On Wednesday, December 17th, Ottawa's technology clusters, OCRI Global Marketing and PricewaterhouseCoopers are hosting an event that focuses on developments in Information, Communications, Nanotechnology, Electronics, Software and Computers and Entertainment and Media which will have profound effects on consumer and business opportunities and investment during the next five years. The guest speaker is Dr. David Jacobson, futurist and Director - Emerging Technologies, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC). Jacobson is the Canadian member of PwC's global community of technology specialists.
The joint cluster event takes place at the Chateau Laurier Hotel and runs from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. Please RSVP to mdascal@ocri.ca if your can attend this free event.
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DemoCampOttawa11 is on Monday, December 1st from 6pm to 9pm at The Velvet Room (62.5 York Street). They'll be six demos on tap - 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demo, and 5 minutes for Q&A. The demo slate is filling up and the following are set to present:
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The 3rd annual Canadian New Media Awards were held recently in Toronto as part of the nextMEDIA conference. The event was MC-ed by the comedian Sugar Sammy at the gorgeous CiRCA nightclub. The winners at the event included Viigo, a Toronto-based mobile RSS startup, and marblemedia, among others. The complete list of the winners (along with the finalists) is below:
COMPANY OF THE YEAR
MOST PROMISING COMPANY OF THE YEAR
EXCELLENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA WEBSITES
EXCELLENCE IN SOCIAL MEDIA APPLICATIONS
EXCELLENCE IN GAMING
EXCELLENCE IN CHILDREN'S
EXCELLENCE IN CROSS PLATFORM
EXCELLENCE IN NEWS/INFORMATION
EXCELLENCE IN CULTURE, LIFESTYLE ARTS
EXCELLENCE IN LEARNING
EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR
PROGRAMMER OF THE YEAR
PRODUCER OF THE YEAR
DESIGNER OF THE YEAR
Viigo™ is revolutionizing the way users access information on their smartphone. Every day, people around the world rely on Viigo as their gateway... [more]
marblemedia is a content creation company on the forefront of television and new media production, devoted to telling stories that entertain and... [more]
With CanUX over, I found myself looking for all the links to templates and other information that were mentioned during the sessions. I thought I might as well share my list with others! Here it is (if you have something to add please let me know in the comments):
Web Form Design – Luke Wroblewski
UX Swimlanes – Yvonne Shek
A Better Method for Designing with Developers – Jerome Ryckborst
Sketchboards: Good Design Faster – Brandon Schauer
Visual Thinking in Practice – Dave Gray
Microsoft Surface – Dennis Wixon
Books
The next event from nForm will be the Web Strategy Summit, taking place in Calgary on May 4th & 5th, 2009.
If you’d like to read more about CanUX 2008, see my posts on Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3. I also posted some sketches here, and a list of attendees on Twitter here. My photos are here, and you can find other related photos on Flickr here.
Today was the third and final day for CanUX 2008 (you can read about day 1 here and day 2 here). I had a great time at the conference, and I’d highly recommend attending if you’re considering it for 2009.
We started off with a session on Sketchboards from Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer. He took us through his process of sketching and idea generation. It starts with a six simple sketches. From there you pick one to focus on and flesh out a bit. Finally, you take your finished sketch and add it to the sketchboard, which will contain all your sketches and inputs. It was pretty interesting! You can find slides, templates and more at Brandon’s blog.
Our next session was presented by Dave Gray before and after lunch, called Visual Thinking in Practice. He shared with us some simple techniques for drawing, and expressed his frustration at the common response, “I can’t draw!” Dave has made it his mission to change that outlook, and was quite passionate when talking about how visuals are important for effective communication.
Our final session of the day was from Dennis Wixon, a researcher at Microsoft working on Surface. Despite being right at the end of the day, everyone was captivated by the presentation. Dennis did a nice job of explaining how Surface, as a Natural User Interface (NUI), fits into computing history. He was hesitant to talk roadmaps or product features, but offered a number of insights into the design and importance of Surface. He confessed that the technology existed long before anyone at Microsoft knew how it would be useful!
