Feburary UX Meetup: Persona Design

Howdy!

Hope you all had a fantastic holiday season. Now we are all back to work and the fun stuff. Can you find yourself in the collage above? If not, you should join us more often in 2012:)

First SB UX Meetup in 2012 is back to lynda.com. We got two awesome speakers and a great topic:

Kristen Johansen, Senior Director of Web Product
Jill Christ, Senior User Experience Researcher

Building effective personas is an important part of Product Development. It is essential for companies to understand the types of customers that use their product, or could use their product. However, the personas we produce are often full of extraneous, irrelevant, and fake information, and cannot be used to create Product Development Roadmaps.

Based on their experience developing personas for lynda.com, Kristen Johansen and Jill Christ will share how developing authentic personas, that expose users real behaviors, motivations, and deep desires had a powerful affect on the lynda.com Product Roadmaps. They will not only share a case study of how lynda.com discovered and created authentic personas, but they will also cover:

• what personas are, and how they can be more authentic
• strategies and tactics to interview customers and identify customer archytypes
• tips on how to analyze users words and behavior, and create mental models
• how to distill your personas down, make them succinct, and easy to remember

Date: Thursday Feburary 16, 2012
Time: 6:30-8:30 pm
Venue: 6410 Via Real, Carpinteria, CA 93013 (food will be provided courtesy of lynda.com.)

Please RSVP at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup, or by replying this blog. We need a headcount to know the portion of food to order. And to keep an eye for any group updates or upcoming meetups, you may:

Sign up the SB UXMeetup Group at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup
Follow us at twitter @sb_ux
Join our Linkedin Group
Like us on our community Facebook page and you can check out the previous meetup photos.

Doesn’t matter if you are in UX: come join us for the conversation, food, and opportunities.

See you soon!

Happy 2012

Time flies, days pass, and another new year approaches, with the very late holiday greetings!

It has been a crazy year that flew by fast. It’s also an extraordinary hard year. But all’s well that ends well.

My mom is doing great after her gallstone laser operation. My dad still plays ping pong in his spare time, and won several province-wide matches. Many of my good friends have had their new-borns in this year of the Rabbit. So happy for them; and I’ve been upgraded to an auntie too!

I’ve been traveling a lot, as usual. With three international trips in a year, United decided to upgrade me on every flight I flew with them, so I quite enjoy being a loyal customer.

Work has been treating me well; cannot complain about free buffet lunches, and working with a bunch of fun and creative latte makers and yeti (our new stuffed animal toy at work) lovers.

I’m wholeheartedly thankful and appreciative and thank you all… for your love, care, support and understanding; and I would also like to extend very warm wishes to you and your families for a happy and healthy new year!

UX Intensive Takeaways in Action: it’s this Thursday at AppFolio!

If you were wondering if we still have any more meetups in 2011, yes we do! It’s this Thursday 12/8 at AppFolio. If you didn’t make it to the last meetup event and are wondering how well it went, it was a blast – we had almost 50 turnouts and people loved the talk and the food!

The December meetup will be hosted by AppFolio, Inc., and the speaker is Jaimi (J.J.) Kercher. Inspired by the working activities that make this 4-day workshop so – well – intense, J.J. in this hands-on event will cover a few key takeaways from Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive in Chicago this past October. Using some tools introduced at the workshop, together we’ll tackle “All Things UX” on a hypothetical project, following all the key elements that contribute to a successful interactive experience: Design Strategy, Design Research, Information Architecture and Interaction Design.  Come ready to roll up your sleeves and have some fun!

Date: Thursday December 8th, 2011
Time: 6:30-8:30 pm
Venue: AppFolio. 50 Castilian Dr. Goleta, CA 93117 (Across the street from the old building. They just moved. )

Please RSVP at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup, or by replying to this blog. We need a headcount to know the portion of food to order (thanks to AppFolio for sponsoring food!). And to keep an eye for any group updates or upcoming meetups, you may:

Sign up the SB UXMeetup Group at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup
Follow us at twitter @sb_ux
Join our Linkedin Group
Like us on our community Facebook page and you can check out the previous meetup photos.

