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Session abstract

In early 2009, Kara Pecknold, then a student at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, took an internship with a women’s cooperative in Rwanda. Her task was to develop a Web site to connect rural Rwandan weavers with the world. Pecknold soon discovered that the weavers had little or no access to computers and the Internet. Rather than ask them to maintain a Web site, she reframed the brief, broadening it to ask what services could be provided to the community to help them improve their livelihoods. Pecknold used various design thinking techniques, drawing partly from her training and partly from Ideo’s Human Centered Design toolkit, to understand the women’s aspirations.

Because Pecknold didn’t speak the women’s language, she asked them to document their lives and aspirations with a camera and draw pictures that expressed what success looked like in their community. Through these activities, the women were able to see for themselves what was important and valuable, rather than having an outsider make those assumptions for them. During the project, Pecknold also provided each participant with the equivalent of a day’s wages (500 francs, or roughly $1) to see what each person did with the money. Doing this gave her further insight into the people’s lives and aspirations. Meanwhile, the women found that a mere 500 francs a day could be a significant, life-changing sum. This visualization process helped both Pecknold and the women prioritize their planning for the community.

Kara will be speaking to VanUE about the experience of working as a designer in a cross-cultural context, how she navigated language and technology barriers and how this relates to her work now. Please join us as Kara shares video footage from Rwanda and interactively demonstrates the process she went through. As we live in a cross-cultural world and city, Kara suggests that her experience wasn’t just about designing in Rwanda but rather one example of working within a global economy.

Then join us for networking after!

Our speaker

Kara Pecknold has a graduate degree in Design and her research is presented as a case study in IDEO’s Human-Centered Design Toolkit. She is a graduate member of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada and has joined the Designer’s Accord.

Kara is currently working as a design researcher at Emily Carr University with a focus on design and health care. Under the name of Olivelife Creative, she has worked on freelance projects in design, writing and photography.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supporting VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

After the event we will proceed to YEW for appetizers and networking. The event will be run at no profit, so the entire $35 registration fee will go towards appetizers at YEW.

Unfortunately there are only 24 spots available! We are anticipating a lot of interest in the event and want to keep it fair, so we will be drawing 24 names from all of the people that RSVP. The schedule for this event is as follows:

• Friday December 18 (noon)
  All RSVPs must be emailed contactus@vanue.com
  (only one RSVP per person per email please!)
• Friday December 18 (1pm)
  We will draw the names of 24 people
• December 28th
  Participation fee is due (likely via PayPal)
• January 19th (3pm to 5pm)
  Exclusive tour
• January 19th (5pm onwards)
  Appetizers and drinks

We are hoping that this will become a semi-regular series in addition to our regular free events!

We would like to thank the Four Seasons Vancouver for their hospitality in sponsoring this event and also like to thank Vancouver Film School for their continued support of VanUE!

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Session abstract

November 12th will be the 5th anniversary of the phenomenon known as World Usability Day: an event founded to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. Each year, on the second Thursday of the month of November, it has a specific focus and is participated in around the world. For World Usability Day 2008, more than 40,000 people in 180 cities in 43+ countries participated.

This year’s theme is Sustainability.

Please join us on November 17th, when we kick off our VanUE ‘09/’10 season, to hear the results of the WUD event.

For WUD, a group of VanUE volunteers spontaneously organized themselves to apply their professional expertise as user experience practitioners to improve the quality of human life (the fundamental goal of usability) within the capacity and constraints of our environmental, social, and economic systems.

These volunteers are working on an event with the Pine Street Community Garden in a 16 hour “design slam.” A team of UX folks are immersing themselves in the community garden experience and applying a variety of UX techniques to identify and prioritize problem areas and offer working solutions to help the Community Garden do more of what they do so well.

The UX group would like to share the results with you. They hope they have taken a first step in establishing a recurring venue and model for more volunteer UX work that more VanUE members can participate in. The ideal outcome would be a sort of “UX Practitioners Without Borders” — come learn about the first event and see if you’re interested in this type of volunteerism.

