Fluxible is coming to Waterloo

It’s a bit of a soft launch, but yesterday my friend Bob Barlow-Busch and I announced something that we’re planning for September 2012. It’s user experience event called Fluxible, and we’re pretty excited about it. As long-time organizers of uxWaterloo, Bob and I know that there’s a lot of great UX-related activity in our community and we want to introduce Waterloo Region to the rest of the UX world. We also want to bring some of the UX world here. As we put it on the currently-simple launch site:

Coming September 2012 to Waterloo Region: 2 fantastic days with some of the world’s top UX pros. Hone your skills at this fun and social event! Fluxible’s format mixes hands-on workshops with informative presentations, tours of leading global businesses, and plenty of chances to make new friends over great food and drinks.

We’re still working on details, of course, but we hope to reveal more in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, sign up to receive email updates about the event as we announce them, and follow Fluxible on Twitter. And, if you’re comfortable doing so, please share the news about Fluxible with anyone that you think might be interested.

Travel game with Google Street View

During my recent Karos Health trip to Chicago for RSNA, I accidentally discovered a fun game to play using my iPhone and Google Street View. On this and previous trips I’ve emailed photos to my son to show him some of the sights that I see. Often the pictures are taken while traveling from one location to another.

On this Chicago trip, my son noted in an email that one of the pictures I sent was similar to one that I had sent him during last year’s trip. I responded that it was probably the exact same view, as I would have taken both pictures while riding a bus between our hotel and the conference site. The next day he sent me an email showing me that he had found a similar picture on Google Street View.

My Picture

Street View Picture 

And thus, a new (for us, anyway) game was born.

Every day for the remainder of the trip I sent him a new photo, and he found corresponding shots in Street View for all of them. At first, I included clues in my emails, but eventually stopped and just let him discover clues in the the photos themselves. He didn’t have any trouble.

My Picture

Street View Picture

This turned out to be something that makes a business trip more interesting for my family. We might even continue the game here in Waterloo.

Karos Health visits RSNA

Last week I was in Chicago with my Karos Health colleagues for the 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America. That’s a bit of a mouthful, and around Karos we just refer to it as RSNA. It’s an important annual event on our company calendar, as the Technical Exhibits portion of the assembly — essentially a trade show — provides an opportunity to meet with a vast number of healthcare hardware and software vendors.

We were at the event last year as well, but with a much more modest presence.

This year, we had our own booth, and many of the meetings that we had with partners and customers were held there. We had four demo stations, in contrast with our single station last year, and there were several occasions when we had multiple demonstrations going on. As with last year, we were quite proactive in arranging meetings ahead of time. In an encouraging development over last year, we saw more people who sought us out in our booth based on a recommendation or having a specific problem that they hoped one of our products could solve.

We introduced a new product at this year’s event and I was happy to be able to demonstrate it in its current early state. People were engaged, we got some good input and feedback, and the product looks like it meets a real need.

The event was a complete success for Karos. We could not have expected a better experience than we had. Now the work of following up on potential opportunities begins.

Serious play at Felt lab with uxWaterloo

We had a great uxWaterloo event at Felt lab yesterday, and Paul Goodwin and his student team from REAP were wonderful hosts. There were plenty of interactive display toys to play with, and lots of opportunity for “thinkering” with like-minded people who attended.

Darin White has a nice summary in the form of a photo essay over at his always interesting makebright place. We’ll have more at uxWaterloo soon, too.

Thanks to everyone for coming out and making the event a success.

uxWaterloo design workshop with REEP

Last Thursday the uxWaterloo meeting for October featured a new kind of activity. While we had done design workshops in the past, we had never previously had a design workshop focused on a real-world problem.

REEP Green Solutions, a Waterloo Region not-for-profit organization focused on the environment, is working on a web application that’s intended to help consumers understand the case for making upgrades to their homes that will increase energy efficiency. REEP approached uxWaterloo for help, and Thursday’s design workshop was the result.

Working in small groups, workshop attendees brainstormed initial designs to deliver a compelling user experience for the application. REEP team members provided input, answered questions, and otherwise provided context for the design work. They had previously provided personas to work from, and a high-level functional description of their vision.

While the timeframe was ridiculously condensed — the meeting was only 90 minutes from start to finish — the workshop was a great success. Everyone seemed to have a great time, with many interesting ideas emerging from the action. The REEP team was excited by the ideas they saw and heard, and are already thinking about next steps.

Steve Jobs

I’m surprisingly saddened by the passing of Apple’s Steve Jobs, a man I never met. I’m also feeling surprisingly reflective. I can’t think of any other company or person whose products have had such a profound impact on my daily life for such a long time.

The Mac wasn’t the first computer that I ever used, but my first Mac made a liberating, empowering, and lasting impression on me. I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say that I would not be doing what I’m doing in my career as a designer without the Mac and later products from Apple.

I think that my best response today is to use my Mac to try to make the world a better place. I hope that I can have even a fraction of the impact that Jobs had.

It feels overwhelmingly fitting to finish off this short post by saying that I wrote it on my iPad.

2011 Oktoberfest Parade

I enjoyed another Oktoberfest Parade with my family this year. We live near the parade route, and it’s a short walk for us to get there and set up our lawn chairs. The beautiful weather seemed to bring a out a larger crowd than I’ve sometimes seen in years past. Personal highlights included some sort of precision rake team from the City of Kitchener, the Fergus Pipe Band, an implausibly cool float from the Waterloo, Wellington, Dufferin & Grey Building & Construction Trades Council, and a very mobile giant airplane balloon that was helpfully identified as “Inflatable Airplane” on the WestJet sponsorship banner that preceded it. Fun stuff.