Garrick Van Buren be discussing how Cucumbers are the future of interaction design artifacts, prototyping, and User Experience design.

DATE & TIME
May 10, 2010 (2nd Monday of the month)

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe parlor room
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

My notes for the conversation

WHAT’S HAPPENING

The Art & Science of Seductive Interactions
How can we design interactions that encourage specific behaviors?
A while back, LinkedIn experimented with a feature: a little meter above the users’ information, showing their profile’s “percentage completed.” Suddenly, more users filled out their profiles. The feature didn’t have a clever interface, a sophisticated information architecture, or show any technical prowess. It just leveraged basic human psychology.

As designers, we work hard to provide powerful features in our applications, but if users don’t take advantage, it’s all waste. We have to extend our designer’s toolkit, leveraging the latest thinking from behavioral economics, neuroscience, game mechanics, and rhetoric.

Stephen will guide you through specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications, especially during the post-signup period, when it’s so easy to lose people. He’ll demonstrate how to engage your users through a process of playful discovery, which is vital whether you make consumer applications or design for the corporate environment.

RSVP on Facebook

WHEN
Wednesday, April 28th 2010
7-7:30p Socializing, food & drink
7:30-8:30p Presentation and questions
8:30-9p Further discussion, socializing. And more beer.

– — – — –
About the Presenter:

Stephen P. Anderson is an independent consultant based out of Dallas, Texas. He spends an unhealthy amount of time thinking about user experience design and intrapreneurial teams—topics he loves to speak about.

Prior to venturing out on his own, Stephen spent more than a decade growing and leading teams of information architects, interaction designers and UI developers in the creation of all types of interactive experiences, bringing value to clients such as Nokia, Frito-Lay, Sabre Travel Network, and Chesapeake Energy as well as many smaller technology startups.

In addition to consulting, Stephen is working on Mental Notes, a tool to help businesses apply principles from psychology to design better experiences.

As time permits, Stephen enjoys sharing his thoughts at poetpainter.com

First, we’ll discuss the Interaction10 conference. Some TC UXers who went will offer their take on the big ideas that came out of it and how they can apply those ideas to their work. If you want to get a sense of what went on behind the #ixd10 hashtag, now’s your chance!

Then, after we talk, stay and play Social Mania, the new game from Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone, the authors of Designing Social Interactions. We have an early beta version in our possession—you can’t even buy this yet. Play with us, and you get to join a product team and design social products. You know you want to.

This special two-part UX meetup will run from 6 to 9 PM. Feel free to drop in for the parts you’re most interested in.

DATE & TIME
March 8, 2010 (2nd Monday of the month)
6-7:30 PM – Interaction10 talk
7:30-9 PM – Social Mania

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe parlor room
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

UPDATE – Monday 3/8 – looks like we’ll need to postpone the Social Mania game, but the Interaction10 discussion is still on. See you there!

We’ll be discussing a The Web Content Strategist’s Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds. The author, Richard Sheffield, will join via video-conference.

When reading the book, please write down your answers to these topics/questions and bring them with you — they will drive our discussion (yes, you can still join us if you haven’t read the book):

What did you like about the book?

What did you dislike or perhaps not understand?

Will this book influence how you work or think about work?

DATE & TIME
Monday, February 8
6pm – 8 p.m.

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544

But it’s winter in Minnesota – and you need to get out more – so come over to CoCoMSP the new collaboration and co-working space in Lowertown St. Paul on Monday, January 11th 7-9pm for the inaugural ColdStart Happy Hour.

ColdStart is an initiative – by Todd Emmel and me – bring together our local startup tech community more frequently and more informally.

RSVP at http://coldstart.eventbrite.com

Ideas for topics might include:

Types of projects
Types of work —IA, content strategy, content development, SEO….
Project management approaches
Project teams
UX teams
Titles & roles
Timelines
Deliverables
Logging hours

DATE & TIME
December 14, 2009 (2nd Monday of the month)
6-8 p.m.

LOCATION
Gluek’s Restaurant & Bar – Backroom
16 N. 6th Street, Minneapolis
612.343.9790

• UnSummit compared to open space technology (imagine a summit with no set schedule or speakers, just one big question or problem to be addressed)
• Mentorship – how can people find potential mentors, and how would mentorship be structured? This could tie in with a discussion we had a few months back about people transitioning into UX: how can we help provide opportunities for people to establish new working/learning relationships…
• The wide variation in how IA and other UX terms are defined
• Working with problematic requests/suggestions from clients: probe to find the intent behind those requests, and then find a better way to address that intent.
• UX as a permanent state of mind (”You’re not just grumpy, you’re doing your job.”)

Thanks to Garrick Van Buren (Kernest.com) for sponsoring the meetup!

Upcoming meetups: November’s event on 11/9 will be the UX Book Club discussing A Project Guide to UX Design. We’re currently working on a topic for the December meetup.

We’ll be discussing a recent UX title from New Riders, A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making, which came out in March.

When reading the book, please write down your answers to these topics/questions and bring them with you — they will drive our discussion (yes, you can still join us if you haven’t read the book):

• Two things in the book that really struck a chord
• One thing you either hated, disagreed with, or don’t understand
• Do you see the ideas in this book influencing your practice/job/work, and if so, how?

DATE & TIME
November 9, 2009
6-8 p.m.

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe
518 Hennepin Ave. E. • Minneapolis, MN 55414
612.331.4544
Map & info

PS – Don’t forget: next UX Meetup is Monday, October 12 (6-8 PM) at Sen Yai Sen Lek Thai in NE Mpls. Hope to see you there!

Your Twin Cities UX Book Club organizers:
Bill Dorman
Christine Anameier
Stephanie Hammes-Betti
Jennifer Bohmbach
Garrick Van Buren

This will be an open discussion – let’s hang out, talk UX and eat spring rolls.

If you have something you’d like to discuss (prototyping techniques, user research in the age of mobile Twitter, selling UX to Eskimos, etc) leave them in the comments.

Hope to see you on the 12th!

DATE & TIME
October 12, 2009 (2nd Monday of the month)
6-8 p.m.

LOCATION
Sen Yai Sen Lek Thai Rice and Noodles
2422 Central Avenue NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418
612.781.3046
Click for directions

Your Twin Cities UX Meetup organizers:
Bill Dorman
Christine Anameier
Stephanie Hammes-Betti
Jennifer Bohmbach
Garrick Van Buren

• Organizing Wordcamp Twin Cities 2009
• Converting rocking HTML Designs into rocking Wordpress Templates
• Wordpress Overview for Beginners
• Wordpress as a CMS

Details: