Recent posts in my London IA Category

If you follow the London IA twitter account, have recently visited the website, or are a fan of the Facebook page, you’ll have seen this message: “London IA is still on its holidays. As of now no plans to come back to work. So. ‘On Holiday until Further Notice’”

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. Here are my notes from Tim Caynes’ talk about designing the mobile wallet.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. I’ve already published my notes on Giles’ redux of the IA Summit, and here is what I made of Johanna’s talk.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. As ever, Sense Worldwide were our hosts, and Zebra People our sponsors. Here are my notes from Giles’ talk.

Last week we held the latest London IA evening, hosted by Sense Worldwide and sponsored by Zebra People. The talks were from Warren Hutchinson and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Here are my notes from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino talking about “Products & products: how the web and manufacturing collaborate”.

Last week we held the latest London IA evening, hosted by Sense Worldwide and sponsored by Zebra People. The talks were from Warren Hutchinson and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino. Here are my notes from Warren Hutchinson’s talk about “Brand with a little b, Design with a Big D”

I wasn’t able to be at this month’s London IA event, which is possibly the first time I’ve ever missed it. Unavoidable, but a real shame because I had been looking forward to seeing Jeff Gothelf talk about Lean UX, and hear the debate that was sure to follow. But instead of hearing about it, I was putting it into action.

We don’t really do “headline” slots at London IA, but at January’s meet-up, we’d kind of figured that it would be hard for anybody to top the gun-wielding zombie antics of Mary Hamilton. “Verbs. Zombies. UX.” was her tale of running Zombie LARP, which, for the uninitiated, involves paying for the privilege of running around a deserted shopping mall trying to survive a zombie attack. Her talk explained how they try and create a real-world user experience using just a few verbs.

Alexander Baxevanis started his talk at January’s London IA with a confession - “I’m addicted to side projects”. He went on to outline some of the benefits of having side projects, and five rules for making them work.

Here are my notes from Sjors Timmer’s talk at January’s London IA, about the design process of OMA and OMA founder Rem Koolhaus.

There are two great free events going on in London tomorrow if, like me, you are interested in either UX or journalism. Or the UX of journalism.

Some dates for your diary if you’d like to see me talking

Last week we had the last London IA night of the year, as ever in the Sense Loft and kindly sponsored by Zebra People. Joe Muggs and Jim Kosem were speaking. Yesterday I blogged Joe’s talk. Today, here are my notes from Jim’s rather harrowing tale of designing digital monuments for mass graves.

Last week we had the last London IA night of the year, as ever in the Sense Loft and kindly sponsored by Zebra People. Joe Muggs and Jim Kosem were speaking. Here are my notes from Joe’s talk.

We are planning to kick of 2012 with a different format for January’s London IA event - we’d like an evening of four talks, no more than fifteen minutes each, on a varied diet of topics.

Last week we held November’s London IA evening at the Sense Loft, sponsored by Zebra People and CX Partners. Mags Hanley and Vanessa Harden were talking.

A couple of weeks back we held the latest of our London IA evenings. I’ve already blogged about Ben Bashford’s talk on “connected things”, and today I’m posting my notes from Jonty Sharple’s talk about arrogance in design.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, and here are my notes from Ben Bashford’s talk about “Interaction design for connected things”.

Tom Coombs spoke at least week’s London IA event about his experience of working on the UX for a start-up that had managed to raise a lot of cash before they had really settled on their product vision. Here are my notes from his talk.

At London IA last week, Oli Shaw was reprising his EuroIA talk about serendipity. It is, he said, a lovely word on the tongue, but has been rated as one of the hardest English words to translate into another language. Here are my notes from his talk.

Just because I wasn’t blogging at the time doesn’t mean I wasn’t taking notes at events, and so I thought this week I’d post some write-ups of events I went to in April and May. This post is about Chris Heathcote’s talk at April’s London IA. It was about “urbicomp”, and the increasing pervasiveness of computing in our lives.

Whilst I was taking a break from actively blogging I was still taking notes at the events I was attending, so I thought this week I’d whizz through some of the things I went to in April and May. One of the speakers at April’s London IA event was Michael Blastland. It was the second opportunity I’ve had this year to see him speak, having attended a panel session he spoke at about reporting crime statistics. For London IA, his theme was “designing for doubt”.

The main reason for going over to Denver for the IA Summit was that Matthew Solle, Eric Reiss, Joe Sokohl and I were doing a very informal panel session on “UX communities: Starting from the beginning”. Matthew has blogged his round-up of the main points, and here is mine.

In preparation for today’s panel session at the IA Summit about UX communities, Matthew Solle and I have been blogging our thoughts about London IA, and what has made it a success, and what has been a failure. The final two themes I wanted to address were the idea of physical spaces and community, and the necessary role of “outsiders”.

