UX Night with Eric Reiss

Happy St Patrick’s Day!

I have this honor to invite Eric Reiss, Content Strategist and CEO of FatDUX Copenhagen, to come to Santa Barbara and have a UX night with us.

Eric served as the President of the IA Institute for two terms and is a renowned speaker in the IA and UX community. I went to his talk at the IA Summit two years ago and was impressed by the fascinating content and his public speaking charisma.

Topic TBD but I guarantee you it will be wonderful.

Date: Thursday March 29, 2012
Time: 6:00-8:30 pm (note that we moved the time to half an hour early)
Venue: 6410 Via Real, Carpinteria, CA 93013

Please RSVP at meetup.com/sb-ux-meetup. 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!

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!

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!

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!

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!

9th SB UX Meetup: UIE Web App Master Tour Take-aways

Santa Barbara UXers, I am almost positive you missed the UIE Web App Master Tour (because I didn’t see any of you:) In reciprocity of Jill’s and Josh’s awesome presentations in our last meetup, I am going to report back my take-aways at this two-day conference in the emerald city, Seattle. I am so glad to be back after all those years and of course I was welcomed by an entire week of raining, which I miss quite often in Southern California.

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm (Pizza will be served at the courtesy of lynda.com and I will also bring chocolates!)
Date: June 23, Thursday 2011
Location: lynda.com downstairs lobby conference room. 6410 Via Real, Carptineria, CA 93013 (Call me at 206.384.8495 if you have difficulty finding it.)

Some highlights I am going to walk you through:

Jared Spool: the essential principles behind design principles

Bill Scott: designing for mice and men

Josh Clark: mobile apps: native or web based

Julie Zhuo: facebook: data informed v.s. Data driving design decision makings

Luke Wroblewski: designing mobile web experiences

This is by far the most interesting and hands-on conference I’ve attended and I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts with you.

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

Signing up the SB UX Meetup Group 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 commenting on this blog. We need a headcount to know how many pizzas we are going to order!

See you soon!

Next SB UX Meetup is around the corner!

Missed IA Summit or IxDA this year? No worries, we got conference attendees to share with us on their take-aways in this month’s SB UX meetup:

Jill Christ: User Experience Researcher @ Citrix Online, will share with us her experience in Denver, CO at IA Summit.
Josh Morse: Interaction Designer @ RightScale, will talk about his take aways in Boulder, CO at IxDA.

Time: 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Date: April 21, Thursday 2011
Location: RightScale. 136 West Canon Perdido Street. Santa Barbara, CA 93101 USA (Call me at 206.384.8495 if you have difficulty finding it.)

I am also excited to give you a heads-up that Nick Finck, seasoned UX/IA speaker and community cultivator may come down to Santa Barbara and give us a talk. And you got to pick a topic in this meetup! I am still working with him on a date so stay tuned.

Some other talks lining up:

• I will share my experience attending the UIE Web Apps Master Tour (Seattle, WA);
• Jeremy Johnson, Senior User Experience Designer at Citrix Online and I may co-present mobile design topics; and
• yours? Email me your upcoming talks/conferences let’s get this community always updated on cool stuff out there in this wild wild world.

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

Signing up the SB UX Meetup Group 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, or emailing me at me@kejunxu.com. We need a headcount to know how big the conference room we’ll reserve.

See you soon!

First SB UX Meetup in 2011

Two months’ holiday celebration and hibernation brings a refreshing new year and our first Santa Barbara UX meetup in 2011, the year of rabbit.

Look forward to seeing you at Dargan’s, Santa Barbara’s #1 (as they claim but they do serve awesome food) Irish pub and restaurant.

Live music from 6:30 to 8:30 pm on Thursdays so it’ll be a casual UX chit chat. Ideas of how we want to carry our UX meetup going forward are welcome!

Venue: Dargan’s, 18 E Ortega St, Santa Barbara, CA 93101

Date: February 17^th, 2011, Thursday 6:30 pm

Contact: Dargan’s 805-568-0702; Kejun 206-384-8495

Please RSVP to this blog post, or email me at me@kejunxu.com.