uxWaterloo – Connolly Design

September 4, 2018November 1, 2020

Here comes Fluxible

A crowd of people leaving an auditorium

As some of you might know, I wear multiple UX-related hats. The big three are probably co-chair of Fluxible, Canada’s UX Festival; co-organizer of uxWaterloo, our local chapter of IxDA; and partner here at Zeitspace.

As we did in 2017, Zeitspace is sponsoring Fluxible this year. Given my roles, it’s probably pretty obvious that UX is important to us at Zeitspace in the work that we do for our clients. But let me draw attention to some specific things about Fluxible that we think are pretty awesome.

Each year, Canada’s UX Festival (yeah, I like to type that) presents half-day Fluxible Workshops featuring amazing UX professionals. This year is no different.

First up, Peter Morville is delivering a morning workshop on Planning for Strategic Design. Check it out! If you have any interest in delivering great UX for products, this workshop is for you. By the way, Peter is co-author of the industry classic Information Architecture For the Web and Beyond (now in its 4th edition). Wow!

Next, Margot Bloomstein is delivering an afteroon workshop on Building a Brand-Driven Message Architecture. Do you ever use words in the UX work you do? Well of course you do! And Margot can help you do that more effectively — she’s been shaping content strategy both as a practice and an industry for almost two decades. How about that!

And it gets better. Both Peter and Margot will be delivering presentations at Fluxible Conference. More on that tomorrow.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

December 22, 2015October 31, 2020

Cooking up a career bigos

I had a recent conversation with a friend about working in UX. As we all do, he’s aiming to find a balance of work that is rewarding, provides room for growth, and pays the bills. He has a range of important creative activities that he’s engaged in and he wants to ensure that none of them are being neglected.

Our conversation resonated with my own thinking about my career. Metaphorically, I have a soup of ingredients that are all important to my UX work and that I aim to have aligned with each other. Boltmade is the major ingredient, while Fluxible and uxWaterloo are two other obvious ingredients in that soup. Other ingredients like attending other events, having conversations with various folks in the community, and ongoing readings all go into the mix as well. I’m delighted that these all complement each other as well as they do.

As I talked about this with my friend, he got it right away and declared it to be more of a stew. What immediately popped into my mind was a wonderful kind of stew called bigos.

My mom taught me how to make bigos, and it’s a dish that my whole family loves. One of the great things about it is how it improves on subsequent days as it cooks. Moreover, adding new ingredients on those day renews it and extends it over more meals.

My UX career bigos evolves, and the ingredients that I add over time ensure that it keeps getting better.

September 21, 2015November 1, 2020

It’s Fluxible Week!

Well, all the preparations, machinations, and invocations have come together and Fluxible is upon us!

This year we’ve pulled together a whole week of events for Fluxible, and there are UX-related events happening on each of the next seven days, all of them featuring interesting and engaging material presented and shared by folks who are committed to building UX community in Waterloo Region and around the world. I’m looking forward to learning something from all of them.

Things get started today at Boltmade, where my colleagues Brian Potstra and Katie Cerar will be presenting a workshop on learning Sketch, a favourite design tool amongst the UX team there. This workshop filled up quickly, as the Boltmade Sessions events tend to do.

Tuesday sees the September edition of uxWaterloo taking place at Christie, where Alan Woo and Chris Kirby from their design team will be taking us on a deep dive into designing a remote control for one of their projectors. Registration for this session filled up by the end of August. Amazing…

Wednesday features UX Book Club Waterloo Region, and a visit from Abby Covert, who happens to be in town for Fluxible. Abby is smart and articulate — not to mention funny — and this session should make for an engaging conversation. Katie Cerar and Davis Neable have been presenting these UX Book Club events for quite a while now, and they know how to deliver a fine experience.

Thursday finds Christina Wodtke joining Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region to talk about “The Architecture of Advocacy”. Christina will be busy while she’s in town, as she’s also presenting a Fluxible workshop on Friday morning (see below) as well as a presentation during the Fluxible main program on Saturday (also see below!).

Friday is filled with pre-conference Fluxible workshops by Christina Wodtke (Design Thinking for Innovation), Stephen Anderson (Design for Understanding), and Jeff Gothelf & Jim Kalbach (Jazz Performance as a Model for Team Collaboration). There’s a lot of learning to be done!

Saturday and Sunday sees all the UX activity comes to a head with the main program for Fluxible. This year’s edition of the UX party disguised as a conference sold out faster than ever, and the speakers will deliver a rich collection of presentations.

Next week I’ll be sleeping it off…

September 2, 2015November 1, 2020

September kicks off a new season for uxWaterloo

After July and August sessions that featured relaxed conversations over drinks on summer patios, we’re kicking off a fresh new season of uxWaterloo events on Tuesday September 22 with a visit to Christie in Kitchener.

Their design team will be taking us deep into the process of creating a new remote control for their projectors. It’s always a great learning experience to see and hear how a design to team has approached and solved a problem, and the folks at Christie promise to share plenty of insights. It will be a terrific session. I’d usually encourage folks to register at this point, but the event is already full! Be sure to watch for announcements for more great uxWaterloo sessions for the fall.

There’s something special about the September session, though. It’s part of a full week of UX events in Waterloo Region that our Fluxible team has pulled together around this year’s edition of the UX conference disguised as a party.

