Jessica's posterous

On Saturday I attended UXCampLondon 1.5 at LBi on Brick Lane. This was my first time at a BarCamp and it was a really great experience!

A BarCamp is basically a user-generated conference - everyone who attends presents a short session which can be a polished presentation, a demonstration or a discussion. The atmosphere is very informal and the sessions are not announced before the day, so there is a sense of spontaneity about the whole experience. 

Here is a photo of the grid (by Jeff Van Campen) where everyone wrote their session titles on post-it notes. It quickly became clear that the hardest thing about the day was going to be deciding which sessions to attend. I was really impressed with the diversity of the topics. Here's a brief outline of the sessions I attended:

• UX must die by Jason Mesut - I was very intrigued by this title! Jason talked about the threats facing UX such as the perception that what we do is common sense and how other disciplines are starting to do similar tasks to us, but also identified some opportunities for the future. I really liked his model of the 4 areas UX professionals typically operate in: Experience Strategy, Interaction Design, User Research and Information Architecture. He showed that we all have a unique 'map' of the extent to which our role involves these things. It is a great way of making sense of what we do and planning how we want it to change.
• Embedding usability from scratch was a session I did with Michele Ide-Smith (her slides are here). I hadn't met Michele before the day but we arranged the session via Twitter which in itself was pretty cool! We both had some slides on our experiences of introducing usability to our organisations and it was interesting comparing the public and private sector perspectives.

• Agile & UX by Michelle Adams - this was a really useful presentation for me. Michelle talked about how the principles of Agile are very compatible with UX (ultimate goal being to deliver a great customer experience) and shared her experiences of working with the Agile process. It seems that being 'committed' i.e. part of the team might be the way forward.

• Tentacles of an Octopus by Mehul Hirani - this was a bit different! We had to create an egg cup out of some random materials (paper plates, staples, sticky tape) and the results showed that even with the same brief everyone had come up with something different, demonstrating the power of unleashing creativity. Mehul talked about different brainstorming techniques he found useful and others shared their ideas. One that stuck in my mind was a technique where you think of all the things a product shouldn't do (e.g. be impossible to use, be prohibitively expensive) and then reverse them to come up with a list of the things it should do.

• When is bad usability good for business by Trang Du - a very thought-provoking presentation. Trang showed examples (e.g. RyanAir) of companies whose websites seem to break every usability rule and yet they still get many customers returning. She suggested some interesting reasons for why this worked: if websites look cheap, people assume the product is also cheap even if it isn't, because people get used to the experience not being great and somehow this becomes part of the brand's offering, and because these sites take you so far down a path that even if it's been a bad experience, you don't want to start again from scratch. The talk got me thinking about how certain persuasive design techniques actually deliver a bad user experience but still sell things. 

• Animated sketch prototyping by Chris Neale - Chris has devised a method of creating animated paper prototypes using a web cam and The Animationizer, a tool he created. This seemed to be both very simple but also very clever. I would like to try it out.

• iPad UI: Why it matters by Fabian Marry - another very useful talk. Fabian highlighted why the iPad is different to tablet computers and the iPhone. He gave some tips for developing for the iPad and showed some great examples to illustrate his points. Since very few of us can get our hands on the iPad at the moment, this talk made me feel very well prepared for when it does happen. 

• My Society & me by Joe Lanman - Joe talked about his work with My Society. They have some great websites which I wasn't aware of, such as TheyWorkForYou which enables you to find out more about your MP, their history and how they voted on key issues. Another is WriteToThem allowing you to easily contact your MP and another is FixMyStreet allowing you to quickly report a local problem to the council. This was an inspiring talk to finish the day as it was such a worthwhile and useful project.

All in all a great day, many thanks to the organisers.