Quick write-up of my notes from the first day of the UX Australia conference today.
Having (mostly) read Alex Wright’s book “Glut”, there wasn’t a lot of new content in Alex’s presentation for me, however the history of information is still incredibly interesting and I was happy to hear him run through the last several thousand years of the evolution of preliterate culture through folk taxonomies, symbols, writing, libraries, the printing press, Industrial Revolution and through to the invention of the Internet.
Alex cited several very interesting people including Charles Cutter, H.G. Wells, Teilhard de Chardin, Paul Otlet, Vannevar Bush, Eugene Garfield, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson – all who had some idea or vision of a global network of information access and sharing, collaboration and augmentation of knowledge.
Great presentation – Alex makes it sound like the web even in its current form decades after its creation is still very primitive, backward even. It’s exciting to realise we have so far to go, there are so many opportunities to advance the platform and take the web to a whole new level that we can’t even really visualise what it looks like and the effect it will have on humanity.
Darren Menachemson gave a solid presentation on visualisations – ways of presenting scenarios and design ideas like a story to help convey how users might interact with a product or service. Finished his presentation with an activity where the audience had to quickly sketch up a visualisation, a story of something they did recently – for example, cooking a meal the night before.
Ben Kraal almost dissuaded me from attending his presentation by mentioning “leg ulcers” but I wanted to see a success story of using video in user research, so I went along. No photos of ulcers, but more detail than we needed on the subject. Very interesting – some hard-core research science, with coding videos, analysing the videos and drawing conclusions.
Lachlan’s presentation on Atlassian’s dashboard development project was interesting, but not quite what I was expecting. My fault for not reading the program properly. At least I got to see some of the nice visualisation gadgets being released with JIRA 4.
Penny Hagen and Michelle Gilmore spoke about developing user experience strategies, looking at a case study of their work with UNSW. An interesting process involving developing hundreds of user stories in workshops with their clients, grouping and modelling the stories into high-level activities then prioritising and culling down to the requirements for a product, service or new process.
Shane Morris and Matt Morphett spent the remainder of the afternoon working with the audience to try and translate Matthew Frederick’s book “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” to the user experience design field. Very entertaining and highly inappropriate!
// purecaffeine.com, UX, design, social media and Gov 2.0 blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