Matthew Solle and I are making up half of a panel at the IA Summit in Denver. We’ll be joined on the day by Joe Sokohl and Eric Reiss. To prepare, we’ve been debating on our blogs the topic of the panel: “blah”. This is the sixth installment, looking at the role of professional development in a UX community.

Andrew opened by pointing out that when Matthew Solle had asked him to speak at London IA, he was pretty certain that he wanted to talk about the “Cognitive Cities” conference he had yet to attend, so it was lucky that it turned out to be good. Andrew’s talk was part-redux of things he’d seen in Berlin, and part musing on what it meant for us as UX people.

I was going to start this blog post off with a quote from Leisa Reichelt’s recent London IA talk, but she came out with so many pithy one liners that it was impossible to pick one. Leisa’s basic premise was that if you read some of the very best books about management strategy and techniques, they sound awfully familiar to anyone who has ever read a UX book. For example, they have a focus on businesses being successful by serving customers needs - a criteria for design success that we are all familiar with.

Matthew Solle, Joe Sokohl, Eric Reiss and I are running a discussion panel at IA Summit 2011 called “UX Communities: Starting from the beginning”. Matthew and I have been preparing by having an online debate about what makes up a community, and how you go about forming them. Matthew kicked off part one and I responded on currybetdotnet. On Thursday Matthew added part three, and this is part four.

Matthew Solle, Joe Sokohl, Eric Reiss and I are running a discussion panel at IA Summit 2011. It’s called “UX Communities: Starting from the beginning”. Before heading to Denver, Matthew and I wanted to prepare by having a debate about what makes up a community, and how you go about forming them. Part one of this discussion can be found on Matthew’s You The User blog.

Last Wednesday we held the latest of our London IA events. As ever it was curated and organised brilliantly by Matthew Solle. I've already posted my handwritten notes from Relly Annett-Baker's talk - she banned the use of technology whilst speaking - and today I've got a rather more conventional blog post about Dan Lockton's talk.

On Wednesday we held the latest London IA event and our first talk was by Relly Annett-Baker. In her second slide she issued an edict for no chewing, no running in the corridors, and no fiddling with electronic gadgets. That was my cue to do something I've been meaning to do for a while - a blog post that (almost) entirely consists of my hand-written notes.

Last week at London IA, as well as Mark Plant's talk about agile and UX, Jason Mesut brought along a sneak peek into his "grotto of geek", as he showed us what user experience designers could learn from music software and hardware. Here are my notes on his talk.

This week at London IA, Jason Mesut was talking about the way that music software and hardware design might influence UX professionals. In one of the conversations I had after his talk, I discussed how many of these interfaces would fail our classic user testing methods.

On Tuesday night we held the first London IA event of the year, and here are my notes from Mark Plant's talk explaining why wireframes are dead - "Experiments and experience from the UX/Agile divide"

At our last London IA night, Nic Price gave an inspiring talk on how analogy could be used during the digital design process, specifically talking about how the refurbishment of London's South Bank Centre resembled the rebuilding of an intranet.

Pretty much every time I finished a freelance contract between 2006 and 2008, I'd return to my adopted Greek home and tell my wife, "Right, now I'm going to start writing my book". I never did. Which in some ways is just as well, because having listened to Giles Colborne talk at London IA on Tuesday night, I realise that I was in no way prepared for how much work it would be.

We had, I thought, a really good London IA evening on Tuesday. It was a good turn-out with faces old and new in the crowd, and I thought there was a good vibe about the evening. In the run-up to the night we had been a bit more strident than usual about people letting us know if they couldn't make it. Here are some thoughts on why we did that.

At the last London IA evening, one of our speakers was Tyler Tate. He was addressing the issue of complexity in user interfaces, and making a forceful argument that neither simple nor complex were inherently or morally good or bad, but that the key to a usable UX was having the right level of complexity for the task at hand.

At the last London IA mini-conference, Eva-Lotta Lamm reprised her fantastic talk about visual note-taking, complete with tea-stain sketch drawing exercises and a figure drawing lesson.

For some reason, the idea of embeddable fonts being available on demand as a web service gives me the heebie-jeebies. In a presentation at The Guardian last week I tried to explain why. But it is probably just because I am old and resistant to change...

Andy Budd finished off our recent London IA evening with an energetic and provocative talk entitled "The cult of innovation", where he argued that businesses who pursue a strategy of 'innovating' are deluding themselves that this will be the solution to their problems.

At the last London IA event, Claire Rowland gave a talk on the "Psychology Of Creativity", examining whether we value the right types of creativity, and including some tips on how you can help improve your own creative abilities.

Glenn Jones from Madgex gave a presentation at the last London IA evening looking at "Re-using data people have left around the web". In it he showed a demo of his Ident Engine project, which uses fragments of information about your digital identity to construct a whole profile.

At last week's London IA gathering, Richard Rutter gave an overview of the future of typography on the web, and introduced Fontdeck as a way of delivering that experience.