Our Next Event: Seattle Annual Re-MIX 2010 And UX Show and Tell
Normally Every third Wed this coming meeting is the 4th Wed, March 24th at 7:00 – 8:30pm at Bellevue Place where the Hyatt is located. Free parking after 6:00 pm is located under the hotel. We meet in the Hyatt Board room on the second level in the Atrium ( big dome), Look for our great new Sign. If you get lost call Eric at : 206.779.0314
Our meetings are always free.
This month bring your favorite UX examples for show and tell. We are looking to see the great stuff that everyone is working on. Well have some touch devices and lots of cool stuff and we’ll be talking about some of the good and bad points about those user experiences. MIX is the week before the meeting and we will be having a brain dump of some of the cool trends in UX in the web 2.0 space. We have a couple of people attending the conference which is in vegas and they will be talking about tends, content and the coolest UX related stuff from the show. Lastly we will be talking about Windows Phone 7 development tools and all the related annoucements from MIX and we will compare and contrast the Windows Phone 7 or zPhone with the iPhone. 
Come join the fun with Interact IxDA.
_____________________________
WHEN
Date: Wednesday, March24th, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 8:30pm PAC
WHERE
Bellevue Place
10500 NE 8th St.
Bellevue, WA 98004
Cost
Attendence: Always Free.
Parking: Free.
Are you on LinkedIn and planning to attend? Well let us know.
News Feed
User eXperience Digest No. 16
v1 #16 2/22/2010
Interact’s UX Digest is our oftentimes weekly digest of UX links that attracted our attention out in the blogosphere. We also tweet daily on hot UX topics. Follow us on twitter or friend us on facebook,
This week…
| The top 5 new rules of productivity |  |
| Fantastic Information Architecture and Data Visualization Resources |  |
| Navigating the latest in navigation trends |  |
| The Internet in 2020 |  |
| The Power of Frameworks |  |
| Color Theory for Web Design: The Meaning of Color |  |
| What Happens When You’re Gone? |  |
| The Usage Lifecycle |  |
| Better User Experience With Storytelling, Part 2 |  |
| The Usability Mindset |  |
| Springing Out of Nowhere |  |
| Analytics – The Usability Lab of the new decade |  |
| Words That Zing |  |
User eXperience Digest No. 15
v1 #15 2/15/2010
Interact’s UX Digest is our oftentimes weekly digest of UX links that attracted our attention out in the blogosphere. We also tweet daily on hot UX topics. Follow us on twitter or friend us on facebook,
This week…
| The Future of User Interfaces |  |
| Interaction’10 videos online |  |
| Managing UX teams |  |
| Experience Maps |  |
| Gesturecons – icons for prototyping Multi-touch applications |  |
| Hawthorne effect |  |
| What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation |  |
| Quality vs.. Quantity: Approaches to Web Publishing |  |
| Isometric Experience Maps |  |
| So you want to be a user researcher? |  |
| Denote – another app for website annotation (beta) |  |
Does Your Agile/UX (User eXperience) Shop have a CMM Rating?
CMM? what is that? is the typical response I get when asking about CMM. For starters CMM = Capability Maturity Model For Software Engineering project methodologies. Basically it’s a way to rate how good a software shop is with regard to its process. Now in the UX/Agile space talk of applying Software Engineering metrics such as the Capability Maturity Model For Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University might be a bit more than most will deal with however being exposed to both worlds I think it is worthwhile to talk about what UX/Agile can learn from CMM.
To be fair lets to all the UX/Agile folks, lets be honest about CMM… CMM is used to see if a software shop can write software for the space shuttle, you know meetings about meetings about meetings about the planning meetings to plan the planning meetings about the meetings to talk about the methodology that might be used to develop some software… there is some of this in CMM at a certain level but if one back up and takes a fair look at CMM I think it provides a way to see if what we are doing in our UX/Agile shop is reasonable. For some light reading on topic check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model
So how the heck does CMM apply to UX/Agile shops… well to be honest (again) UX != Agile. UX is about user experience right? and making better ones, integrating design with interactive software and all that. Agile is a group of software methodologies that are perceived to be about quickly building software. In many cases companies or teams have a status meeting called ‘Scrum’ (oh wait a scrum is not a status meeting for starters but lets ignore that for now) and do un planned 2 week sprints of building software that that the dev’s test and they call them selves agile; but really this is not Agile either. Agile is albeit a shorter life cycle approach is in fact still an SDLC disciplined approach or at least it can be and as such we can use CMM to look at how effective the approach to Agile is in our ‘UX/Agile’ team.
Lets look at CMM and understand in more detail how CMM does this. So the part we care about is that CMM lets us see how ‘mature’ our team or organization is in our course todo it right. CMM has this idea of a Maturity Level. For example CMM Level 1 is chaos… where CMM Level 5 is software teams building software for the shuttle. CMM level is broken down into 5 levels
1. This level is characterized by software that is accidently successful, ad hoc, chaotic processes IF there are any at all.
2. The Managed team is able to set goals and has some outline of a process that is frequently successful.
3. The CMM Level 3 team has a defined process that is documented and standard team process’s and reasonably expected to have consistent performance in its software project implementation.
4. The CMM Level 4 is where we start waxing a bit transcendental, ‘quantitatively managed’ using KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators)
5. CMM Level 5 is where the organization as part of its process is able to dynamically optimize its process’s, something like a self programming program.
I think a good quote from SEI is in fact “Predictability, effectiveness, and control of an organization’s software processes are believed to improve as the organization moves up these five levels. While not rigorous, the empirical evidence to date supports this belief.”
