Ben Skelton's Blog

VanUE Event

Wow, we had a packed house for Tuesday's VanUE event! Gentry Underwood did an awesome job of showcasing some of the knowledge sharing initiatives underway at IDEO. One concept that really resonated with me is having an always-on video conference link between offices in the water-cooler area of the office. I think it would be pretty cool to grab a snack or drink in Vancouver kitchen while chatting with someone in Calgary who is doing the same thing. Maybe we will be able to incorporate something similar in the new office design :)

From a presentation standpoint Gentry's talk was one of the best I have seen in a long time. He had an incredible deck (which seemed more like watching a timed movie then static slides). In addition he showed us the actual IDEO intranet, which was cool to see. 

Thanks to ThoughtFarmer for footing the bill to bring Gentry up to Vancouver, Analytic Design Group for the kick-ass snacks and of course VFS for continuing to host us. In addition a huge thank you to Gentry for such a solid presentation!

VanUE will be back on Tuesday January 20th with Greg Bell.

Awesome Event

We've got Andrew Crow coming up to speak to us at the next VanUE event. Here's a little info about the event:

Awesomeness

As designers, we find ourselves in a position to inspire, celebrate and
create value. The opportunities and challenges we face are new and exciting.
The tools we have at our disposal are powerful and abundant. The communities
we've forged and the ideas that flow openly are all indicators of a shift in
our industry. We'll discuss examples of all this and how we can continue to
push forward.

The event is on Tuesday September 18th and begins at 5:30pm. Check out the the VanUE site for more details!

VanUE event is on this Thursday

The VanUE event is on for this Thursday, check out the site for more details!

VanUE Presentation Slide Deck

You can find the slide deck for my User Experience in an Agile World presentation that I gave to VanUE last week here.

We have been working on refining our Habañero presentation template. I used the latest draft version of the template for the presentation and we have made a few more changes since. I think it is an improvement over our old presentation template. We are going to have a white background version and a dark background version, giving people the choice of what type of background they would like to use. For now I am recommending that client deliverable presentations should have a white background and marketing related presentations should have a dark background.

Would love to hear what you think of the new template in the comments :)

User Experience in an Agile World

On Thursday January 18th, 2007 I am going to be presenting to the Vancouver User Experience Group. I guess it is time — the group has been active since July 2003 and I haven't presented yet :) Here is a summary of my talk:

Many organizations are adopting agile software development techniques when developing large-scale websites, web applications and desktop applications. How do you design an exceptional user experience in a project that follows an agile philosophy? How do traditional user-centered design activities, such as detailed up-front IA and UI discovery, fit into the agile development process?

In this session Ben Skelton, Director of User Experience for Habañero Consulting Group will propose one approach for incorporating User Experience design into large-scale agile projects. After the presentation we encourage everyone to join in a moderated discussion of techniques and tools that have worked for them, and those that haven’t.

Visit the VanUE website to learn more or register for this free event!

VanUE Event - Jensen Rocked!

Our April VanUE event is now over and I think it was our best so far. Jensen Harris spoke to the group about the new user interface in the next version of Microsoft Office. We ended up going an hour over for questions and Jensen stayed for another hour after we wrapped up answering questions and talking to people. It was cool to see so many people stoked about the UI work that the Office team is doing.

The most interesting part of the talk for me was at the end when Jensen showed some of the prototypes that were proposed before the team settled on the ribbon concept. It was also interesting to see the initial prototype for the ribbon and how it has evolved into the product currently in beta.

I always get a little nervous when we have speakers come up from the US as you never know what kind of delay customs will introduce. I have this nightmare of having 100 people in the theater at VFS and not having a speaker and having to entertain them. So far we have been lucky :)

After the VanUE event I went to the UX cocktail hour that Dimitri Nekrasovski and Loretta Hui arranged at Relish. It is nice to see that Vancouver is starting to build a stronger User Experience community!

Jensen Harris at VanUE

If you are interested in software UI development VanUE has a treat for you! We have Jensen Harris coming up from Redmond. Jensen is a Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft Office User Experience team and is one of the key designers behind the new user interface being introduced in Microsoft Office.

It should be a really interesting talk. We still have a few seats left, so if you are interested please visit the VanUE site for more information.

Great VanUE Event

Wow - we had quite the turnout to the VanUE (Vancouver User Experience Group) event last night. 86 people signed in at the door! The group is really gaining some momentum which is awesome. It seems that the less academic (more real-world) events are the best attended. We also seem to get different people out to each event depending on the topic.

I thought that Selma Zafar from Nokia and Chris Masteron from Optimal Interfaces did a great job presenting. We do a lot of usability testing at Habañero and I still managed to pick up a few things from their presentation.

Unrelated to their presentation I also learned that Nokia has around 700 people that work in area. Who knew?