The great and the good descended on Bristol last Friday for the first of hopefully many UX Bristol events. The event was organised by Dave Ellender, James Chudley and Stuart Church and grew out of the Bristol Usability Group.
The event was the first of its kind in Bristol and you would never have guessed it was the first event organised by the guys – the only hitch was me falling of my bike in the rain on the way home (it looks worse than it was).
I volunteered for the day but still managed to catch some great sessions. I enjoyed the format of all the sessions which were workshop based with some presentation rather just pure presentations or round tables. Highlights were…
The Sketching for UX designers workshop from Eva-Lotta Lamm from which I’ve added Ed Emberley’s: Make a World to my Amazon wishlist (although perhaps not the new version at £84).
An insightful session from Leisa Reichelt on Strategic User Experience which encouraged businesses to clearly identify their business strategy before expecting digital to miraculously solve everything. Leisa suggested a clear elevator pitch sentence structure, as proposed by Marty Neumeier:
“Our brand is the …… that …… ”
Have a clearly defined statement of that ilk allows all later decisions and discussions to be framed in that light. I’m going to be getting hold of this ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands following the session.
The last main session I attended was from Bristol’s own Fergus Roche on How to Run a User-Centred Requirements-Gathering Workshop. Having done a fair bit of teaching in the past a lot of it was fairly familiar (but very useful to be refreshed on) and the final section on planning poker was excellent. I’ve used this for estimating project timings before but Ferg added the extra element of not basing the units on time but on effort. Effort can then be translated back into timing at a later point. Nice.
The day finished with several short talks from Ian Fenn, Sam Menter, Steve Cable and Mark Skinner which were short, sweet and interesting – perfect after a long day of thinking and listening.
Well done to the organisers and I’ll definitely be signing up to volunteer again for the next one.