Doesn’t matter if you are in UX: come join us for the conversation, food, and opportunities. Two friends of mine found their jobs through this networking channel, you never know!

EnRoute

Having an experience designer’s heart and soul, traveling is native to me. It’s a fantastic way to draw design inspirations, to think outside of the box, to embrace cultural shocks, and to understand people and become more open minded.

Coming to the US six years ago I barely had any cultural shocks: my mind was open enough that any culture differences were expected. But going to UK over the week of Thanksgiving, it was a total shock but sweet experience: men or women, are dressed up stylish and properly; it’s expected that you finish your appetizers before the waitresses bringing you the entree, or they offer to take them away from the table; they have almost no trash cans in the subway but seriously, their subways are pretty darn clean; I did not see any homeless people even in the hustle and bustle of the city center (in LA, NYC or Chicago even in extreme cold weather you can still see a handful of homeless guys camping outside), so on and so forth.

There were also some moments of lost in experience. For example, I was standing in front of a map for a few minutes titled “Northbound Underground” but all the destinations on the map are in the South, meaning they are below “you are here” on the map, and I was obviously trained to read the map in the way that anything above is North, below is South. Despite the occasional confusing maps, the subway system in London is by large visitor friendly but the on-the-ground trains are so hard to figure out, no easy-to-find time tables, no numbering of the lines whatsoever and you either need a geeky or lucky intuition or, have a local friend who may direct you out of the dark.

But in general, good food (surprisingly), nice people, laid back countryside and town cities, designer interior designs at most service places: it was a pleasant trip. And my major take away, besides they have surprisingly good food and pastry:) is that you really got to understand people, knowing their mindsets, stereotypes, expectations, to be able to design for the experience: because we are so different, even speaking the same language.

 

September SB UX Videos Up

Sad but peaceful. Tribute to Jobs.

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

I was just trying to parse the life experience redesign yesterday, Jobs answered the question back 7 years ago: remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

What Jobs left us is his striving for quality and excellence. It’s not just in Apple product but things he did. I heard tough stories about his personality from his Cupertino Apple staff for but for a man to attain to that success level, you got to have a hard core personality, you got to be ambitious, aggressive and most importantly, working hard, very hard.

Talking about hard work, thanks to Andy Ta, as guilty as I am, by making the man who works 12 hours a day 18, we finally got the two edited and compressed videos up:

Part I: Amber Brown gave us a talk on how their UXR team adopted Kanban as their day-to-day practice. It did not happen overnight. Scrum was first adopted to help manage the overload of projects. A year later, Kanban came in to accommodate the team’s and stakeholders’ needs. Amber detailed us on the several aspects of Scrum that they did not want to let go; the course of the Kanban adoption; and the current process they like to call “ScrumbanUX”.

Part II: To extend Patrick’s talk on Rapid Prototyping in August’s meetup, Zach Forrest gave us an overview of building Citrix Online’s web component library and how UX researchers and developers benefit from the library.

Bon appetit!

Can we design our life experience?

A few months back I made a trip to Big Sur and there was this old man sitting on the chair over a creek, having a beer, quietly enjoying his peaceful moment. We started to have a conversation while I took some photos of him. Briefly telling the story about his life, “life is about love” he said, “work is always there. treasure your love and enjoy the life.”

That was around the time I had a significant change in life. With the old man’s words of wisdom in mind, I started to really think about how to live a meaningful life to myself, to my family, my friends, people I love, and those who love me.

I don’t deny that I’m a workholic, sometimes. I love my job. I love designing for the experience. But when it comes to designing my own life experience, I was intimidated. There is no user research I can conduct, no contextual interviews I can poke around, no data I can back up my design. I read other people’s lives but those are not apple to apple comparisons.

