But organizing an event for the first time teaches you a lot of things. It’s a very “people” job, one that often requires a certain amount of savvy, timing, and humility. Only then does everything else become “logistics”.

As Cennydd said, the devil is in the details.

So being an organizer, you will replay countless scenarios in your head, but the end result is often surprising. And just as some had predicted, we had a decent turnout (about 60 people – see update), the day went by quite smoothly, sessions were really interesting, and everyone had a pretty good experience through and through.

Some highlights included James O’Brien’s Agile UX talk, Laurian Gridinoc’s session on “reactive documents“, and the repeat of Cennydd’s IA summit wayfinding debut.

I regret not putting enough thought into my own session. That’s a scar I’ll have to bear forever, but the credit certainly goes to the many UXCamp newcomers like Nick Dunlavey and Clarence Lee, who presented some really interesting stuff.

Still, the best part of any UXCamp is the sheer camraderie and partnership you get from the combination of attendees, sponsors, and organizers.  What we may remember best is Jonty Sharples’ venn diagram oddities, finding common ground about UX in the enterprise, Dr. Simone laughing over a pint, Cennydd as a perennial UXCamp favorite, and the crowding of the otherwise quiet local to wind down the day.

Plus I met so many cool new faces on Saturday I stopped worrying whether this year’s camp would be as cool as the last.

And that’s the way it ought to roll.

(update: I made an error calculating the percentage of 60% turnout initially by basing it off an outdated list. The number is closer to 75%, or 20 no-shows. It’s still a concern, but not as bad as I originally thought.)

When I attended the first Design Jam last year, no one was really sure what to expect. It was great at the time when I was transitioning careers from being a hybrid dev/designer to full-time UX, as it gave me an opportunity to practice a lot of cool stuff I’d been dying to try out. I did skip the second one for several reasons, but by the time Design Jam 3 came around I was itching to give it another go since full-time UX started to feel quite repetitive.

My primary goal for the day was to keep things simple and to test how my UX skills had developed over the last 6 months. My plan was to avoid pre-selecting specific methods to use and to go with the flow. I wanted to know if I was more aware of the design process, and whether I was able to influence it towards a positive outcome. So, while the first jam was for me to test out UX methods, DJL3 was for me to evaluate my ability to navigate or influence the design process (which I feel is a core part of what UX designers do).

I think that overall, I’m quite okay at facilitating generative activities by prioritizing ideas, chunking activities up into tasks, having a ‘feel’ for the team’s flow and encouraging discussion. I was not so okay with the delivery part of the day when we needed to pull together to make something. With the generative part of the work, all I had to do was organize the information that my team members were freely sharing with each other. But with the delivery part of the day, I wasn’t really sure how to suggest an approach that worked for everyone – almost everyone had a different idea of what needed to be done.

In the end Jason Mesut stepped in and helped us formulate a plan. The mentors made a big difference that day and I was particularly pleased they were handpicked by the organizers to provide teams a balance of domain, team, and design advice.

While I certainly came away with some interesting insights from the day, I spoke to a lot of people who said they weren’t exactly sure what they got out of design jam apart from the fact that it was sort of fun. Some people were expecting to have a kind of workshop-like experience where they would be exposed to UX methods, which they could incorporate into their current work. Some said it would’ve been better to be assigned into teams for skill balance, rather than assigning themselves to teams in a semi-random fashion.

I agree that its impossible to please everyone, but I think that it may be worth reflecting on what attendees really want out of a design jam. For me, it was first a place for me to try out UX methods, and then a place for me to evaluate my design skills. But for others, it may be something completely different.

I wonder if there are patterns that are starting to formulate, seeing that Design Jam is now in its third iteration, that could help shape future iterations of the jam in a new way. So far the formula for a design jam hasn’t really changed very much. On the other hand, maybe all we really need is for design jam to be a testing ground of sorts for multidisciplinary teams to work on something and have fun at the same time.

Either way, I hope and trust that future iterations of design jam exceed the community’s expectations for a UX hack day.