Then join us for networking after!

Our speakers

Members of the WUD team (more details to come shortly)

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supporting VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

Hearty thanks to The Network Hub for making space available to our WUD team for the design slam.

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Session abstract

As the popularity of social networks on the web has risen dramatically over the last few years, many designers and developers have found themselves running into a bit of a dilemma: does one design and build for promotion and virality, or to enhance their site’s existing community experience? Fear not, fellow user interaction designers; these two things need not be mutually exclusive.

Creating a sense of community in a web-based environment is a complex puzzle at the best of times, with hundreds of moving parts that can be hard to nail down. It’s also an exhilarating experience that can be as addictive to designers and developers as any drug. This session will work through several examples of how you can design (or update) your site to integrate some of the key elements required to build any successful community:

• Create a barrier to entry (it’s not as bad as it sounds!)
• Provide users with a sense of identity and ownership
• Give users control over their content
• Provide social tools for discussion and collaboration
• Offer multiple paths to discover interesting content
• Encourage reciprocity and cross-pollination
• Don’t be a faceless entity: get involved in your community
• Create and develop your super-fans
• Allow your community to share content and promote itself
• Listen to your users: triage feedback, iterate quickly, grow organically

Our speaker

Nick Bouton is a user experience developer and community architect based in Vancouver, BC, Canada. He has over 10 years of experience in software and web application design and development, and is passionate about creating and growing online communities.

Nick is responsible for front-end development of web solutions at Habañero Consulting Group, which includes interaction and interface design and development, establishing look and feel, and ensuring usability. A dynamic developer, Nick has extensive experience developing rich internet applications (RIAs) using AJAX, Web 2.0, and client scripting. He works primarily with the .NET Framework, as well as various open source platforms.

In addition to his position at Habañero, Nick is the founder of Taunt Media, a consultancy that sponsors, develops, and nurtures several community-driven collaborative website properties including Protagonize (www.protagonize.com), a collaborative fiction-writing community. Nick majored in Computer Science at UBC, and studied Java development at BCIT. Prior to beginning work at Habañero, he held a variety of positions including as development lead for OpenRoad Communications’ enterprise 2.0 intranet, ThoughtFarmer; as a software engineer at Versatile Mobile Systems, and as technical lead for Tribal DDB Canada in Vancouver.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

You don’t need to RSVP – Just show up!

Price

Free

Session abstract

Designing mobile optimized websites is hard. The last two years has seen tremendous growth in mobile internet usage in the Canadian and global marketplace. Smart phones are becoming more common and data plans are available to a larger number of customers, but the handset market remains fragmented with a large number of platforms and display sizes. Although newer smart phones offer browsers capable of rendering sites designed for desktop, a positive mobile experience will always depend on an optimized site. Building an optimized site that works well across the gamut of handsets remains expensive and time consuming.

Come learn how the Selective Transcoding method (ST), conceived and developed in Vancouver by Mobify, addresses these issues. ST lets designers design and automates the routine components of building a mobile presence while providing a unified mobile/desktop browsing experience on a site. Using a web-based interface a designer can choose components of an existing website for mobile. These components can then be styled and organized in a manner that dramatically decreases mobile bandwidth usage and serves content optimized for hundreds of mobile devices, without creating a separate mobile site or a new URL structure. ST’s unique architecture eliminates the need for duplication of content between mobile and desktop views and works with any underlying CMS architecture. Mobify, the first Selective Transcoding service, is currently deployed by leading web design blogs such as A List Apart, as well as conferences, brands and events around the world.

Our speaker

Peter McLachlan believes in a one web world that offers platform and context optimized views into a shared content base. He has a passion for usable mobile interactions and building community tools for improving cross-platform compatibility and user experience.

Peter wears many hats. He holds a MSc in computer science from UBC with a specialization in human computer interaction and does usability research on visualization systems. He is also a software architect and developer in multiple platforms and programming languages, focusing on Python and Django for web based applications. He is a system specialist in Linux services, serving as an IBM Linux services consultant for three years as a Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE). In his current work on selective transcoding (ST) he has cleaned the cobwebs out of many of the web’s ugliest compatibility corners.

