Letters from the Equator

Sometime late last year, I offered to organize uxcamplondon 2011 with the support of previous years’ team and a bit of help from my friends. I was determined to see it happen this year after I missed last year’s uxcamp due to an illness. After all, I had learnt a thing or two after volunteering [...]

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. [...]

This year I decided to attend more UX conferences, having fully made the transition into UX for good. The year kicked off with UX Hong Kong (which was amazing), followed by UX Lisbon in May, and just few weeks ago – the DIBI conference up in Newcastle. Every conference has its own strengths and general [...]

There’s a really vibrant UX community here in London, with a diverse range of activities and groups such as book clubs, talks, field trips, mentorship programs and the like. But there’s one type of meetup I’ve particularly gained a lot from, called Start UX. About a year ago, Joe Lanman had an idea to gather [...]

Jared Spool does it again. He explains how two important aspects that are key to successful design teams: Direct exposure to user observation of team members for at least 2 hours in six weeks Each team member has to be exposed directly to the users themselves. Teams that have dedicated user research professionals, who watch [...]

I just finished reading Giles Colborne’s “Simple and Usable” – a delightfully compact, practical and highly readable book about interaction design. I’m glad the book isn’t one of those books that tries to solve everything about interaction design. Instead, it’s a book from a designer telling stories about his experiences solving design problems to someone [...]

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 [...]

When I was studying the HCI course at UCL, we had a module known as “Design Tools and Techniques” (it’s now been changed/modified to “Design Practice”), which provided an overview of design that looked like this: The Design Problem Requirements, Scenarios & Task Analysis Prototyping Sketching Design Judgements Visual Design Visual Communication Interfaces Personas If [...]

I have a problem in that I find it hard to do any kind of work in which I see no point in doing, and this happens a lot with UX documents. Even when I get rewarded for doing it, it’s hard for me to work on something without understanding the purpose and goal of [...]

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 [...]