November 2018: The UX of Mobile Autonomous Robotics, with Clearpath

October 2018: Artificial Intelligence on screen and in reality, with Chris Noessel

After a September filled with UX goodness in Waterloo Region, this month we have a very cool special guest speaking on a topic that is simultaneously lighter and dead serious.

Most people know about AI through movies and TV shows. This one has an unblinking, red eye. That one crushes human skulls under its metal—and humanoid—foot. But how does the AI seen on screen match up with the science of AI? How does what you’ve seen color the way you think about it? How optimistic you are? What you think should be done, and how you would vote on AI policy? Join Chris Noessel, keeper of scifiinterfaces.com, as he explains what screen AI aligns with the science, what is pure fiction, and what we should be telling ourselves but aren’t.

Please register for this free event

Thursday October 18, 2018
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Communitech Hub, 2nd floor
[View on Google Maps]

September 2018: Charting the Course — Building Effective Strategic Partnerships

This month, we’re presenting a special edition of uxWaterloo as a part of Fluxible Meetups!

As user experience professionals, we are uniquely positioned to drive product strategy through deep understanding of the needs of the people who use our products. In this talk, Google’s Meagan Timney will share some stories of how she’s developed successful long term relationships with cross-functional teams and enabled UX to be an effective partner in developing product and organizational vision and strategy. She’ll discuss some of the most common barriers and challenges, what’s worked (and what hasn’t), as well as how to be effective when you’re the sole UX voice on a team, working remotely, or constrained by ambitious timelines and limited resources.

Meagan Timney is a London, Ontario native and a creative at heart. After completing her PhD in English Literature and a postdoc in Digital Humanities 8 years ago, her path led her to the Bay Area and the field of UX, where she’s worn many hats: designer, researcher, and manager, at small agencies, silicon valley startups, and now Google.

Please register for this free event

Thursday September 20, 2018
7:00 to 8:30 pm
Google Kitchener-Waterloo
51 Breithaupt Street
Kitchener, ON

August 2018: Informal Pub Meetup

Hello UXers! Join us for the 2nd instalment of the Summer patio edition of uxWaterloo. Come out to Abe Erb in Waterloo, have a drink and enjoy some like-minded company. The event will be informal, where you can meet and learn what others are working on or just how they’re spending their precious Summer time.

See you there!

Please register for this free event

Thursday Aug 16, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Abe Erb Brewing
15 King Street South, Uptown Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario

July 2018: Informal Pub Meetup

In what is now a beloved summer tradition, it’s time to replace energizing presentations and deep UX thoughts with a lighter event befitting the season. Let’s savour that summer feeling with a July uxWaterloo session that features informal talk, some of it even UX-related, and drinks. As befits any self-respecting tradition, we do this every July and August and the laid-back atmosphere and conversations are a welcome addition to any summer schedule. Join us!

And, as has become a yearly tradition, count on hearing an update on Fluxible 2018, Canada’s UX Festival! You’ve been warned…

Please register for this free event

Thursday July 27, 2017
5:30 to 7:00 pm
Abe Erb Brewing
15 King Street South, Uptown Waterloo
Waterloo, Ontario

June 2018: Soft Skills Are Hard, with Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal is no stranger to Waterloo Region, having spoken at the second edition of Fluxible back in 2013, and again in 2015. Now, through the miracle of video calling, Steve joins us at uxWaterloo to help navigate the potentially tricky skills of communication and collaboration.

Working successfully in UX entails communicating and collaborating with a diverse range of individuals in other geographies, organizations and disciplines. But we’re people first and workers second. We’ll take a hard look at what it really takes for people to get work done — working with colleagues, leaders, and users — and trying to deal better with ourselves! These are the skills we know we need, but we rarely spend time or effort to develop.

Note that Steve will be presenting remotely for this event, through the miracle of the internet-enabled transmission of sound and images.

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

Please register for this free event

Note the special day this month!

Wednesday June 13, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

May 2018: How FreshBooks persuaded its customers to accept radical change

How do you persuade your customers to try your new product when they’re already pretty happy with what they’ve got? How do you get them to migrate to a new product that, technically, has fewer features? How do you overcome the dreaded “switching cost,” the pain of learning something completely new?

In this talk, Aaron Wright and Jeff Kraemer will detail how they researched migration experiences (which are usually terrible), explored UX designs using a lean UX process, and ultimately launched a migration experience that lives up to FreshBooks’ mantra: “Execute extraordinary experiences every day.”

In 2014, FreshBooks launched an ambitious, secret project to reinvent itself—a complete redesign and rebuilding of its flagship product, a cloud accounting application used by over five million people. The old product was saddled with both technical and UX debt, and we just weren’t able to deliver what our customers needed quickly enough.

After two years of testing and iterating in weekly UX sprints, we were confident that the new product was a much better experience for users. But: it had fewer features. And the first thing we learned when we asked customers what they expected from a new FreshBooks was “more features!”

So, we had a challenge: we needed to persuade our customers to leave a product they generally loved, move to a new one with fewer features, and avoid making it another awful migration experience.

We’ll explain how we researched and designed that experience, list some lessons we learned, and offer key takeaways for anyone planning to introduce their users to a radical change.

