Design Strategy: Building Concentric Circles of Connection (New York, NY)

A discussion and working session with ROGER MADER and JAKE SAMUELSON

Please join IxDA NYC for a discussion and working session to apply a
tiered strategy to your interaction design challenges in a variety of
applications. Noble Desktop will be raffling off a free, 3-day computer
graphics training class!

For more information and RSVP go to  http://tinyurl.com/nyc-ixda-june

Posted in Calendar | IxDA | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA
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The Service Designers (New York, NY)

Dot Dot Dot: MFA Interaction Design Lectures

While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we’ve entered a service economy. It’s not only products that are designable experiences; services are creating new challenges for designers and are increasingly demanding attention. As the line between products and services blurs (if it ever was there before), the emergence of service design has risen to demand a need for new ways of working to make for more meaningful services—whether those services are tangible, intangible, or a combination. Four designers engage in 10-minute discussions about the service sector and its different design challenges.

SPEAKERS
* Jennifer Bove, Principal, Kicker Studio
* Chenda Fruchter, Assistant Commissioner, Director of Content & Agency Relations, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication, New York City
* Sylvia Harris, Information Design Strategist

ABOUT THE LECTURE SERIES
The Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short talks in an informal setting. Wisdom will be revealed and methods will be shared in a environment intended to satisfy both social and scholarly pursuits.

RSVP: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=cHNFREZseTBKNjV1bHNSOGZpUHg0Smc6MA..

Posted in Calendar | New York City, NY, USA
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Spark the Innovation in You (New Brunswick, NJ)

Spark the Innovation in You
Featured speaker Andrew Pek, author of the award winning book, “Stimulated, Habits to Spark Your Creative Genius at Work” will share the five observed behaviors of successful organizations, large & small and then sign your included copy of his book!Feeling stuck? Stale? Under-stimulated? Do you need a little infusion of freshness to become more passionate about what you do everyday bringing you to the next level at your job and in your life?With the pace of competition, innovation, and change in today’s world, creativity isn’t a luxury–it’s a survival skill. But even the most creative people can end up stuck, stale, and stressed out, worn down by the daily grind, striving to cross the chasm between vision and success.  This event is an energetic exploration of five habits that can help you release your creativity and expand your innovative thinking. The method is playful, fun, enriching, and mind-expanding, but most importantly, it’s a step-by-step process for getting unstuck and becoming truly stimulated!

 Speaker Profile Andrew Pek is an author and life/business coach in the field of creativity, innovation and human potential.  Andrew helps individuals and organizations turn adversity into adventure, and stimulate growth.  With over 25  years of experience in organizational behavior, innovation, and communication, marketing and strategy, Andrew works  with thousands of individuals throughout the world and has inspired growth in many organizations such as Accenture, Alpharma, Bayer, British Petroleum, JP Morgan Chase, Kraft Foods, The Limited, Pfizer Inc, Wyeth and Zale Corporation, among others.Andrew has been featured on ABC, NBC, Fox and Friends, over 50 radio shows throughout the United States as well as print media such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Redbook Magazine, Investor’s Business Daily and Business Week. 

Register: http://www.pdma.org/events_register.cfm?pk_event=328 

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA | Uncategorized
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The ROI of Usability: How to Demonstrate the Value of User-Centered Design Within Your Organization (New York, NY)

Mary M. Michaels of Human Factors International explains how good usability means a good return on investment (ROI), ensuring that dollars are wisely spent, especially in this difficult economic climate. Learn how to improve productivity and operational efficiency, while minimizing support, training, development, and maintenance costs by focusing on usability. Make the case for usability at your organization, improve your designs, and demonstrate positive ROI. Mary M. Michaels, M.B.A., CUA, is a project director and instructor at HFI and is also treasurer for the New York City chapter of the UPA.

For more information and to RSVP go to http://www.nycupa.org/

Posted in Calendar | Event type | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA | UPA
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Semantic Web meetup (Madison, NJ)

Meetup for North NJ User Experience Meetup!

The semantic web is really a way of looking back at the web. In web pages or in separately stored data, new conventions and notations can be used to state what a page is about, what a part of a page is about, which concept is meant, which two concepts should be considered identical, or what information is related to a topic or concept. The anchor for all these assertions is the URI, which looks just like a URL pointing back into the web.

RSVP on the site at http://ia.meetup.com/54/

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA
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Difficult Conversations in Creative Environments by Dan Brown (New York, NY)

Every designer faces difficult conversations — defending design decisions, explaining project mishaps, managing conflicting requirements from different stakeholders. Good designers must recognize their strengths and weaknesses not only in creative skill, but also in their ability to interact with others day-to-day.

This presentation will establish a framework for evaluating and understanding the dynamics of common scenarios in creative projects. This framework helps us account for different forms of communication among people and make appropriate choices for effective communication in specific situations. With the theory as a backdrop, the second half of the session will focus on skills and techniques for making conversations easier.