Check out my team’s work here at http://djlon0310.tumblr.com

Every conference has its own strengths and general vibe. After getting advice from some seasoned conference attendees, it was a matter of choosing the conferences that would suit me best. For me, UX Hong Kong was a perfect start, as it was a fairly intimate conference where I got to meet some really interesting people and give me a taste of what a UX conference feels like.

May came around and it was as people had prophesied – UX Lisbon turned out to be a big UX party – food, fun, sights and Don Norman. Plus a stellar cast of UX rock stars made it promptly a trip to remember.

Then, just when I thought I had exhausted my remit for conferences, I made an impulse purchase to attend DIBI a few months later after finding out that Jared Spool and Jeffrey Zeldman were speaking.

At this point you’re probably wondering why I keep attending so many conferences, and what have I really benefited from them?

Well for one, I don’t really attend conferences to learn new skills or even pick up on future trends. The real reason I attend conferences is to absorb the intangible benefits of being around people who influence and care about this industry.

Some people call this networking, but that’s such a lame word. I prefer to call it a ‘community of practice‘, based on the work done by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, where a profession evolves and develops around groups of people with shared interests.

There are several reasons why this is important with regards to conferences.

Watching our industry evolve in real time

UX as an industry is still taking on form, shifting and moulding from a primordial soup of different disciplines, practices and vernaculars. Thus we constantly draw upon the work of highly influential people who have done the good job of piecing together these otherwise separate domains. Each practitioner represents a specific sphere of influence, but this again is constantly changing in and outside the context of work.

Conference settings allow for ‘change’ conversations to happen between experts, practitioners of varying levels, students, and casual observers. It is during these moments that we collectively work out our perspectives, beliefs, and approaches as a community.

As with all new industries, the main challenge isn’t about solving problems from what we already know as a community, but about how to tackle issues from what we collectively don’t know.

You can only get this kind of thing by working it out with other practitioners, and conferences are great places to do that.

Engaging with the wider conversation

There is a tendency of assuming something had been codified after it has been published in some form or practiced more widely – the more popular, the more ‘permanent’ its effects. It’s far better to understand the wider conversation that is taking place between influencers, and the work that goes on between them.

At DIBI, speakers like Inayaili de León, Jeremy Keith, Faruk Ates and Jeffrey Zeldman all made references to the history and progression of digital (publishing, web, devices, teams…) to establish the context in which we *ought* to think about digital. So although they each delivered different talks, their overall message was the same – that the web has now matured and a huge re-thinking is in order.

Missing the wider conversation is really about missing the plot entirely, because the wider conversation (in the case of DIBI) explains why we had the web in the first place, how it has become what it is today, and where is it trying to get to. Skip that, and all you get is a dumbed down instruction book on how to code HTML5. That’s not what you come to a conference for.

Understanding UX across horizons

Conferences like UX Hong Kong and UX Lisbon are great for meeting an international crowd. Everyone has a different story to tell about how they got into UX and it varies per country, locale and city.

I think this is important since we’re increasingly designing for a far wider audience now. This isn’t just about solving design problems, but also about how clients in different countries perceive the value of UX, and how designers adapt their practices to the local culture and market demands.

This challenges us to rethink our own approaches – are our designs really fit for purpose? Is there such a thing as a universal design language? How do we ensure that we communicate design effectively across borders and cultures?

Being human

Conferences shouldn’t feel sterile and mechanical but it occasionally does. No one’s really at fault but it does take a lot of empathy, hospitality, encouragement, patience and candidness for attendees to feel welcome and in good spirits.

By all means, organizers should consider hygiene aspects such as the registration process and fun stuff like the schwag bag, but I think it comes down to the fact that practitioners are making a sacrifice to be with other practitioners, regardless of rank, background, specialism, principle or agenda.

Plus, I try to stick to conferences that allow me to be myself. And I suppose this is self-selecting that certain conferences tend to attract a certain crowd, but it’s better when people get along.

