The topic will be “What Taxonomy Is & Why It’s Important to UX.”

Our guest speaker will be Seth Earley, CEO of Earley & Associates.

Seth will join us via Skype.

DATE & TIME
Monday, January 9
6-8 p.m.

LOCATION
Wilde Roast Cafe
65 Main St SE (Riverplace)
612.331.4544

Topic
The Business of User Experience.
In honor of the all-too-quickly approaching Tax Day, it would be nice to hear about the business of user experience. Do you work at GigaUX GmbH providing UX solutions to the world? Perhaps you work for a large company in the UX Department. Or, you might be the “go to UX expert” on a development team. Maybe you point your lance at those UX giants from the comfort of your own business, Quixotic UX, LLC.

Come share your story, your experience, your wisdom. We would love to hear about your workflow, tools that impede or ease the flow, best practices—even financial “observations”! NB: This should not be taken as official financial advice from the Man’s Life of Chartered Accountancy! [Hat tip Monty Python.]

When
Monday, April 11. 6pm

Where
Red Stag Supper Club

Location
509 1st Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55413
612.767.7766

We will be meeting to discuss at Wilde Roast Cafe in Minneapolis.

WHERE TO BUY
Rosenfeld:
Paperback + screen-optimized PDF + ePub + MOBI, $39
Print-optimized PDF + Screen-optimized PDF + ePub + MOBI, $22

Amazon.com
Paperback, $39

MEETUP DETAILS
Date & Time
Monday, May 9
6 – 8 PM

Location
Wilde Roast Cafe
518 East Hennepin Avenue
Minneapolis, MN 55414

For reference or to learn more about the titles of UX Book Club check out the Reading List for 2011.

A quick reminder that we’re meeting on a different night to accommodate Valentines Day: Monday, February 7, at the Wilde Roast Café, from 6:00p–8:00p.

Our theme for the meeting is The Emperor’s New Clothes: Challenging Received Best Practices, Tools, and Standards. There are experts in all fields who promote a methodology or tool or best practice. Sometimes they are spot on and provide amazing insight and ease or enhance our work; other times they’re a red herring, wrong, or misleading and add unnecessarily to our workload.

Do you know any experts who got it wrong? Have you used tools which made your job harder, not easier? Were you forced to do something one way because “that’s how it’s done” when if only “they” had listened to you the project would have finished early and under budget? Well, now’s your chance to share your own expertise and insights. Come challenge the experts and conventional wisdom!

If you’d like to try on some of the Emperor’s fashions for yourself, he’s been know to shop at these fine stores:

Jared Spool, Understanding the Kano Model – A Tool for Sophisticated Designers:

http://www.uie.com/articles/kano_model

Is this tool meant to be used prescriptively or descriptively? Does it provide meaningful or useful data? Do you use it?

Jakob Nielsen, Change vs. Stability in Web Usability Guidelines:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/guidelines-change.html

Perhaps we can see now that some people were correct from the beginning…or eventually! Are there pros to being the first, even though it bucks tradition or standards or trends?

Please feel free to share any books, articles, or musings where you’ve personally pointed out that the emperor had no clothes!

Regards,
The UX Meetup Organizers

Please join us at Wilde Roast Cafe at 6pm Monday evening, November 8th, to discuss topics and activities for upcoming TC UX Meetups in the next few months. We have some ideas and we know that you do too. So, let’s hear ‘em!

Think about:

• Books we might read and discuss.
• Articles and blog posts we might review.
• Current issue trends we might expose.
• Industry or practice developments we should all know about.
• Even games we might play.

Monday, 11/08 (second Monday in November)
6pm

Wilde Roast Cafe
518 E. Hennepin Ave.,
Minneapolis, MN 55414
Map

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