This week's meetup roundup

So I attended two meetups on UX design this week.

Web Design Best Practices and "Guiding Principles" for UX

The first was hosted by Noel Saw of LA/Pasadena Designers and concentrated on Best Practices for Web UX Design. About 20 people attended. Various approaches and tools were discussed.

photo credit Noel Saw

Take away points

• Have empathy for the user
• Really understand the problem before you try to solve it.
• Create an experience, not just a site.
• Beware of "featuritis". Just because you are capable of having something doesn't mean you should put it in.
• Content is key. Since this effects the structure and purpose of the site, it's important to get it from clients or help them develop it.

Potentially useful tools

Mockingbird for wireframing ( I personally prefer Balsamiq right now but I'll give this a try )

Hot Glue for wireframing and prototyping. A relatively new, flash based offering. Looks interesting.

Xscope is a paid tool someone mentioned that appears to be the desktop equivalent of the Web Developer toolbar. This overlays your desktop and adds extra design functionality. Whatever that means...haha

All in all, it was a nice experience and I met a lot of great people. Had a great conversation with Andy (I think that's right. I'm terrible with names.) on print design which gave me greater insight into the modern print process. He runs the coworking space Indie Desk in downtown where the meetup took place. Indie Desk is a spin off of Indie Printing.

Prototyping Meetup

The second was run by the The Los Angeles User Experience group at Coloft in Santa Monica. This was a huge meetup of around 120 people which is one of the largest I've been to outside of user groups and conferences.

photo credit Christian Sosa-Lanz

They had a panel of three speakers who gave their experiences on prototyping vs wireframing, the UX design process and various methods of dealing with client expectations and user testing.

Good quotes (although more like paraphrasing)

"Stay on task." Alexis Antonelli - regarding UX testing and not doing more than necessary to execute a test.

"Cause + Effect = Value. Site visitors need to be oriented to understand a site's value" - Steven Diebold

"I don't ak whether I should do protyping, I just go ahead and do it. It's part of my process" - Christian Sosa-Lanz

Take aways

The most important take away for me was Steven's perspective on various client approaches depending on type. Judges/Active clients versus Collaborative clients. Judges take a "show me and let's do it" approach. Collaborative clients are willing to examine and try prototyping and are generally more comfortable with the iterative/evolutionary development process (aka wireframing, prototyping, usability tests). Judge clients are quick decision makers and are more at ease jumping feet first into situations. These are the most challenging to get to buy into prototyping, since the prototyping process assumes that the best choice will be created using that process. On the other hand, once they commit to something, you have their full support.