UX Camp London – field notes
Last Saturday (22 Aug 09) marked the first UXcamp in London. What a fabulous non-conference day for user experience geeks (aspiring and well-established ones alike). I was impressed with the quality of sessions by the enthusiastic and friendly crowd.
Choice paralysis
Cara Dewsnip started out with a well researched session ‘Getting started in UX – my quest for answers‘. As a newbie to the field she was looking at different ways to establish a UX career for herself. She posed the question: to study or to learn on the job? How do you get one of the coveted places as a junior user experience consultant? The industry seems to favour seasoned professionals, but hardly any of them have any formal training in the field of UX. They tend to have backgrounds in design, reseach, psychology or development. How relevant is a formal UX qualification? – As one head of industry put it – it’s 90% experience and 10% education. She has teamed up with a mentor from the industry and urges all established UX professionals to volunteer as mentors. Cara concludes that three things will help her achieve her goals: 1 – read books and blogs. 2 – Network and learn from those already in the industry. 3 - attend conferences/take courses.
I recently noticed a session by Adaptive Path about Tools and Methods for Learning, Navigating and Making a Name for Yourself in the UX Landscape”. It seems many people out there in the UX industry are trying to make sense of how they ended up in User Experience and how to make the most of it.
Next up I joined Julianne Bowman’s session on ‘Bringing UX design into a corporate strategy‘. She shared her strategies for raising the profile of design and user-centered thinking at a strategic level within her organisation. Her painpoints struck a chord with my own experiences of setting up and further establishing user-centered practice in corporate, start-up and creative businesses. She emphasied that as user experience professionals we need to learn to talk the language of business if we want to be heard. As an industry we are ridden with acronyms and non-userfriendly language. She also highlighted the importance of leading workshops at strategic level to showcase the value and our ownership of design thinking in product/service strategy. She brought great examples of how to visualise the design process to enable high level management understand the impact of their (often under-informed) decision making on the quality of any design output.
Andy Budd shows us how to 'design the box'
Andy Budd ran a hugely entertaining session on design games and had us all design the box for Gumtree. A great way to get us out of our post-lunch slump and bond with new friends at uxcamp. What worked well for us rings also true with clients. To tear down barriers between job titles and levels of seniority design games are a great way to warm up the stakeholder team for a day of creative brainstorming.
David and I decided on a session exploring how UX professionals explain their jobs to themselves and everyone else. Deeply frustrated with the notion that he ‘works in IT and can fix computers’ David was keen to find better ways to explain our work and label our roles to help our mums, dates and the rest of us to better understand what user experience is all about. Linking back to Cara’s session earlier we are not surprised it’s a confusingly diffuse field to get into. We are all too used to the fact that no one understands what we do. We nod sagely when our nans think we fix computers or help her set up her email. Then again, as one participant put it, if people do get what we do they think “it sounds a bit wanky”.
There’s still work to be done to educate clients, bosses, nans and hiring managers in the value of user experience and design thinking.
Last but not least, I won something! This deserves a shout-out. Thank you for voting my deliverable (a hand sketched storyboard) 2nd best in show, and thank you Axure for your generous prize.
This was my first time organising a barcamp. I have a feeling there are many more to come. Thank you to all the organisers and sponsors (Gumtree, Vodafone, Amberlight, Axure, Rosenfeld Media, Clearleft, Addlestones, Saros) for putting this show on the road. And a big round of applause to all the participants/speakers.
You can find my pictures of barcamplondon at Flickr.
Soaking up the sun... and the cider
2 Comments August 25, 2009