In addition to the Tuesday uxWaterloo event, there’s a Boltmade Session on learning Sketch (Monday September 21); a UX Book Club meetup with Fluxible speaker Abby Covert (Wednesday September 23); and a Girl Geek Dinners Waterloo Region event with Fluxible speaker Christina Wodtke (Thursday September 24).

Of course, there’s a day filled with Fluxible pre-conference workshops on Friday September 25, and the week culminates in the main Fluxible program on Saturday September 26 and Sunday September 27!

Great stuff, right?

August 17, 2015October 31, 2020

The calm before the storm…

While I’ve been quiet here on the blogging front, there’s plenty going on behind the scenes in anticipation of what promises to be a busy autumn.

Preparations are in the final stages for Fluxible. It’s going to be another terrific event, and there’s still more that’s yet to be announced. Relatedly, uxWaterloo will start the new season with a terrific, soon-to-be-announced event. There’s plenty more UX goodness in the pipeline, so stay tuned! September is going to be filled with exciting news.

October 28, 2014October 31, 2020

Join in on some monthly UX fun with uxWaterloo

While much of the UX community activity that I engage in is Fluxible-related, I’m still involved in organizing monthly meetings of uxWaterloo, the local chapter of IxDA, as well as a Communitech P2P group. Bob Barlow-Busch and I have been doing it for many years, and it’s a fun opportunity to learn and to meet folks and talk about UX. We have designers and researchers attending, as well as UX stakeholders like developers and technical writers. We have professionals and academics at all career stages as well as students looking ahead to entering the work force.

If you haven’t attended, come and check it out. We’ve been having some great events recently, with author and Fluxible speaker Giles Colborne joining us for a UX Book Club session in September, Caryn Humphries presenting a wireframing workshop in October, and a talk coming up in November from Kuyler Neable on intellectual property for designers.

On a logistical note, from now on uxWaterloo will be using Meetup to connect people to our monthly events. If you haven’t already done so, go get signed up and don’t miss any of our coming events!

June 28, 2012October 31, 2020

An omnibus post to wrap up June

I had another busy month in June, which made for another sparse month for blog posts. Here are some of the highlights of what kept me busy.

(Ignite Waterloo 9)

On June 12 Ignite Waterloo held its ninth event, this time at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Once again, it was hugely popular, with tickets selling out in just a few hours. I’ve helped to organize these events since the very first one, and this version really felt like the best yet — the speakers were great, the venue was fantastic, and everyone had a great time.

After nine events, though, I need to take a break from Ignite Waterloo, mostly because I need to focus on Fluxible, a conference that I’m co-chairing with Bob Barlow-Busch in September. It’s been keeping me busy finalizing details around speakers and the program. Bob and I are pretty excited about it, and we’ll be opening up registration very soon. I’ll write more about Fluxible in the near future.

(uxWaterloo design workshop)

June featured two uxWaterloo events, rather than the more usual one event. The first was another visit to Felt lab, while the second was a design workshop focused on helping out Tula Foundation, a not-for-profit with a health-care project in rural Guatemala. I’m happy that uxWaterloo is easing into summer mode now, with a couple of low key social gatherings in July and August, details of which will announced soon.

March 12, 2012November 1, 2020

Busy!

I’ve let my blog slide more than usual lately, in part due to being busy on a number of fronts. Here’s a bit of an update that also serves as an explanation!

There’s always plenty to do in my regular work at Karos Health, including a February trip to Las Vegas for the annual HIMSS conference. It was the company’s first trip as an exhibitor to that particular conference, and with our successful visit we’re already committed to going again next year.

February also saw the eighth Ignite Waterloo event at the terrific Waterloo Region Museum. I’ve been an Ignite Waterloo organizer since the very beginning, and it was great to see that people continue to enjoy our events. The next one will be even more special, as we have some very cool plans in the making for our ninth event.

uxWaterloo remains on ongoing pursuit for me, and our monthly meetings are a wonderful way to spend my time. Organizing them with Bob Barlow-Busch is a real treat, and the support that we get from our community of attendees is gratifying. Our February event was essentially a socializing one, where the discussion centred on conference experiences. Our March event was a trip to Felt lab to see the projects that REAP student teams have been working on. It sounds like everyone found the meeting productive and fun.

Speaking of REAP, I’ve been involved there from the beginning as well, acting as a sort of design mentor to the student teams. It’s an easy thing to do, as the student teams really do all the work. I just ask them questions about what they are up to and answer their occasional questions. Connecting REAP with uxWaterloo was a happy opportunity that just seemed inevitable.

A newer initiative is Fluxible, a design event that Bob Barlow-Busch and I are planning for September 2012. We’ve got some interesting speakers and great venues lined up, and we hope to announce more news soon.

Finally, I’ve been busy since January teaching an undergraduate course in presentation design at the University of Waterloo. It’s a joint offering under both Digital Arts Communication and Speech Communication, and the course is another rewarding experience for me. We’re nearing the end of the term, and I’m looking forward to the Ignite-style presentations that my students will be delivering in class. Maybe one of them will apply to Ignite Waterloo and deliver a presentation there.

Sometime way back in January I also managed to make it out to DemoCampGuelph and StartupCampWaterloo, both of which are always enlightening and entertaining.

As I said, I’ve been busy!

November 25, 2011November 1, 2020

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.

October 25, 2011October 31, 2020

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.