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

“The first member of the team we are looking for is an experienced interaction designer to help develop a vision for highly usable solutions, working closely with customers, product management, engineering, and Symantec’s internal UI design team, which is global. NetBackup’s UCD and UI architecture center of expertise is Pune, India, and we have support from the corporate UCD center in Mountain View, CA. This individual will need to maintain excellent communication and foster working relationships with all teams. He or she will also execute the vision for highly usable solutions by helping establish design processes and enabling individual engineering teams to deliver that vision incrementally, on time, and within budget. Finally, this individual will help us grow the team as needed to support these activities.”

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.

We have an immediate opening for a User Experience Designer (Contract)
at Medtronic in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area.

High-Level Responsibilities:

Provide leadership conducting task analysis and usability assessments.
Work closely with customers, the business teams and the development
teams to play a lead role in user interface design for internally- and
externally-facing web applications and sites. Conduct heuristic
evaluations and recommend design improvements. Conduct usability tests
and present usability results and recommend design solutions to
project managers, business users, developers and testers. Gathers and
analyzes user requirements. Conduct workflow analysis. Design the
information architecture and content of the site and develop a
conceptual model to prototype. Design and prototype interfaces using
standard tools. Provide detailed design document for the development
team to construct the site. Develop user guides.

This is not a graphic design or programmer position.

For more details or to submit your resume, contact
janene.christman – medtronic.com

As a reminder, our title for March is Nancy Duarte’s Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences.

Date and Time
Monday, March 14, 6:00p–8:00p

Location
Sen Yai Sen Lek
2422 Central Avenue NE,
Minneapolis, MN 55418
612-781-3046

Password is: webinar

Duarte Resources

• The blog: http://blog.duarte.com/
• The book: http://www.duarte.com/books/
• Book assets: http://www.duarte.com/books/resonate/assets/
  The book assets include many of the diagrams found in resonate. She encourages readers to include them in blog posts and presentations.
• Tools and resources: http://www.duarte.com/training/tools/
  The tools and resources link contains several small videos to help lone agents compel bosses, peers, and direct reports to improve communications. There are also two PDFs for analyzing signal to noise (Glance Test) and showing where a presentation might fall (Presentation Landscape).

As a side note, duarte.com has several tools and resources you may find of use, as well as an informative blog. There are several entries on the blog that are an accompaniment to Resonate or continue its theme. She even has a posterous entry showing a glimpse of a Resonate iPad app, which would pare down the text and add multimedia features such as video designed to enhance what the book teaches.

Location
Sen Yai Sen Lek
2422 Central Avenue NE,
Minneapolis, MN 55418
612-781-3046

Regular and Vegetarian PDF menus are available online.

Date and Time
Monday, March 14, 6:00p–8:00p

The months for the Book Club meeting this year are: March, May, July, September, November.

MARCH: Resonate, by Nancy Duarte
MAY: Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design, by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks
JULY: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte
SEPTEMBER: Change by Design, by Tim Brown
NOVEMBER: Rework, by 37signals

If there’s a book you’d like to nominate or rally to change, please post in the comments. We are also on the look out for new locations, so please comment on that as well if you have ideas or suggestions.

– The UX Meetup Organizers

US:
Small interactive design agency specializing in forward-thinking solutions, specifically in the mobile/social realm,
to help our clients engage their audience in new and exciting ways. We’re also incredibly passionate about what we do,
and we bring that passion to every aspect of our work.

YOU:
Keen eye for design and design translation across multiple platforms.
A strong passion for digital creative.
Experience with all things Mobile and the desire to learn as this medium evolves.
Experience leading other creatives or working closely with a group of creatives.
Background in the development/coding process (actual development skills a HUGE bonus, but not required).
3-5 years experience in the interactive/digital industry.
Strong communication skills.
Self-Motivated.
Team oriented, willing to work in a highly collaborative/flexible environment.
Appreciate the ancient art of Karaoke.

All interested individuals should email a copy of their resume (PDF is always nice) and a link to their Website* to jobs [at] sevnthsin.com
We will contact you to arrange an interview time, please do not email more than once.
Please no phone calls.
Do not “pop-in” †

* Website absolutely necesary.

MORE: HTTP://JOBS.SEVNTHSIN.COM

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