2016 – Page 2 – Connolly Design

June 30, 2016November 1, 2020

Check out Fluxible, Canada’s UX Festival

Somewhat belatedly, it seems appropriate to mention here that the Fluxible 2016 program has been announced, and that earlybird tickets are now available. The program for this year has been expanded into a weeklong celebration that we’re positioning as Canada’s UX festival. And what a week we have lined up!

Fluxible Meetups starts the festival on Monday September 19, and features multiple events each day through Friday September 23. We’ll be revealing more events in the coming weeks and months, but we already have a stellar schedule to share. There’s a daily brown bag lunch series happening at the newly expanded Communitech Hub. We’ve lined up on-site events at some of the region’s technology companies: D2L, Clearpath Robotics, TD 55 Technology Centre, and Shopify Plus. And we’re launching a set of dinner events on Friday that will give out-of-towners and locals alike a chance to enjoy conversations about UX with old and new friends over good food and drink.

Fluxible Workshops continues the festival at the Communitech Hub on Friday September 23 with a pair of half-day pre-conference workshops that provide deep dives into timely topics. Pamela Pavliscak will lead a morning workshop on How to Design for Happiness, while Kai Haley leads an afternoon workshop on Design Sprints. Pamela and Kai are both on the Fluxible Conference program as well, and Pamela will be a special guest at UX Book Club KW — they clearly have plenty of knowledge and expertise to share with the Fluxible community.

Fluxible Conference is the main course of our festival meal this year. As many of you will know from our previous announcements, the conference features an amazing group of speakers in a single track program that means you won’t miss a thing. They’ll be enlightening us on a range of UX topics, along with our now-expected presentations on unexpectedly relevant topics from other disciplines. Fluxible Conference opens on Saturday September 24 and runs for two days at the CIGI Auditorium, a new venue for this year. Check it out, and start making your plans to attend.

This post originally appeared on the Fluxible blog in a slightly different form.

May 2, 2016November 3, 2020

25 short stories about user experience

Photo by Davis Neable

Last Wednesday, Bob Barlow-Busch and I delivered a presentation as a part of the Communitech Breakfast Series. It was titled Insights that lead to great UX, and the focus was on ways in which to use stories to fuel insights.

We structured the presentation in a way that put the focus on stories, with the bulk of the presentation being organized into 25 Short Stories About User Experience. Perhaps unexpectedly, the structure was inspired by a similarly-titled movie about Glenn Gould, as well as John Cage’s story-telling on Indeterminacy, and Oblique Strategies, an influential card deck by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. And, of course, there was the obvious appeal of telling stories about stories — everything goes meta.

The beauty of the structure for us is that it’s quite flexible — stories can be swapped in and out as needed to emphasize different things for different presentation contexts. In fact, there were stories that didn’t make it into last week’s presentation.

It was the first time delivering this presentation, and we were pleased that people who attended appear to have found it a valuable one.

April 15, 2016October 31, 2020

State of the City of Kitchener

State Of The City presentation by the Mayor

I had the honour of attending the City of Kitchener’s annual State of the City event on Wednesday, representing Fluxible along with friend, colleague, and long-time collaborator Bob Barlow-Busch.

The event was held in the magnificent industrial space at 41 Ardelt Place, and featured Mayor Berry Vrbanovic delivering a State of the City address to a large crowd.

Make It Kitchener was the theme, and it was fun to hear the details. There are six opportunities identified in the strategy:

Make it Spark
Make it Start
Make it Grow
Make it Urban
Make it Vibrant
Make it Connect

It’s exciting to see “Support professional development in user experience” identified as one of the ways to get “Make It Spark” to happen. I’m delighted to help drive that through Fluxible!

February 9, 2016October 31, 2020

Hiring season at Boltmade

It’s co-op hiring season, and at Boltmade we’re been deeply engaged in finding students at University of Waterloo who can join us for a four-month work term this coming summer. We’ve been a long-time employer of development co-ops, and have more recently been hiring for our UX team. That’s the side of things that has kept me and my colleagues busy.

It’s fascinating to see the wide range of academic disciplines that we’ve seen in the applications for our UX position. There are, as expected, many great applications from within Systems Design Engineering, but also from Software Engineering and Mechatronics. There are Computer Science applications, of course, which isn’t really a surprise, but we’re delighted to see applications representing many departments and programs in the Arts faculty — DAC, English, Anthropology, Psychology, Fine Arts, and more.

Because of the diversity of sources, it can be a real challenge to evaluate and compare candidates, but as we like to say, that’s a great problem to have. We’re excited about seeing who joins us in May.

Of course, we’re also looking for full-time software developers to join us at Boltmade. Check us out and let us know if you’re interested!

January 28, 2016November 3, 2020

O’Reilly Design Conference

Last week I attended the inaugural O’Reilly Design conference, along with my Fluxible co-chair Bob Barlow-Busch. As with last fall’s trip to the CanUX conference, I’m always watching to see what works at a particular conference and thinking about how we might apply it to Fluxible. There was a level of logistical sophistication here that reveals O’Reilly’s years of experience running similar conferences and events.

The program touched on user experience, industrial design, and graphic design, with standard mix of keynotes and breakout sessions. Highlights for me included a briskly paced vision of design from Erika Hall, a primer on effective critique from Adam Connor, and a call from Bob Baxley to bring more people into the design profession.

The venue was Fort Mason Centre, with the main program happening in a cool warehouse space on a pier over the bay, and breakout sessions also happening in what appeared to be old army buildings. It worked well for me, even with a long and steep staircase to climb between buildings!

Beyond the program, of course, there were many fine conversations with friends old and new.