Emerging a User Experience Strategy: people, pencils and post-its

Emerging a User Experience Strategy: people, pencils and post-its is the title of the presentation @michellegilmore and I will be giving at UX Australia at the end of August. The conference is happening for the first time this year and there is an excellent range of speakers. The event will be a much appreciated addition to Australia’s calendar of UX and HCI events. A brief outline of our presentation is provided below based on our submission.

Michelle and I will be talking about the process of emerging a User Experience Strategy (or getting from fluffy to something). The approach we’ll be sharing emphasises collaborative and light-weight design methods (people, pencils and post-its). Drawing on a recent case study we’ll highlight experiences and techniques evolved over a number of projects and influenced by IxD and agile development methods. Continue reading…

Seeding: prototyping ‘in the wild’

Over the last few years I’ve experienced a real change in the kinds of design services that might be needed by, or offered to, clients – especially working in the not for profit and community sectors. As we all know, more and more organisations are beginning to see the potential for social technologies to engage with new audiences, or engage with their audience in new ways.  In such cases the design work can become more about re-configuration of existing technologies than creating something from scratch. Design-time is often spent on developing strategies for extending a client’s online presence through existing platforms, tools and channels. While we may be moving away from an emphasis on actual building and designing pixels in this version of design practice, our responsibility to successfully seed participation and engagement is growing.

Continue reading…

Introducing Personas and Scenarios

The highlight for last week was introducing 300 first year design students at UTS to the idea of personas and scenarios. The guest lecture was for the Researching Design Processes course being run by the fantastic Lizzie Muller.

Introduction to creating personas and scenarios

There is a wealth of resources out there that explain how to create personas (and debate their value) – just check out this list on delicious.com for some of them. What I needed though was a simple overview of how you go from user research to actually developing scenarios and personas. I just wanted to capture the essence of the process in a very accessible format for an audience who had never been through anything similar before. So I bashed out this quick sketch of the process, showing the various stages we go through.

I’m still waiting for the audio which will make the presentation a little more meaningful, but there are stil some slides that make sense sans v/o.