Keith Instone

UXnet survey

UXnet currently has a number of initiatives underway, and part of our plan for 2008 includes a questionnaire to better understand who our stakeholders are. We have designed a very quick survey that we invite you to complete.

• Check out the survey

This survey will take you less than 5 minutes to complete, but will give the Board of Directors a good overview of some key information. The survey is completely anonymous, and no answers can be attributed to any individual.

Also, we are looking for information from across the industry. We are therefore asking everyone to forward the survey link to people they think are involved in a related discipline, or who have interest in user experience, but who may not be directly involved in the UXnet organization itself. Our intention is to collect information concerning everyone related to this field, in order that UXnet may effectively align itself for future growth and success.

We very much appreciate your time & effort. Thank you.

Posted in About UXnet | Announcements | News
Tags: survey
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UXnet Medical Industry Group

MINNEAPOLIS-ST.PAUL, MN (U.S.) - September 7, 2008 - The User Experience Network (UXnet), the only international not-for-profit organization dedicated to building the user experience industry, announced a special interest group for the medical industry today. Under the leadership of Suzanne Currie, a long-time connector in the user experience community and an active practitioner in the medical industry, the group will connect professionals who are involved with or interested in user experience throughout healthcare, for the purpose of growing a dedicated community.

“The medical industry is faced with some of the greatest user experience challenges today,” said Currie. “We hope to bring together top practitioners into a dedicated professional group that provides assistance and support to one another while injecting leadership to the practice of user experience in the medical area.”

Initially a virtual effort, the UXnet Medical Industry Group hopes to use online connection and participation as a springboard toward creating physical community and professional relationships. Among other tools, the popular professional website LinkedIn will provide early networking infrastructure. Interested participants can sign up for the group on LinkedIn.

“The healthcare industry touches some of the most personal and important interactions that people have in their lives,” said Dirk Knemeyer, President of UXnet. “It is also one of the largest growth industries in the world and truly demands the attention of user experience as a professional discipline. We hope this group is able to provide an invaluable service to the many practitioners who are hard at work solving these very personal and complicated design problems.”

UXnet creates effective, functional and strategic networks to enable cross-disciplinary collaboration between user experience professionals. We connect people, organizations, resources and ideas to enable the growth and maturation of User Experience as a practice, a community and eventually a discipline. For more information about UXnet, please contact Keith Instone, instone [at] uxnet.org.

Posted in Announcements | Medical | News
Tags: linkedin | Medical
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Inverge 2008 (Portland, OR, USA)

Inverge is the Interactive Convergence conference, where human interaction and participation adds to convergence concepts. Some of the presentations at the 2008 event related to user experience:

• Integrating Graphics, Artificial Intelligence, Entertainment and Learning
• Cross-Media Usage Patterns
• Experiential marketing

Inverge is an interdisciplinary thought-leader event that focuses on the convergence of media platforms, of virtual and physical, content and advertising, and corporate content and consumer-generated content.

Posted in Calendar | Conference | Portland, OR, USA
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Search Analytics Case Studies

Earley & Associates presents their next Taxonomy Community of Practice Calls on “Search Analytics Case Studies” by John Ferrara, Information Architect, Vanguard, September 3rd, 2008, from 1-2:00pm (Eastern Time USA).

This presentation will describe two methods developed at our organization for quantitatively measuring the quality of a website’s search engine results using data readily available in search logs. The first is a quick and easy relevancy test that yields concise, bottom-line scores of how reliably the search engine returns the best matches first. The second is a more advanced and insightful evaluation of the results’ precision — the proportion of relevant and irrelevant matches clustered at the top of the results. The presentation will describe how to repeat the methods at any organization, and make available spreadsheets for automatically processing gathered data. It will also describe which solutions can rectify problems found in the evaluation.

This presentation will be of greatest interest to user experience professionals who want to improve the quality of a search engine’s results and need a reliable and credible means of tracking its performance.

See Earley & Associates for more information.

Posted in Calendar | Online
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SamataMason (Bowling Green, OH, USA)

BGSU School of Art, Graphic Design Division and AIGA Toledo present Dave Mason and Greg Samata from the Illinois based firm SamataMason. See AIGA Toledo for more information.

Posted in AIGA | Calendar | Local meeting | Toledo, OH, USA
Tags: aiga toledo
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DESIGN What? (Toledo, OH, USA)

The opening reception for the DESIGN What? exhibition, showcasing the creative talents of local graphic designers, illustrators and photographers. The exhibit will run until September 15 and there will be an open ballot to vote for Best of Show.

See AIGA Toledo for more information about the opening reception.

Posted in AIGA | Calendar | Exhibition | Toledo, OH, USA
Tags: aiga toledo
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Marcia Lausen, Design for Democracy (Maumee, OH, USA)

AIGA Toledo presents Marcia Lausen, author of Design for Democracy: Ballot and Election Design.

Marcia is an outspoken advocate for the value of design in corporate, consumer, and government communications. She has served on the local and national boards of AIGA and she co-founded the election design initiative of Design for Democracy: a strategic program of AIGA that seeks to improve the quality and clarity of government communications.