Dan Brown is founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC, with clients in telecommunications, media, education, health, high-tech, and other sectors. Dan has been practicing information architecture and user experience design since 1995. He is the author of Communicating Design (New Riders, 2006), a book on user experience deliverables, and a frequent contributer to Boxes and Arrows, UX Matters, the CHI Bulletin, and Interactive Television Today. Dan is a popular speaker at conferences and is an active leader in the DC information architecture community.

Location to be announced

RSVP: http://nycupa.org

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA | UPA
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Heuristic Evaluation (Madison, NJ)

North NJ User Experience Meetup!

The April meetup on heuristic evaluation brought forth so much comment that the group only got halfway through the program. So Bob Didner has agreed to return on May 14th for a second session on heuristic evaluation.There are a lot of rules of thumb floating around out there, and some of them are persistent enough that they get quoted whether or not they apply. We’re learning when to apply a few famous rules, and when to use alternatives or antidotes.

RSVP for event details 
http://ia.meetup.com/54/calendar/10287429/ 

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA
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To Answer or Not to Answer: That is the Question for Cell Phone Users (Morristown, NJ)

May Usability NJ Meeting 

The abundance of technology-mediated communication tools such as the now ubiquitous cell phone has not only increased our ability to communicate but also the possibility of being interrupted. As a result, we need to understand how to design communication tools so that productivity gains can be realized from desired interruptions while the losses from unwanted communication can be minimized. Prior research exploring interpersonal technology-mediated interruptions has focused on identifying the costs of cognitive and social intrusions, partly in the hope that sensor technology can be utilized to improve the timing of interruption requests. However, this approach has had limited real world success because it fails to take into account either who the interruption is from or what the interruption is about with respect to the value it may bring along. This talk will address this short coming and present a theoretical framework and associated research program. Findings from two user studies on cell phone call handling practices that validate key constructs will be presented. They highlight how people desire and use information about the interrupter’s context, interruption content and historic interrupter-interruptee interaction history in their decisions to answer or ignore a call. The talk will also demonstrate CellPhone IMT - an interruption management tool for cell phones, whose design and instantiation is inspired by the findings of these studies. 

Biography:Sukeshini A. Grandhi is a member of the SmartCampus Group and a final year doctoral student at the Department of Information Systems, NJIT. Her research interests are at the confluence of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), ubiquitous/pervasive and social computing. Her work revolves around understanding the social and organizational work processes using technology and how this understanding can inform the design of innovative applications and user interfaces. She has published and presented in many conferences including CHI, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS). Her other publications include IEEE Internet Computing and a book chapter on Supporting Proximate Communities with P3-Systems: Technology for Connecting People-To-People-To-Geographical-Places.She is an active member of the HCI community and has reviewed several peer publications and worked at many ACM conferences as a volunteer. Ms. Grandhi holds a masters degree in Business Administration (MBA) from University of Western Australia Perth, Australia. She also has a Masters and a Bachelors degree in Mathematics from Madras Christian College, University of Madras, India.

When:         Wednesday, May 20, 2009          
              6:00 PM – social hour – hors d’oeuvres and soft drinks
7:00 PM – presentation
8:00 PM – question period followed by more socializing 

Where:        Logical Design Solutions
131 Madison Avenue
Morristown, NJ 07960
Phone: 973-971-0100 
RSVP: http://usabilitynjmay2009.eventbrite.com/ 

Posted in Calendar | Local meeting | New York City, NY, USA | Uncategorized
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Usability NJ Happy Hour (Woodbridge, NJ)

Help celebrate Cinco de Mayo. Join UsabilityNJ on Tuesday, May 5, 2009 for
socializing and a bit of brew at

J. J. Bitting Brewing Company
33 Main Street
Woodbridge, New Jersey

*6 PM - 8 PM *
*Directions: http://www.njbrewpu bs.com/direction s.html

or one block from the NJ Transit Coast train stop

Posted in Calendar | New York City, NY, USA | Social networking
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Enterprise Search Summit (New York, NY, USA)

The Enterprise search summit is a conference that covers how to develop, implement and enhance cutting-edge internal search capabilities. If you are an information manager or IT or search professional, this event is where you will learn strategies and build the skill sets you need to make your organization’s content not only searchable but “findable.”

The emphasis for Enterprise search summit 2009 is on how enterprise search enables information access. Search can no longer be viewed as a stand-alone application. It is increasingly part of everything we do and has become the de facto gateway to information in the enterprise. This year’s Summit will examine the ways to leverage search tools, information architecture, classification, and other strategies and technologies to enable information access.

Presentations specifically addressing user experience and search:

• Pre-conference seminar: Understanding How People Seek, Find, and Use Information in Organizations
• Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit
• Emergent Social Search Experiences
• Enhancing Findability and Usability: Taxonomies and Search
• Improving Findability Through Site Search Analytics
• Help the Users Help Themselves
• Improving Results at Ernst & Young
• Lessons in Designing the Experience of Information Retrieval
• Just a Suggestion: Better User Input for Better Search Output
• From Facts to Full Text: Designing the Search Interface

See enterprisesearchsummit.com for more information.

Posted in Calendar | Conference | New York City, NY, USA
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