So, yes – I feel there are good reasons to be a conference junkie – however I think setting the right expectations, picturing the broader context, preparing to meet people, and a dose of humility and empathy can make a big difference in the conference experience and how one is ultimately enriched from it.

About a year ago, Joe Lanman had an idea to gather a few people who weren’t officially UX designers but were trying to build it into their work and organizations. At the time, I was working at a startup and I was doing everything from user research all the way to the production code. One of the group’s first members, Jeff van Campen, got me into Start UX along with a few others – Francis Norton, Nick Smith, Rob Enslin, and Basheera Khan, who were all interested in getting UX into organizations and influencing change.

We’ve been meeting informally since then to talk about our experiences (war stories) about getting UX into our work and organizations. I’ve been extremely grateful to have these friends to share with, bounce ideas off, and rant to whenever I needed an outlet, some help or support, even another perspective.

The benefit of having a group of people like this isn’t just about learning from each other, but about challenging each other to do what’s worth doing. It’s like peer-coaching.

A year has passed since Start UX first got off the ground, and even though some of us have moved on to dedicated UX roles, the journey still continues and the relationships have grown more mature and valuable. So, I think the spirit of Start UX is about challenging, encouraging, learning from, and growing with one another – like apprentices in a guild.

I highly encourage other practitioners to start their own version of Start UX. If you’re interested in starting one, here are some loose guidelines that may be useful to you and your group:

• keep the group to about 10-12 people, with each meeting made up of about 5-7 people (not everyone will make it at all times) – this keeps the group more intimate and allow for better sharing and social cohesion
• keep to the same group members, so that the members will really get to know each other and each member’s issues over time
• use google groups or something similar to facilitate discussion online, plan meetups, etc.
• for the meetup: find a spot that’s conducive for discussion, has enough room to support a meeting space, and refreshments
• choosing a meeting topic can help scope discussions (e.g. we had a meeting about deliverables once)

Also, make sure to share it with the wider community. That’s one thing our group has failed to do, but that’s going to change -  starting with this blog post. :)

When I first got wind of Global Service Jam back in January, I got really excited that a service design unconference was coming to town. I was desperate to get on board so I tuned into GSJ via twitter and kept a watchful eye on organisers, news, and making sure I got a ticket when the time came.

And now the weekend’s over and I’m not quite sure how to put it – Global Service Jam has certainly been a very memorable design jam event for me, but I think I’m left with more questions than I had before about service design and I’m now really wondering if it isn’t really all that different from UX.

Firstly, I have to be honest that my team wasn’t made up of service designers. It would’ve been interesting to gain some insight into how a service designer would’ve approached the problem. In fact, it would’ve been helpful to be given some tips on how to approach service design if you were, say, from an information architecture background or even an interior design background (as one of our team members did).

So over the weekend, “service design” felt to us like it was UX except with a larger scope… it felt like many groups went down the route of not being able to scope an idea, and it felt like we could’ve spent more time focusing on the design process than trying to brainstorm ideas.

I certainly cannot fault the organizers, sponsors, and mentors for being such an amazing, energized, and cooperative team. Two mentors that stood out for me were Belina Raffy, through her energetic improv activities, and Robin Pharoah, who really helped us get to grips with our service idea of helping teens speak out to the wider community.

It has certainly been one of the most energized design events I have ever been to. Design Jam 1 was pretty energetic and UXCampLondon was as well – but it the combination of the 2-hour review sessions, the full weekend span, the frenzied “times up” bell, improv ice breakers, Shoreditch + Brick Lane, the uber-ambiguous “superhero” theme, and the personalies combined that truly set itself up as the craziest design jam in the world (so far).

So, if I’m right, I’ve successfully the 1st design jam ever organized and now, the craziest design jam ever organized.

In the end – I took a way the fact that designing for services takes up way more effort than designing for an app or a website, and it forces you to really dig deep, go far out, and really engage with people (or find good research that has). All the teams who put up commendable effort did all this and it was encouraging and inspiring to see their work, even if the service outcomes weren’t as comprehensive or pragmatic.

OK so in the end I guess we did end up with a service after all.