My new roommate, a Brooks Visual Journalism student who was pursuing an acting/singing career since she was four, recently switched her life to be a student and producer at the back stage working behind the scenes. She shoots beautiful photographs and documentaries and in her own words, it’s “a new awareness”.

I admire those who has the guts to push for a life experience redesign. People hate changes. Every time Facebook launched something new, people hated it but after a while life goes on without you realizing it.

It’s a daunting task to design the life experience, or at least proactively, as one third of it is bed time, a quarter is to run around, commute, run errands, eat, and go to the bathroom, and after the deduction we only get less than half of the time to look for or define who we are, what we do, how to live our lives, meaningfully, and where we want to get at in the next 10 years. Often times we follow the mainstream, and sometimes disruption may not mean everything is bad.

Recently came across a video John Jay talking about creativity. The best part I like is that he advised to “put yourself in an unusual situation, put yourself with people you don’t hang out with, and put yourself out of the comfort zone. Our job is never let anyone define who we are in their terms.”

And to take a step back, before diving into self definition, collecting the experience might be an easier task. As Morris, Inc. puts it, “A designer must collect life experience from beyond the computer screen. They must observe culture, travel, watch movies, read books, and attend seminars and live life. This mindset creates well-rounded vision, adds solutions to your memory bank and builds connectedness between your ideas.” They also put together this short video on the wisdom they discovered in their explorations:

Writing to here, I don’t think I have a clear answer to my very first question: I wish I could:) But it helps to think aloud as I’ve been intrigued by it for quite a while. Maybe there is no better way but listening, observing, caring, learning, pushing, and always trying to pursue the true self, and follow my heart to wherever life brings me to.

Personal kanban board & October UX meetup

After watching lynda’s time management course and being educated to reduce the collector points to maximum of 6, it’s hard, pretty darn hard, until I went to Irvine last weekend and attended this Kanban workshop. Not a whole lot of new stuff to me because we are practicing Kanban for a few projects at work for a while but one take away from this awesome speaker Pascal Pinck is a free kanban web app: leankitkanban. Now I got my personal kanban board and am able to reduce my focal points significantly!

As opposed to having post-it notes everywhere and reminders in emails, calendars (physical & multiple digital), now I only got one board to look at and prioritize. Life is made so much easier.

Good thing about personal kanban board: you are the product owner and executor so you don’t run into resource issues across multiple teams. The team we have at work is still looking at product owners for release schedule but if everybody of us is dedicated, the deployment for kanban should be a natural work flow from state 1 to state 10 – essentially it’s practicing scrum w/o a timebox.

An fun exercise we played at the workshop using dice to check off complexity points and event cards to facilitate unpredictability almost mirrored the harsh reality. The tip of that day, “we all try to explain things in life but we are just throwing dice.”

And Kanban board doesn’t need to be fancy; it can be everywhere: on the white board, sticky notes, or on the window:

Last tweet for today: October UX meetup is coming soon, at lynda.com! (NOTE: RESCHEDULED to Nov. due to power outrage)

Date/Time: 6:30-8:30 pm November 20th Thursday

Venue: lynda.com lobby conference room, 6410 Via Real, Carpinteria, CA 93013

As always, food & dessert will be served.

Laura Smith Sr. UX Designer at Citrix Online will talk about how the web is being rebuilt around people and will discuss the fundamental shift that social networking has brought to the way people behave online. She will present findings from UX researchers & designers that have shaped products like Facebook, Google+ & YouTube. Laura will give examples of how to integrate social behaviors into products & websites, that goes far beyond simply bolting on a “Like” or “Share This” button, and will share with us 6 key principles to think about when designing products in light of this shift in online behavior. Hopefully you will walk away with practical ideas you can take back and apply to your own projects, or at least be inspired to think differently about social networking.

Take a peek at the meetup group shot from September, and see you soon!

Process & Methodology: Scrumban & Pattern Library

My heartfelt thank you to your all-star support to make the 10th SB UX a big success! Patrick did such a great job at detailing rapid prototyping on different platforms: interesting analogies, fancy demos, and flavors of humor made the learning experience a lot entertaining.