I’d like to thank the nForm crew for putting together an excellent event! It was great to meet some of Canada’s User Experience community, and I learned a lot.
Next year's Canadian Financing Forum takes place on January 29, 2009 at the Hyatt Hotel in Vancouver and with the first Selection Committee meeting scheduled for December 2nd, now is the time to apply. Presenting companies are split into two streams - Cleantech & Advanced Technology and Information Technology - and will have an opportunity to get to know the Venture Capital Community and promote their company at this premiere event.
The Canadian Financing Forum is one of the most respected resources for North American investors who seek to recognize, gain exposure to, and facilitate partnerships with the best and most promising Technology entrepreneurs and companies that are based in Canada.
Past presenters have raised over $1,080 Million and 47% of the presenting companies attending the Canadian Financing Forum have successfully raised funds over the last 7 years (2001-2008).
Visit the Canadian Financing Forum website for more information.
Just got back from day two of CanUX 2008. The schedule was packed, but it seemed to go quite quickly which means I wasn’t bored or overwhelmed. There was a nice balance of content and activities, and again, great food!
In the first session, Luke Wroblewski from Yahoo talked about web form design and why web forms suck. He spent some time talking about forms in general at the beginning, but devoted most of his talk to redesigning a Boingo form. He listed his ten best practices, and had clear and thorough reasons for each. I thought it was a good way to illustrate the concepts. Luke finished by advocating gradual engagement, and challenged everyone to consider whether or not a form is actually needed. I’ll definitely be picking up a copy of his book.
The second session was on UX Swimlanes, presented by nForm’s own Yvonne Shek. A UX swimlane is a document that provides a bird’s eye view of where you are in a project, by communicating a story or scenario. The document consists of vertically stacked lanes for different audiences, all illustrating the same concept. The executives have a lane with a comic strip, the UX/creative types have a lane with a workflow diagram, etc. It’s a neat concept, and I wish we had more time to explore it. You can find some comic panels to use here, and a Visio template for swimlanes here.
After lunch we had a long session on creativity, facilitated by the Banff Centre. We broke into three groups: one worked on collages, one explored drumming, and the group I joined focused on improv. Everyone seemed to enjoy the session! I found the activities we took part in were more applicable to leadership than to creativity, but I still had a great time. My favorite activity in the improv group was the last one. Working with a partner, you start off by saying “I have this great idea for a party…” and they follow with “yes, but…” and you keep going until the facilitator stops time. Then you switch, and do “yes, and…” instead. It’s incredible how wild the latter ideas became! Great tool for brainstorming.
The final session of the day was A Better Method for Designing with Developers. Jerome Ryckborst shared with us his experiences using the “Five-Sketches-Or-Else” method of getting developers and potentially other team members involved in design. It’s a really intriguing concept that I’m keen to try out. You can find most of Jerome’s presentation here.
After dinner was a “Show & Tell” reception where anyone could get out their laptop and show others what they are working on. It was neat to see some of the projects that attendees are focused on. Tomorrow is the final day of the conference, and the schedule is packed once again! You can read about day 1 here. I’ve been uploading photos here and I posted a few additional thoughts here.
I arrived in Banff this afternoon for CanUX 2008, the Canadian User Experience workshop. The annual event brings together a wide range of people who care about making things work better. CanUX is organized by Edmonton-based nForm Experience Consulting. One of the most appealing things about CanUX is the size – there are only about 80 people in attendance, and that’s on purpose. It makes for a more intimate type of event.
The day started at 9am with the UX Bootcamp, a preconference workshop to get attendees up-to-speed on user-centered design. The conference officially began after the Bootcamp at 3pm. Each attendee received a tote bag with two books inside: Subject to Change by adaptive path and Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.
The first session of the conference was called Design Slam. A group from the University of Lethbridge led the session as “BestJet”, a fictional airline not unlike the real WestJet. We broke into groups and were tasked with designing a strategy to help BestJet grow its market share and reduce customer frustrations. It was a fun exercise, and served as an ice-breaker without feeling forced! Most groups came up with some sort of airline profile, so that passengers could save preferences for future flights. Almost everyone said the planes should be upgraded to contain touchscreens.
The design work and presentations for Design Slam were split by dinner, and followed by the opening night reception. It was great to meet a bunch of new people today, and I look forward to the rest of the conference! I’ll be blogging about it here and on my own blog, and uploading photos to this photoset at Flickr. You can also follow along on Twitter!
Of course we would be greatly concerned about companies using or selling our private information. We're so terribly concerned... that we're giving it away for free.
At the Insight Internet Law conference that happened this week in downtown Vancouver, James Bond (the lawyer with Lang Michener LLP, not the spy with MI5) pointed out the strange disconnect between what people say about online privacy and what we actually do. He cited a Pew Internet Project study from November 5 showing:
Yet many of us are still giving in to the convenience of free web apps for work and staying in touch with our friends... and we typically don't even bother reading the contract before signing up (Have you ever read the Facebook terms-of-use contract? How about iTunes?)
Bond points out that the increasing ability of governments to obtain any private information they like a la the US Patriot Act doesn't bode well for their ability to protest behavioral tracking in the private sphere, given what they're doing.
The only conclusion that is easily drawn here is that we can't reasonably have an expectation of privacy on the Internet, if such a thing ever existed.
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Once upon a time before the Web, there were user groups: clubs focused on a particular technology or platform. Through monthly meetings and other events, users could interact with like-minded others for learning and socializing. With the growth of the Web, the popularity of user groups waned as it became easier to build communities and share knowledge online. Today, user groups still exist but more commonly exist in the form of less formal meetup groups.
I've had experience with various groups over the years and have enjoyed them as an excellent way to learn and network. I organized an engaging Ruby on Rails meetup group in Edmonton for a short time before I moved. My motivation was to meet others using it, learn from them, and perhaps network for a job. From that experience, I learned how relatively easy to organize people together when there is a common topic of interest. Later when I moved to Vancouver, I helped organize the first Vancouver Facebook Developer Garage, which ballooned into a huge event with the popularity of the platform at the time. If there is a subject area you think is under-served in your area, I encourage you to start a group, and offer these tips for doing so:
Web Presence: At a minimum, set up a mailing list. Keep up conversation on the list between meetings. Google Groups works well, as does Meetup.com though they charge a fee. A website makes it easier for people to find your group, and a Facebook group makes it easier to invite folks to events. Don't go overboard, especially for small groups; too many communications mediums can dilute the conversation.
Location: Finding a suitable location can be tricky, given that a meetup usually has no budget. Coffee shops work well for small informal groups, but limit your ability to scale or have presentations. Offices after hours are great (tell your boss that supporting meetups is free advertising and brings community recognition.) Students may have access to school facilities after hours. Using someone's home is uncommon, but can work if the space is suitable. The presence of a projector is a key element to consider.
Content: General practice is to have someone give a presentation of 30-45 min. After a few meetups, willing presenters can be hard to find, so keep it flexible and low pressure. An evening could perhaps feature two short presentations instead. A case study of a project you're working on can make a good presentation; even if you don't think of your work as interesting, it can be compelling to hear _how_ you work. In lieu of presentations, start discussion: recent developments in the area of interest, problems you've encountered, novel solutions, personal experiences, or anything that will send the room off on a thread.
Meetups are made of people, so treasure and tap people as the greatest resource. In a world where we all spend too much time behind screens and keyboards, people yearn for contact and community with like-minded people. The medium to light duties of meetup organizing can pay off well in community stature, knowledge learned, employment solicitations, and good times.