I find it surreal that I only got back from Hong Kong the morning two days ago, and that it has only been 4 days since UX Hong Kong. Maybe it’s because I feel there’s a lot to digest and I’m still experiencing the conference high, which I think is a good thing. I’ve certainly been in conferences where I’ve felt really deflated, as though the event was a big party and everyone had to go back to their scheduled lives -  it hasn’t been so with UXHK… at least not yet.

Why UX Hong Kong?

UX Hong Kong is the first UX conference (AFAIK) ever held at this scale in Hong Kong. There have been several UX conferences in China (warning: link may be reported as an attack site) and Australia of this sort, but none in Hong Kong until now. I think UXHK, befitting its political and cultural context, sits between the East and the West; and provides a venue for globally-minded, Asia-aware practitioners to meet and exchange views about the state of UX from this Eastern melting pot.

It has managed to attract a diverse list of attendees, such as:

• HK-based practitioners and companies looking to expand and improve themselves
• Foreign companies and freelance consultants interested in Asia as a market
• Foreign and local companies looking to recruit promising candidates
• UX practitioners looking to HK as a potential base (e.g. born in HK but working abroad, dimsum lovers, etc.)
• IxD/design students from HK educational institutions

The conference was organized by Apogee HK (Daniel Szuc, Josephine Wong), a well-respected UX consultancy both locally and abroad.

Talks & Workshops

The format of the conference was a basic presentation-followed-by-workshop format, with four speakers each giving a high-level presentation of a chosen topic to a full audience, followed by a half-day workshop with registered attendees.

I felt the selection of topics were fairly varied, which was good. Steve Portigal focused on the topic of delivering real value from UX research, Rachel Hinman on what I call a-really-good-approach-to-designing-for-mobile,  Steve “doc” Baty and Janna DeVylder on practical means of materializing UX strateg(ies) even/especially without a centralized UX approach, and Gerry Gaffney on the essence of UX and getting to grips with the fundamentals.

I liked the no-nonsense, anti-bullshit approach – I think UX has gotten discredit for being some fluffy stuff because of misrepresentation (uxmovement.com?) and misunderstanding, so I’m happy to say that even experienced practitioners got some real meat from the sessions.

Since I only attended the Experience Strategy workshop, I can only summarize from that experience:

• a strategy is intended for decision making (my take: if you can’t make a decision from a known strategy, it probably isn’t a good strategy)
• deep and broad understanding is required – ask the right questions and then brainstorm the answers exhaustively to build rich models of the context, environment, business needs, etc.
• illustrate the synthesis of those models through visualization tools such as experience maps, storyboards, pain points, and so on – by all means, map those against each other to find correlations and cohesion
• Always, always, always consider the broader context of what users go through – illustrate it, discuss it, map it out – don’t treat it lightly, because it’s easy and common to sidetrack (I made that mistake too, even in the workshop)

Grokking the Event

In all fairness, UX Hong Kong wasn’t a major UX conference. It was intended to be a fairly intimate, practical event for UX professionals, and I think they succeeded very well. I was happy to get to chat with all the speakers during the conference day and the dimsum + informal excursion the following day, plus meeting fellow practitioners from Singapore, Japan, China and other places was exceptionally invaluable. While I love being in London’s amazing UX scene, it was really nice to meet some fresh faces and build rapport with them. At the same time, the event gave me a chance to experience Hong Kong a little bit more than if I was at a typical stay-in conference. Some of us even got a short guided tour of HK culture by Calvin Chan, who was one of the attendees!

I must say, however, that serving fried rice, kai lan with oyster sauce, and roast pork first BEFORE siu mai, har gau, cheung fun, and char siu bao is not very representative of proper HK dim sum… otherwise, I had absolutely no regrets attending UX Hong Kong and would highly recommend attendance and/or re-attendance of next year’s UX Hong Kong 2012.

photo credits: yeungfeifei, szuc

After 5 pages of sketchnotes, I’m still not done yet. The sketchnotes have certainly helped me digest and really synthesize the talks – it’s almost like being there, plus I can do background research about the speakers and certain topics at my leisure. I’m so glad that people are putting all this stuff out. If I don’t manage to get to Dublin for Interaction 12, I won’t know what to do with myself.

