It was brought to my attention by my colleague Jae Lee , here at Forward, and without his help I wouldn’t have been able to bag a ticket. There were only 50 tickets available, and as they were free, there were a lot of people keen to get hold on one — thankfully Jae’s fast mouse-work managed to secure me one.
I’ve not been to a workshop / hackday type day before, so entered the event wondering what would happen, what type of people I’d meet, and more importantly what could I contribute & learn.
The event was held at the City University building just off Northampton Square, near London, which was thankfully a nice sunny 15 minute stroll from my apartment.
Johanna introduced the day, set out the brief and a few tech details, and got the teams to start work. We had essentially 7 hours or so to take a design challenge and come up with some kind of prototype or at least wireframes of a product.
Team Waltz
We assigned ourselves into groups based on our skillset, and I found myself in team 3. There were four of us (left to right in the photo): Adam (@admataz), Steve (@subcide), Jason (@jasonchanoz), and me.
We came up with the team name very quickly — Steve said as we were team 3 with 4 people, it was like the time signature for a waltz: 3/4 — so from that point we were Team Waltz. This pretty much turned out to be the norm for us for the rest of the day, as we were able to get past the small details and get in to the big issues & work on the brief pretty quickly.
We all brought different skills to the table, with development, design, and UX all represented in pretty equal measures.
The teams were encouraged to keep track of what they were doing on tumblr blogs. I found this to be a great way of documenting the process, so I tried to write out the different phases we covered during the day.
Rather than repeating myself and typing out everything we did on the day, here’s the tumblr blog for our team:
At the end of the day we held presentations to show what we had all managed to put together in the time allowed, using the tumblrs (thank goodness I’d been typing for most of the day) and any sketches we needed.
I was happy to present our teams work as I was really proud of what we’d achieved, and everyone else was more than happy to let me!
What I learned
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve not done any full time UX work in nearly 2 years, but found to my relief that a lot of the techniques I’ve been using for a many years before are still valid.
In the time allotted to the problem we were acutely aware that some really useful UX techniques were impractical.
We really didn’t have time to do any user research, and as such didn’t feel we could build valid personas to base our work on (hence the very rough generic persona we created).
We also didn’t really have any time to do any paper prototyping, or any user testing of our ideas, relying only on the good balance of people in our group.
However, even though there were a lot of restrictions on what techniques we were able to use, the team worked really well together, and it reinforced how much I enjoy working in a team to resolve a complex problem.
It was great to see what the other teams were able to achieve in the time too — and to see the various techniques employed to get to the final result. You can read the other teams tumblrs: Team 1, Team 2, Team 4,Team 5, Team 6, Team 7, Team 8, Team 9&Team 10.
I’d definitely do another one of these UX days, and have now started to look into other UX events that are going on. I’ve missed the design and user experience part of my work as I’ve been focussing only on front end development for the past 18 months.
Design Jam relit the fire for me!
Ideas of March
Today while catching up with my reading on my favourite feed reader I came across a post by Jon Tan. It’s part of a movement encouraging people to fire up their blogs and try to post more regularly throughout March and onwards, with a view to promote more thorough discourse online rather than just 140 characters in a tweet. Twitter is not an enemy to blogging, if anything it should encourage more discussion, with people actually writing out what their reasoning is behind their original message.
Chris Shiflett was the catalyst for the Ideas of March, and is asking people to:
Write a post called Ideas of March.
List some of the reasons you like blogs.
Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.
So, here goes…
Why I love blogs
Over the past 7 years or so, I’ve kept a steady 50–60 blogs in my feed reader, all of which supply me with a variety of information, entertainment, and encouragement. There are a number of reasons for this dedication to these blogs:
Without blogs I wouldn’t have gained the sort of experience, and level of technical knowledge that now supports me on a daily basis;
It’s great to get someone’s thoughts & reasoning behind a short status update or a tweet;
I’ve often stumbled across a new blog through a post by someone I already read, and found some great content I would never have found otherwise;
As other people share their wisdom, knowledge and links, I’ve built up a much better understanding of subjects that I wouldn’t even know where to start with normally.
My pledge
Almost exactly a year has passed since I wrote the obligatory first post on this blog. It was at a time when I needed to update the content and design of this site, mostly to help secure more contract work and support my CV with some imparted wisdom. Looking back, I had great intentions and ideas, but never really fulfilled them, both through apathy and not really knowing what to write.
This should hopefully encourage me to write the posts I have planned on a variety of subjects, and I’m hoping it’ll help me to rationalise a lot of my thinking. Without doubt it’ll also help my writing skills too.
So due to the reasons above and (a lot) more, I’m going to try my best to write more, more often, and join in the conversation where I can.
Shouldn’t we be supporting British?
British Telecom’s latest radio and television advert for their product BT Infinity features a lovely song called Corner, by a ‘rising US star’; Allie Moss. I wouldn’t have known about the musician if today I’d not heard the full radio advert which is promoting a special performance she’s putting on soon.
Grrrr…
A part of me was slightly rankled enough to tweet that I was unimpressed that BT were supporting a rising US artist, when I would have thought it more appropriate to support rising British talent. Â After all, BT stands for British Telecom, right?
A good friend Rich Knowles, who works for BT, joined in the discussion (that I’d only had with myself at this point) and mentioned that the tune was “a ‘good’ song. And BT works in over 170+ countries” (I’ll get to his Daily Mail comment in a moment.)
I already thought the tune was good (if not a little reminiscent of recent technology adverts like Sony, O2, Orange, Vodafone, and T-Mobile have used), so the point about being a ‘good’ song was cool.
What I find hard to understand is why, when specifically targeting a UK audience, BT chose to use a foreign artist. Surely there are plenty of British musicians producing great quality tunes that could have suited the advert just as equally?
It’s not about race or creed
At this point I’ve got to rebut Rich’s comment about being ‘Daily Mail’ about it (and Rich if you read this, please don’t take this bit personally, you just touched a nerve, I still love you mate!).
It seems we’ve slipped into a era where any possible chance there is to make someone feel bad about their opinion when it comes to the mention of ‘Johnny Foreigner’, that anyone who wants to improve British pride or see British talent get pushed to the front at every opportunity is branded some kind of right-wing, BNP supporting, Daily Mail reader (of which I am none, thank you very much!).
How did it get to be like this? When did it become such a bad thing being proud of our nation? Have we got to a point where the thought of being proud of your nation has been captured by the nutters like Nick Griffin, or the Daily “we’re not racist, but it’s the immigrants fault” Mail, so we’re frightened to say so?
More importantly how do we go about re-capturing it and making it something worthwhile again?
I’m not the first to fly the flag on St. George’s day (another note about that will be coming soon), but I do like being British, supporting British where I can, and hopefully seeing the country doing well enough to feel proud.
Yes, BT is a global company, but it started as British Telecom. If they can’t push their ad agencies to use British talent when targeting the Brits, then why should any other global company care when they’re peddling their wares here?