To me a guess the connection is obvious but just in case here is the correlation, An Agile Process that is not consistent and REPEATABLE with quality is not going to work and in fact might not be agile but just be more of a mess. Using CMM to get to a consistent, repeatable, documented and well managed process with regard to Agile and UX is key to helping is implement good agile which in turn can help us deliver good UX. IF your agile is CMM Level 1 then maybe you need some CMM for your Agile before you get your UX in order…
User eXperience Digest No. 14
v1 #14 2/8/2010
Interact’s UX Digest is our oftentimes weekly digest of UX links that attracted our attention out in the blogosphere. We also tweet daily on hot UX topics. Follow us on twitter and friend us on facebook.
This week…
| Does technology need personality? |  |
| Craft is about details |  |
| Words that Zing |  |
| The Meaning of Color |  |
| Browse is the New Black |  |
| Win 5 Signed Copies Of Information Is Beautiful! |  |
| Live at Interaction ‘10 |  |
| The Right Way to Wireframe |
|
| On the Subject of Design |  |
| Realism in UI Design |  |
| Lessons from IKEA |      |
Accessibility Makes the Experience More Usable by More People – IxDA Interact
Every third Wed 7:00 – 8:30pm at Bellevue Place where the Hyatt is located. Free parking after 6:00 pm is located under the hotel. We meet in the Hyatt Board room on the second level in the Atrium ( big dome), Look for our great new Sign. If you get lost call Eric at : 206.779.0314
Our meetings are always free.
This month Wendy Chisholm is talking about Accessibility Makes the Experience More Usable by More People.
Wendy is a user experience person by passion. Her focus is on creating experiences (both online and off)
that are accessible to people with disabilities which in turn should
make the experience more usable by more people. She is curious about
talking with you about applying universal design to your own work and
she may challenge your assumptions about people with disabilities; She also hopes you challenge my assumptions about design and what’s practical.
Wendy is looking towards the future (participated in the HTML5 Working
Group) and wants to pick your brains about where the web is headed and
how we can ensure it is inclusive…how can we make universal design
cheap and easy? i.e., how do we make accessibility accessible? What
barriers have you run into while making your work accessible? Or has
it never been an issue? If not, why not?
A bit more about her: she co-authored the O’Reilly book “Universal Design
for Web Applications” and she worked at the W3C for 6 years. She currently
splits her time between the UW and consulting.
For even more, including a link to her stint as Wonder Woman:
http://sp1ral.com/about/
Come join the fun with Wendy at IxDA Interact.
_____________________________
WHEN
Date: Wednesday, Feb 17th, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 8:30pm PAC
WHERE
Bellevue Place
10500 NE 8th St.
Bellevue, WA 98004
Cost
Attendence: Always Free.
Parking: Free.
Are you on LinkedIn and planning to attend? Well let us know.
User eXperience Digest #13
v1 #12 2/1/2010
Interact’s UX Digest is our oftentimes weekly digest of UX links that attracted our attention out in the blogosphere. We also tweet daily on hot UX topics. Follow us on twitter and friend us on facebook.
This week…
| 10 ways you can use photos to influence the user experience |  |
| Ninja Coders and Despot Designers: Game Over |  |
| User Experience Diagrams |  |
| Card Games for Information Architects |  |
| Better User Experience With Storytelling – Part One |  |
| Bringing User Centered Design to the Agile Environment |  |
| Call To Action; You need to have me at hello. |  |
| My Recommendation: Stop Making Design Recommendations |  |
| Fantastic Information Architecture and Data Visualization Resources |  |
| Constraints Fuel Creativity |  |
| The Affinity Diagram |  |
MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) in Silverlight 4
MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) in Silverlight 4 By Glenn Block and Seattle Silverlight User Group – Interact Silverlight SIG.
http://seattleslug.blogspot.com/2010/01/mef-managed-extensibility-framework-in.html
Seattle’s Silverlight User Group, in association with Interact and community organzations everywhere is having its next meeting on February 3rd, 2010 at Building 40/41 caff ( http://www.bing.com/maps/?v=2&where1=Microsoft%20Building%2041%2C%20WA&encType=1 ).
All the local Microsoftee’s and MVP’s will be there.
http://www.SeattleSilverlight.net/
Come join Seattle Silverlight User Group when Glenn Block talks about the new MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) in Silverlight 4 and how you can use it to build more maintainable Silverlight applications which can be extended by third-parties. Come with questions ready the use MEF building extensible applications which can be partitioned across dynamically downloadable XAPs. In this talk we’ll drill into the core of MEF and discuss scenarios for it’s usage.
User eXperience (UX) Digest #12
v1 #12 1/25/2010
Interact’s UX Digest is our oftentimes weekly digest of UX links that attracted our attention out in the blogosphere. We also tweet daily on hot UX topics. Follow us daily on twitter or check out our tweets on facebook,
This week…
| Your Attention Is Riveted By Pictures Of People |  |
| You cannot not communicate. |  |
| Six Reasons Big Companies Aren’t Creative |  |
| eCommerce ROI: Why Usability ALWAYS Beats Advertising |  |
| 24 UX Articles to start 2010 |  |
| Interaction Design’s Early Formal Education & Beyond |  |
| Agile as a ‘Cargo Cult’ |  |
| More Like This: A Design Pattern |  |
| Questionnaires in Usability Engineering |  |
| Some incredible statistics about the iPlayer’s usage |  |
| Emotionally intelligent signage . . . in an airport? |  |
| a nifty and free utility for simulating color blindness |  |
Lunch With Interact – MVVM For Tards
We did a cool video pod cast on MVVM for Tads. Had Erik Mork, Fabio Matsui and Jeremiah Morrill and we talked about MVVM and MVVM for tards and did a demo showing how to build an MVVM for Tards or Tard’d application in Silverlight.