Why?

I’ve been keen on improving my presentation skills (I hear it’s a good thing for UX designers), so I jumped at the chance to present when Lee McIvor announced LightingUX needed some speakers. I’ve given talks before, but it felt a lot harder speaking to my friends from the UX community. I was concerned that my talk wouldn’t be relevant, unique, or entertaining — in the end, I decided all this worrying got me nowhere, and went ahead with the developer-to-UX-designer idea.

I felt some UX folk would benefit from seeing things from a developer’s perspective. I also felt that while there’s much general advice about becoming a UX designer, no one has really shared their experiences publicly. Finally, I wanted to know how other people would respond to my talk in order to improve/learn/synthesize/etc.

How?

It took me about 24 hours in total to prepare for this talk. 5 minutes isn’t a lot of presentation, but it’s good to dive deep during prep. I started out getting philosophical and started brainstorming thoughts about the essence of what made developers different than designers, but that fizzled out quickly because I felt it would be hard to do in 5 minutes. I also scoured the internet looking to see if other people had similar experiences, but that didn’t help me focus my talk very much.

I posted a message on twitter asking what others would like to learn from my talk, and got some interesting responses:

• @myddelton – re: your talk. is it an advantage or disadvantage to know about practical coding constraints when doing UX design?
• @mikejthompson – Do you see your technical knowledge of what’s possible as limiting your creativity or ensuring the relevance of your work?
• @francisnorton – How to avoid the trap of premature commitment? As a coder, I want to start coding; as a designer I need to keep the options open.
• @futureshape – do you still catch yourself thinking of the development impact of what you design? I know I sometimes do
• @ifenn – How has your mindset changed? Do you approach/think about things differently? How?

I knew I couldn’t address everything in a 5 minute talk, so in the end I examined deeeeeep inside my gut and asked myself what it was that made the biggest difference for me, and what were the major paradigm shifts I experienced since doing UX full-time (it’s very different than doing it while being a dev). I came up with this one-pager of prep notes:

My main point was to highlight the fact that what specific things made a difference for me:

• Seth Godin’s AMAL book left an impression that led me to seek out more not-so-tech related stuff.
• About Face 3 – it was practical enough for me as a developer to not just apply it but teach others how to apply it as well (JJG’s Elements didn’t cut it although it’s a good book)
• The UX community – I felt I didn’t do that slide justice. There were specific names I wanted to mention (Alex Baxevanis, Ian Fenn, Tom Coombs, and the StartUX crew) but I felt it would kill the pace of the talk.

With the list of changes a.k.a. the paradigm shift after becoming a designer, I summarized it to these three main points:

• Big Picture thinking – much more holistic as opposed to complex like software architecture, scalability, etc.
• Creative work requires creative methods – learning that the screen is extremely limited, and that the critical part of the process is about thinking, not creating (e.g. wireframing).
• Communicating my work well became a lot more important (though talking code to non-dev people is usually unnecessary and leads to social ackwardness).

The Glue Thinking thing just came to me as a way to summarize the balance between architecture, making things work well, and delight.

Lessons

I screwed up a little on the 2nd last slide and thought I could’ve done a better ending. I think some people liked the Glue Thinking thing (especially the part about getting users high), so I should’ve played that up a bit more. I think I got a bit too self-conscious towards the end after I realized I’d gone over a little bit at the 3 minute mark. I got a bit sensitive when Cennydd made a remark about “staring at screens” just before he started his talk but I’m sure it was just me.

I was surprised to hear other people got some benefit from the talk. Johanna said she was happy that Design Jam had impacted me (she’s one of the local champions). Martin Belam, who does some really amazing work at the Guardian, came up to me after the talk and shared his comments (and made a blog post too). Others tweeted about the Glue Thinking thing. I was really touched – just the comments made it worth it.