Peter has published papers at the ACM Computer Human Interaction (CHI) and International Conference on Multimodal Interactions (ICMI).

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

Positive RSVPs only please: rsvp@vanue.com

Session abstract

Software developers end up directly involved in the design of the products they make, but they don’t use a process that design professionals would recognize as design. This increases business risk and results in friction between Development and the other in-house or contracted teams—Product Management, Design, Marketing, Usability, QA, Tech Comm, and Marketing—that have a stake in the work. You can bring these groups together, through a structured, group method for exploring and analyzing design solutions. Get your design participants to focus on a specific problem statement as they quickly produce at least five different solutions. Then, together, get them to rapidly iterate and analyze the results to help select a single way forward.

Come learn how Five Sketches™ was developed (in Vancouver!), how it works, and how you can use it to successfully design with non-designers on the team. This is a more detailed version of a presentation to the UPA 2008 conference, and was also presented at the CanUX 2008 conference. Both times, it got excellent audience ratings.

Our speaker

Jerome Ryckborst is an MBA and certified usability analyst (CUA) who works in usability and ideation-design, and also instructs select courses at Simon Fraser University. Jerome believes an interdisciplinary approach to problem-solving improves a team’s chances of success of making excellent web pages or complex enterprise-level software. He says: “I think everyone’s heard of usability and UCD by now, but development teams don’t know how to get there. Five Sketches™, because of the way it engages non-designers, can help.”

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

Positive RSVPs only please: rsvp@vanue.com

Session abstract

The sun is quickly setting on the day of single-use content. Content creators are being asked to green their content by reducing, re-using, and recycling. It’s not just a matter of efficiency, but good business practice.

Content convergence is the recognition that content is a corporate asset whose value can be extended by its strategic re-use. While most organizations focus on re-use of marketing content, the breadth of a content strategy straddles marketing, technical, social media, and user-generated content. When a content strategy takes into account all types of corporate content, it can create a powerful user experience that increases corporate visibility, boosts brand recognition, and increases customer trust and loyalty. The convergence of multiple content genres leverages the power of all useful content assets throughout an organization and multiplies its effectiveness exponentially.

In this session, Rahel looks at the various combinations in which content can be integrated, converged, and be presented or distributed, and illustrates some of the ways that the user experience plays out for content consumers.

Our speaker

Rahel Anne Bailie describes herself as a content strategist, though the skill set she uses encompasses content management consulting, business analysis, information architecture, usability, and communications. She has operated her consultancy, Intentional Design, since 2002, helping clients analyze their business requirements and spectrum of content to get the right fit for their content development and management needs, and often facilitates the transition to new business processes, content models, and technology implementations.

Coming from a combined technical communication and user experience background, she understands the complexities of structured authoring and matching performance to user need. A self-professed geek, Rahel is drawn to technology like a moth to flame, and embraces technologies that serve to improve the performance of communication products and the processes to create and maintain them. Rahel participates in Content Management Professionals and co-founded the Canada West community, was named to rank of Fellow of the Society of Technical Communication in 2009, and holds memberships in related professional associations such as IAI and UPA in order to keep current in pertinent practice areas.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

Positive RSVPs only please: rsvp@vanue.com

Session abstract

The importance of a great user experience has never been as important as it is today. Users expect to be able to just pick up the newest gadget or piece of software and be able to figure it out with ease. The role of user experience professional is dead. Everyone from the marketing team to the intern-developer must be a user experience professional to make a successful product.

It has been said that it takes 10 years to create successful software, does our current understanding of user experience fit within this model? How does the user experience actually get defined and who has the power to change it? How can the user experience get shaped in a more iterative and evolutionary way?

Through the lens of releasing a social software application and moving from consultant to product owner, this talk explores current user experience methodologies as well as lessons learned through web application release and management.

