So, it’s been a couple of weeks sprinkled with some joyous things from the world of user experience.
On 22 Jan I attended my first Northern User Experience (NUX) event. This one took place at the swanky offices of Simple Usability in Leeds.
The topic was ‘Can design constraints be freeing and creative freedom constricting?’. I wasn’t drawn to the topic particularly; rather the opportunity to soak up a bit of UX and to meet other people in the field.
On both counts, I succeeded. It was a terrific opportunity to hob-nob with some UXers, both at the event and afterwards over excellent real ale at the Northern Monk Refectory (my kind of bar).
Before beer was the fascinating talk by experienced user experience professional Richard Halford, currently at IBM. I was absorbed by the insightful and honest stories from Richard’s illustrious career, and took away plenty of ideas about the UX process.
My other positive UX thing from the last couple of weeks has been completing in my spare time the online Udemy course, ‘User Experience – The Ultimate Guide to Usability‘ by Dr David Travis. As a general introduction to UX, including the process of contextual enquiry, user testing, personas, red routes and the like, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It has set me up a treat for a forthcoming UX project.
It was the first time I had taken an online course, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I felt like a veritable sponge of knowledge. Better – for me – than reading a book, on the whole.
And I did it all on my new MacBook Pro, perhaps the most joyous sprinkle of all.