubs have been springing up across the world. Initially kicked-off by uxbookclub.org, the events are meetings where people interested in experience design can share their views on some of the discipline's best books.

There are currently 4 regular book club meetings in the UK: London, Bristol, Brighton and since earlier this year Glasgow.

The August meeting is being held here at tictoc, and promises to be the most popular to date. The book up for discussion is the much-lauded Don't make me think by Steve Krug. Steve's book is a common sense approach to web usability, stepping back from the concept of expensive usability lab studies and giving real-world advice on implementing user-centered design on a budget.

If you're interested in coming along to the meeting take a look at the run-down and book a place on the event page. Even if you can't get a copy of the book in time don't let that put you off. You'll be able to learn something from the discussion and get a feel for whether the book club is something you'd like to come to in the future.

By Kate Wooding
Published: 24 August 2009
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Gold for Cardonald

Just home from the Scotland's Colleges Marketing Awards where Cardonald College took home more awards than I suspect they have shelf space for back in Glasgow. 

In total they picked up four awards, and without a doubt the highlight of the evening was watching Jude collect the Gold award for their website.

Keep an eye on the site over the next few weeks as we roll out the latest round of new features.

By Kerry Reid
Published: 19 February 2009
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Web Trends 2007

Information Architects Japan have released an update to their very interesting Web Trends map of 2007. Based on a representation of the Tokyo Metro map the 200 most successful websites are ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective to create an interesting image.

While the focus is still on English language websites (because that is where it's at), we have added some Japanese sites (a mystery to most of you gaijin), some German sites (yeah, there are some popular ones) and a Chinese line (the second Internet)"

Each trend line follows a theme, e.g. the technology line has the tech sites, the design line the design sites. You can download the map in various formats and even use the interactive version as your browser startpage. 

By Tom Beddard
Published: 20 July 2007
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Bill, IDEO and the RSA

By Super Administrator
Published: 14 June 2007
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Planet Organic join our family

By Melanie Russell
Published: 23 May 2007
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