I attended the last UXCampLondon, which was hosted at LBi in London and also sponsored by whatusersdo (who I was hoping to meet). I presented on “A Jung Person’s Guide to User Experience: Archetypes and Personality Types”. I’m not sure the title gave the session justice, so I’ll change it for next time. Reports on these coming soon, but for now, a report on the sessions I attended.

UX Must Die

Apart from the great title, I am always interested in challenges. That’s why on Amazon I always read the bad reviews first. They often recommend even better books and authors. In this session, we discussed threats to UX professionals, opportunities for us, and what the hell our job title should be. I think the conclusion was that we will move into a more educative role, and our jobs our too diverse for a single job title. Although I sometimes wonder why we don’t just call ourselves Business Analysts.

Agile & UX

A fantastic talk, as I know a little about Agile, and feel this is something which I would benefit from knowing more about. In fact, I tried to be a little more agile earlier today. I can imagine it hard to fit user tests in Agile, because when you’re testing one iteration, the developers are already working on the next. So we perhaps need to rethink both how we conduct user tests and how agile is organised.

Wireframes with InDesign

I’m not expecting to produce wireframes with InDesign. Unless you work with designers who are using this, then there doesn’t seem much point. Of course, the industry standard now seems to be Axure. I use Visio mostly, but I thought the presentation might offer some insights on how to use it. He talked about being able to include files within files and how useful that is. That seemed to be the main benefit. I would use layers in Visio to achieve the same effect.

Animated Wireframes

My favourite talk of the weekend. It took me a while to get what he was about. It seemed utterly pointless and futile. Then when the wireframe was created, it was an object of immense beauty. So obvious, that I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before. Some web pages are process driven, and a series of paper wireframes or PowerPoint slides just doesn’t give it justice. We had a project last year where the wireframe was just way to slick. This quick and dirty method would have been absolutely perfect. This is something which I am definitely going to set up. The only problem was that his software was Mac based…

When Is Bad Usability Good For Business

It was a close call between attending this and another session on persuasion. How much of the issues were usability and how much the personal experience of the presenter, I’m not sure. However, we had an interesting discussion, and for sure, some bad websites are bad to add to their credibility.

UX & Split Testing

This is something I would like to get into more. The difference between A/B testing and MVT testing: the former comes at the start of the project when choosing a general design; the latter after launch when refining it. The risk of doing something on a live site which can really mess things up.

Summary

So, there you go, another excellent BarCamp type event. Highlights were definitely Animated User Testing and Split Testing. Not to mention meeting so many great people and having a blast. Suggestions for improvements? Get enough sponsors to provide food. Don’t start late just because people can’t get there on time. Don’t kill the last session just because there aren’t enough sessions booked, don’t have too many rooms for the number of people attending (one if not two rooms could have been removed from the plan). Apparently, a number of people turn up, so maybe instead of asking people to say if they can’t come, ask people to confirm that they can come.

Thanks

Just want to say a big big thank you to LBi and whatusersdo for organising the event. I really hope you do it again soon.

UXCampNorth?

Hey, how about a UXCampNorth? Get in touch if you want to help me organise one.