See AIGA Toledo and Toledo AdClub for more information.

Posted in AIGA | Calendar | Local meeting | Toledo, OH, USA
Tags: aiga toledo | democracy | design | Toledo AdClub
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BGSU SIGGRAPH Student Chapter

There is a student SIGGRAPH chapter at Bowling Green State University. Also known as the Computer Arts Club, it looks like it was started in 2006.

This fall a presentation by Scott McCloud is being planned. Once I learn more I will add his talk to the calendar.

Posted in ACM SIGGRAPH | Toledo, OH, USA
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UX Research at Google (New York, NY, USA)

NYC Usability Professionals Association presents “UX Research at Google in NYC: Methods and Case Studies”.

Two members of Google’s User Experience team will outline Google’s UX design and research processes in New York City, then delve into two recent case studies where designs were influenced by some unique work
with metaphors, and where supporting underlying relationships with software can be the make-or-break predictor of success. (Full presentation description below.)

Speakers: Molly Stevens and Michelle Lee, UX Team, Google, Inc.

Please arrive by 6pm, to allow time to get through security. Photo ID required by security to enter building, and must match name on the registration list.

Cost:
Member or Non-member: $10
Event & 1-year membership: $20
Full-time students: $ 5 (please provide valid school ID)

Location: JPMorgan Chase
270 Park Avenue
(between 47th & 48th, on WEST side of street)
New York, NY 10017

Registration: NO EMAIL RSVPs ACCEPTED FOR THIS EVENT
Please purchase a guaranteed ticket at the event registration site.

Seats are limited and reservations are first come, first served. We advise you to register early, as previous events have sold out, and we had to turn people away at the door.

Presentation description:

Molly Stevens and Michelle Lee, two of Google’s UX Research team, will present a summary of Google’s UX design and research processes in New York City, and then highlight these processes in two case studies:

1. “Using Metaphors to Communicate Research Results with Impact”

Molly will discuss how using a metaphor helped engineering understand the social dynamics of a b2b application, causing them to fundamentally rethink the prioritization of features and some of the basic interactions.

2. “Getting on the Bandwagon: Critical Roles in Online Collaboration”

The biggest predictor of success is how software supports underlying relationships among group members. Not all collaborators are created equal; Michelle will explore critical roles and implications for design using Google Docs as a case study.

Time is allotted for Q&A after the presentations.

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA | UPA
Tags: nyc upa
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Recap of Michigan/Ohio local leader meeting

On Wednesday, April 2, we held a local user experience networking meeting in Ann Arbor. We invited leaders of local professional chapters related to user experience, university representatives, and anyone else who was interested in spending the evening meeting new people who are interested in UX. After letting everyone meet each other individually, we had dinner and then went around the room, learning about what each person was involved in. (See some photos.) The attendees:

• Anthony Viviano, Detroit UXnet local ambassador
• Bob Hale, Columbus UXnet local ambassador
• Carol Smith, UPA board member
• Connie Lippert, Refresh Detroit
• Constantinos Coursaris, Michigan State - Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
• Dan Cooney, Ann Arbor UXnet local ambassador
• Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, UPA & IUE
• Erin Moulton, STC/SM
• Jason Withrow, Washtenaw Community College
• Jenny Jacob, Hanson, Inc., Toledo
• John Rivard, MOCHI
• Josh Holmes, GANG, AACS (Ann Arbor Computer Society), AADD
• Keith Instone, Toledo UXnet local ambassador
• Lavie Golenberg, Human Factors Student, Wayne State College of Engineering
• Lisa Mullinaux, Bay area
• Mark Newman, U of M - SI & MOCHI
• Maureen Hanratty, U of M - SI, HCI Student, SOCHI
• Michael Beasley, Michigan UPA
• Mike Osswald, Hanson, Inc., Toledo
• Ross Johnson, Refresh Detroit
• Shane Sevo, SemaFX (SIGGRAPH), Creative Energy Alliance, Joomla Detroit,

There were several opportunities for cooperation and collaboration mentioned, such as organizing World Usability Day, joint HCI researcher/practitioner speaker series, monthly meeting information sharing, game design talks, and so on. As opportunities arise, we will leverage the contacts made at this meeting.

We asked several people if they wanted a mailing list or online group to stay in touch, and almost everyone said they were already on too many lists. We think instead it is better to leverage the existing lists, groups, social networks and so on. For example, the UXnet group on Facebook is something to join.

We think while we are using the existing tools to stay in touch and look for opportunities to work together, we should start planning our next meeting of local leaders with a passion for user experience. There are several representatives from local groups that could not make it this time, there are new groups of people to invite (such as advertising professionals or managers of local user experience teams), there is more brainstorming and planning we can do for specific UX projects, and there are other areas of the region we can reach out to.

As UXnet local ambassadors, we think that the biggest value we can add to the local user experience community is to focus on organizing these face-to-face networking events, and then let others take it from there on how they want to cooperate and collaborate.

We look forward to organizing more user experience networking events in the future.

Anthony, Dan, Keith

Posted in Ann Arbor, MI, USA | Detroit, MI, USA | News | Toledo, OH, USA
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