And just to toot our own horn for a second, Santa Barbara UX meetup was featured on Meetup.com’s homepage! Only a handful of the most active Meetup Groups are chosen to appear on this page every day and thank you all for your support to make it happen!

SB UX meetup is held every other month but September is a bonus month as we got great speakers/content (one about process & the other about methodology) line-ups and they are:
Amber Brown, UX Researcher, Citrix Online
Zach Forrest, Senior Web Developer, Citrix Online.

Date: Thursday September 15, 2011
Time: 6:30-9:30 pm
Venue: Citrix Online, GoToCafe. 7414 Hollister Avenue, Goleta, CA 93117   (food will be served, courtesy of Citrix Online!)

One thousand readers may have one thousand Hamlets, and different teams may have totally different ways of practicing scrum: Kanban, being one of them, a scrummy methodology but without a timebox.

Amber Brown will give us a talk on how their UXR team adopted Kanban as their day-to-day practice. It did not happen overnight. Scrum was first adopted to help manage the overload of projects. A year later, Kanban came in to accommodate the team’s and stakeholders’ needs. Amber will detail us on the several aspects of Scrum that they did not want to let go; the course of the Kanban adoption; and the current process they like to call “ScrumbanUX”.

Zach Forrest, to extend Patrick’s talk on Rapid Prototyping, will give us an overview of building Citrix Online’s design pattern library and how UX researchers and developers benefit from the library.

Designers, product managers, art directors: you don’t want to miss this talk if you want to bring consistency and efficiency to your work place.

Please RSVP at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup, or by commenting on this blog posting. We need a headcount to know the portion of food to order and the size of the conference room to reserve. And to keep an eye for any group updates or upcoming meetups, you may:

Sign up the SB UXMeetup Group at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup
Follow us at twitter @sb_ux
Join our Linkedin Group
Like us on our community Facebook page and you can check out the previous meetup photos.

See you soon!

SB UX Meetup: This one goes to 10!

 

Believe it or not, big or small, this one goes to the 10th! Check out some previous meetup photos at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Santa-Barbara-User-Experience-Group/155375007842149

So for this Meetup 10, mark your calendar on Thursday 8/18 and we’ll meet at AppFolio, Inc.

Patrick from Citrix Online is going to give us a talk about rapid prototyping and he’s going to detail the numerous benefits of high-fidelity prototyping including how it can be used as an effective communication tool with developers, an executive buy-in tool with stakeholders, and an experimental tool for design teams to try out new ideas. He will share his trial and error explorations with building a prototype to mimic a desktop application that is flexible to use for ongoing usability validation and as an internal communication tool.

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm (Food will be served, courtesy of AppFolio!)
Date: August 18, Thursday 2011
Location: AppFolio, Inc. 55 Castilian Dr., Goleta, CA 93117

Also, you can find us and keep an eye for any group updates or upcoming meetups by:

Signing up at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup
Following us at twitter @sb_ux
Joining our Linkedin Group
Liking us on our community Facebook page and you can check out the photos in our last meetup!

Please RSVP at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup, or by replying this blog. AppFolio needs a headcount to know the portion of food to order and the size of the conference room to reserve.

See you soon!

That’s Why We Are Called a Team – to my friend NK

Four years ago about this time I accepted the PhD program offer at University of Washington and declined a few job offers in the East coast. A hiring manager at NYC whom I turned down called me up trying to convince me to change my mind. He said, working on your PhD is to explore your own territory on your own, while working in a team you live the joy and savor the pain with your team. It’s a family.

A year later, I decided to join a family.

In this world of craziness called web/software development, the fun part is to work with the team, breathe the joy, feel the pain, live in the stress, eat the mistake, fight for what’s good, do what you think is right, pour your hearts and soul, to make things happen, large or small. It succeeds, it’s the team’s success; it fails, it’s the team’s failure. That’s why we are called a team, a family.