Overall it was a good experience and I’m glad I got the opportunity to do the talk. I’m looking forward to the next opportunity and have a few ideas in mind. It certainly forces you to be critical about your work, and that’s what I like about it – that my work can be validated because it should be validated.

I encourage others to do the same.

p.s. The “drunken robotscape wallpaper paper-prototype mural” and the “epic win dragon” on the first and last slides were the awesome handiwork of reyhan (I forgot to credit him in the slides).

How a developer became a ux designer

I was fortunate enough to get a ticket at the very first Design Jam today. It was put together as part of Mozilla Labs’ work to encourage ‘open design’, and runs in the spirit of developer ‘hack days‘, but mainly aimed at UX designers (the first of its kind?). I’m happy to say the event was successful in generating a lot of conversations, getting involvment from the local UX community and beyond, and getting people excited about UX.

I was looking forward to seeing how other designers approached UX, looking to gain insight and value from other practitioners’ work. Although I expected many more UX people to be involved, there weren’t many experienced UX practitioners who participated. Still, I learnt a lot from my teammates who came from varied backgrounds (dev, research assistant, comms, anthropology, veteran generalist).

Here are some of the positive points from my experience with Design Jam:

1. It’s a whole level of experience doing design itself, as opposed to learning about it from books and events. Design Jam succeeded very well here.
2. There was good diversity of skills - many people I’ve never met before, and certainly had the pleasure to work with. We all learnt how good design could take place with the right conditions and environment.
3. Mentors - having them around provided a real yardstick and that extra polish and validation to our work. I was happy that Leisa Reichelt and Ivanka Majic came along to assist.
4. The space - kudos to City University and the organizers for setting up and providing the space needed to do the work. It was perfect.
5. Equipment, tools, etc. – apart from some minor glitches with the projector, I felt there were enough stickies, post-its, etc. although I did bring along my own design kit (instead of a laptop, like everyone else did).
6. The organizers (@johannakoll, @joelanman, @cyberdees, @bobbywatson, Kate from City Uni) were really helpful, went out of their way to get us coffee, and worked their asses off to make this happen.

I think some improvements can be made in future runs of Design Jam:

1. Incentivize more experienced UX practitioners to participate. I certainly saw many people hungry to learn about UX, and it’s not just about having the ability to create personas, using a UX process or doing user research. An experienced practitioner can make a real difference in how all that gets synthesized.
2. It would’ve been better if we had more time for reflection and learning. I felt there were many people, some of which were new to UX, who could’ve given their thoughts and opinions about their experience. It would’ve been much more valuable to gain those insights during the event.
3. The presentation phase could’ve benefitted from more structure. Having some sort of structure and time limit would encourage teams to focus and deliver a more compelling presentation, rather than a looser format of this-is-is-our-prototype-and-heres-how-we-got-there – keeping in mind that energy levels usually drop fast toward the end of these kinds of events.
4. It became a bit intrusive to edit the wiki while doing groupwork - it meant that occasionally one member of the team had to be disengaged from groupwork to focus on the wiki. While I appreciate the value of real-time conversation and updates, it could’ve been given a bit more thought – maybe allocate time for groups to do that rather than steal away precious group time.
5. For some reason, I feel it’s important to have good wall space do to UX design. There were teams that had to make do without ample space, but I guess no one seemed to complain.
6. It felt a bit harder to work without easy access to coffee (ok this is a bit out of place, but…). Thanks again to the wonderful organizers who went out of their way to get us takeaway coffee from a nearby cafe.

Some interesting highlights:

• Our levels of do – part of our conceptual map of the user’s re-finding activity.
• Our user research, done on twitter – complete with incentive for willing participants.
• Stephen Anderson’s Mental Notes cards came in handy.
• iPads as prototyping tool and makeshift powerpoint slides.
• Family friendly.
• Makeshift wall.
• Location-based piles.
• Design Jam wiki – thanks to @jeffvancampen.
• Our team, SevenHeaven.

I’m looking forward to the next one! Big applause to the organizers and sponsors (Mozilla, City University, Johnny Holland).