Our speaker

Greg Bell is a passionate geek who is obsessed with social media, web startups, user experience and web development. Greg is the co-founder and Chief Technical Geek at Orange Peel Media, a web and product development shop specializing in social media and web applications.

Orange Peel’s flagship product is a social network for web designers called ScrnShots. ScrnShots was started in Greg’s free time just over a year ago while working as a User Experience Designer. Since launching in May, ScrnShots has grown to be a strong network for designers to share, store and discuss web and interaction design.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

Positive RSVPs only please: rsvp@vanue.com

Session abstract

Founded in 1991, IDEO is an innovation and design firm that uses a human-centered, design-based approach to help organizations in the business, government, education, healthcare, and social sectors innovate and grow.

Over the past 18 months, IDEO has explored ways to collaborate at scale through a project called Knowledge Sharing @ IDEO (KS@IDEO). IDEO’s professionals are renowned for their cross disciplinary collaboration methods, but how does an organization extend its primarily in-person model across 600 people in 8 locations around the world?

IDEO ran dozens of experiments in offices around the globe, testing everything from multitouch displays and always-on videoconferencing to blogs, wikis, and other social networking tools. Their early iterations have led to the design of an intranet system that uses personal portfolio-building as the basis for knowledge sharing.

Gentry Underwood is delighted to share their design process and the solutions it has produced. Take a tour of what they’ve built, why they’ve built it, and how it’s working.

Gentry will share some of IDEO’s lessons learned about how to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing in large, distributed organizations, as well as showing some of the prototypes developed to do just that at IDEO.

Our speaker

Gentry is leading the Knowledge Sharing project at IDEO. Gentry is a human factors specialist with a background in visual ethnography, psychology, and interaction design. Trained at Stanford, Santa Clara University, and the Peabody School at Vanderbilt, Gentry brings a diverse body of knowledge and experience to his field work.

Prior to IDEO, Gentry had worked as an interaction designer for Reactivity, Inc, London Road Design, and as a private contractor. He worked as an adult, family, child, and school counselor in the San Francisco Bay area, and has made two short documentary films, one of which aired on the nationally syndicated show Democracy Now.

Gentry relies on his counseling experience when in the field to get to the heart of the “why” behind people’s experiences. He is a glutton for the power of visual imagery to capture and communicate aspects of others’ worlds, and he brings his design background into the IDEO process to help move from observation to synthesis.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Event Sponsor: Open Road Communications
A huge thank you to Open Road for sponsoring this event!

Networking Snack Sponsor: Analytic Design Group
Join us for snacks during our networking time provided by the Analytic Design Group

Location Sponsor: VFS
VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their continued generosity!!

RSVP

Positive RSVPs only please: rsvp@vanue.com

Session abstract

The advance of the mobile Internet in recent years has resulted in many designers working the mobile industry to make the transition from mobile application design to mobile service design. This shift raises a number of challenges and issues that designers will need to consider. What factors come into play in the design of services? How is service design different from mobile application design? Should new design methodologies be considered in designing for services?

This talk will examine these questions, drawing upon existing studies in the user acceptance of mobile services and from research in design methods, to elicit some practical design considerations for mobile service design.

Our speaker

Francis Djabri is a user-experience specialist with a broad range of experience in the wireless industry. He has worked as a designer and researcher with handset manufacturers, carriers, OS platform manufacturers, and within industry collaboration forums. He is currently working as an interaction designer with Nokia and lives in Vancouver. Prior to moving to Canada from the UK, Francis led a user experience working group within the Open Mobile Terminal Platform, a carrier-led wireless industry consortium, and worked as a user experience consultant for Telefónica O2 UK and as an interaction designer for various Symbian OS-based mobile applications.

Location: VFS (Vancouver Film School)

The VFS Digital Design campus is located at 420 Homer Street between Pender and W. Hastings. Enter through the side door on the east side of Homer Street. The event will take place in Theatre 1 accessible from the main foyer.

Our Sponsors

Location Sponsor: VFS A huge thank you to VFS for hosting us for another year. VFS has been supported VanUE since our inception and we would like to thank them for their generosity!