Bios:

Aaron Wright:

I stumbled into the field of UX while pursuing a degree in Graphic Design at York University. Originally just trying hone my web design and app-building skills, I soon learned that there was, in fact, an entire field devoted to the study of user experience itself and immediately changed focus. And I haven’t looked back. I’m now a UX Designer at FreshBooks since 2012, livin’ the dream of taming complexity and trying to make boring work (like accounting) as close to fun as humanly possible.

Jeff Kraemer:

I ran my first usability test back in 2001; this was before screen-recording software, so recording the test meant pointing a VHS videocamera at the screen. Since then, I’ve spent time specializing in content strategy and instructional design, but I really love being a UX generalist. Previously at Workopolis and Usability Matters, I am now Principal UX Designer at FreshBooks.

Please register for this free event

Thursday May 24, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

April 2018: It’s time to start designing for democracy, with Dana Chisnell

This month, we’re excited to welcome past Fluxible speaker Dana Chisnell to uxWaterloo to share her insights and experiences trying to improve the voting process in the United States. Dana will be presenting to us remotely, a format that has worked well in previous sessions this season.

Dana’s talk will show how every great designed experience starts with the stories of individual humans.

At the Center for Civic Design, Dana and her team collected close to 1,000 stories from U.S. voters over 5 years. They used the stories to visualize and map the voting experience. This revealed two massive gaps in the process.

First, people who administer elections and voters have very different mental models on the process of voting.

The second gap was between privileged voters and burdened voters. These gaps explained why it’s harder than it should be to vote in the U.S.

The stories also showed that several policies that were meant to make things better had unintended consequences that actually make it worse. And just as in the private sector and across lots of different kinds of organizations, design research could have helped solve real problems without causing new ones.

It’s time to start designing for democracy.

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

Please register for this free event

Thursday April 19, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

March 2018: Beyond the Hype: Transformative Entrepreneurial and Intrapreneurial Design

This month, we’re excited to have speaker Karel Vredenburg of IBM Design join us.

From start-ups to large enterprises, everyone is talking about innovation, disruption, transformation, design thinking, iconic branding, signature experiences, as well as things like artificial intelligence, machine learning, audio interfaces, big data, IoT, VR, and AR. There’s a lot of hype, a lot of excitement, and a lot of money being spent but little focus on the fundamentals and what really makes a difference. We’ll briefly review the history of design and the interface to technology from the point of view of a 106 year old startup, IBM, and then explore the common transformation myths, and the key foundational ingredients for effective design transformation by examining entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial companies. We’ll also discuss the design challenges inherent in several new technologies and proposals to address them. We’ll finish up with an open discussion with the session attendees to solicit their ideas, thoughts, and feedback on the topics raised during the session.

Karel’s Bio

Karel has spent his professional career dealing with design, technology, human affect, cognition, and behavior primarily through the human interface to technology. His current interests are in advances in design practice, design-based organizational transformation, the innovation ecosystem (design school, business school, university, entrepreneur, and enterprise), and the ways in which technology can extend, optimize, and improve work, play, relationships, education, health, and overall fulfillment. He is director of design at IBM and responsible for IBM Design’s worldwide client programs and serves as the head of IBM Studios in Canada. He’s also Industry Professor at the DeGroote School of Business, the DeGroote Health Leadership Academy, and McMaster University. Karel joined IBM in 1988 after having done graduate studies, research, and teaching at the University of Toronto. He introduced User-Centered Design at IBM in 1993 and assumed a company-wide role in 1995 leading IBM’s community of designers, leading the development of design methods, languages, and technologies, and leading the design of the commercialization of the IBM Watson. In 2013, he introduced IBM Design Thinking to IBM product development laboratories worldwide and introduced a tailored version of it to IBM consulting services and technology services organizations worldwide in 2014 through 2016. Karel now leads the development and activation of IBM Design Thinking for client facing professionals worldwide in addition to providing leadership to IBM’s Canadian design studios. Karel is based in Toronto, blogs at karelvredenburg.com, hosts a podcast called Life Habits, and his social media coordinates include @karelvredenburg on Twitter and LinkedIn and @karelveganburg on Instagram.

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

Please register for this free event

Thursday March 15, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario

February 2018: Understanding problem spaces, with Indi Young

We’re delighted that past Fluxible speaker Indi Young will be joining us for a remote session on understanding problem spaces.

For Indi, the problem space is about understanding people and their larger purpose. Exploration of these spaces comes with letting go of thinking of solutions for a time. In todays presentation and discussion, Indi will outline what a problem space is, how to navigate the ambiguity of the problem space with empathy, and demonstrate techniques to explore problems and bring creative solutions. Join us, and bring along some questions for Indi.

Indi Young is the author of two books, Practical Empathy and Mental Models, and has presented at over 40 conferences worldwide — did we mention Fluxible? In 2001, Young co-founded Adaptive Path, a groundbreaking UX agency with the mission to transform communities through design. Young received her bachelors in computer science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. In her early projects, Young realized that there was a gap between what her team knew, as engineers and creators, and what people were trying to ultimately accomplish. Young’s career has been dedicated to closing this gap.

Please register for this free event

Thursday February 15, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario