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

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

Registration is $30 that includes the afternoon of co-working @ CoCo, or $15 just for Chank’s session.

To register and for more information – visit CoCoMSP.com

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

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

Details:

We met June 8, 6-8pm at Wilde Roast to discuss the book Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown.

The conversation was facilitated by Stephanie. She manages a User Experience team at U.S. Bank. She told us a story about how she found the book and how it helped her team. It was so inspirational for them they started a book club just to discuss the concepts in the book. For the team Stephanie manages, it gave them a way to catalog what they were doing and present it back to the other people in their organization. It allowed them to have the language to work more effectively with (internal/external) clients and with each other.

There were a few people in the group that were working in roles where they didn’t ‘officially’ have titles that involved the words ‘user experience’ but they recognized that is what they were doing. The book gave them a language to speak with people inside of the field of User Experience and co-workers who had no idea such a thing existed. In addition to providing a simple and common language, it filled in gaps for individuals who had not been through large web design projects or had the luxury of multi-disciplinary teams. They were working on a different scale, but still doing the same tasks.

“It (the book) brings a community and a language to the team.” The deliverables are the communication tools that allow us to get work realized. It is important that they are effective and easy to use, after all we are in the UX business.

Some conversations that are still happening even after all these years:

• put the print design on the web
• the visual design is the only attribute that matters-as long as it looks good
• usability is still absent from the process of many organizations

The main thing that drew people to the book was that they were seeking more knowledge. This book held a complete view for people who were not practicing with larger teams. Based on the Twin Cities crowd, it has a strong appeal for people that identify they are doing user experience work, but just don’t have those words in their title. YET

We had several librarians at the table tonight. It made me feel like there is a resurgence of new people coming into the field. With the economy adjusting and honestly a need for more people doing this work, I was excited to see it. Smart managers will see the potential in this future User Experience workforce. People that really care about making better experiences are people that can learn and that’s what the work force needs right now.

Our event was sponsored by Harvest, simple online time tracking, time sheet and reporting software. Harvest created a special MNteractive Meetup coupon code for anyone who’d like to upgrade to a paying Harvest account: MNTERACTIVE09 will get the recipient $10 off their first month.

Thanks to Harvest for sponsoring the event. Christine A. was the winner of the $50 gift card from Wilde Roast.

Your Twin Cities UX Meetup organizers:

Kristi Olson
Stephanie Hammes-Betti
Jennifer Bohmbach
Garrick Van Buren

P.S. Please note we are taking a summer break.

The next UX Book Club will be September 14th, 2009. The second Monday of the month.

However, we are going to try and pull together a resume workshop with managers and UX people who would like to talk with others about how to build a better UX resume.

We have a thriving interactive community that presumably should be interested in things WordPress. Any takers?

Email jmyers at visi dot com or @jaymyers

Update: here’s the original Minnov8 post – video by Gabe Chefitz of 612Authentic.

Well, now you can support the model locally with a concert coming up September 2nd. The Ripple Effect one day concert event on the State Capitol lawn is selling tickets at whatever price you feel is worth it. So support the model!

I’m looking forward to seeing Michael Franti and Spearhead, myself.

Well, the reality wasn’t quite as exciting as it seemed it would be. Yes, it was convenient. Playing with the dry ice in the sink was always fun. And those green tubs were always convenient for camping trips. But it wasn’t necessarily the cheapest option, and, at least back in the day, we found their produce lacking and we were still making trips weekly to get milk anyways.

That said, it was still a really amazing idea and was great to see it out there.

And they continued on even as the dot-com crash came into view. Other online grocers started dropping around the country, but Twin Citians seemed committed to keeping Simon around.

We haven’t used Simon in years, but every time I see a truck go by I think “hmm, we really need to try that again.” Alas, now it’s too late. Gas prices have finally done Simon in. The end of an era?

An interesting aside, about a year ago, Byerleys and Lunds started offering online shopping for groceries. We often shop there, and actually enjoy going ot the actual store. That always seemed to be one of the selling points of Byerleys compared to the big boxes…carpeted floors, big aisles, actual people there to bag your groceries. They replaced their drive-up pickup window where they’d load the groceries for you and it’s now the ‘online ordering pickup’ window. Alas, at least at our local Byerleys, I have yet to see anyone actually use it. Anyone shop for groceries online via Byerleys?