Austin UPA is hosting a panel discussion where we will discuss technologies such as Silverback, ClickTale, WebEx, VMware, Morae and UserVue.  Their strengths and weaknesses will be covered as well as the impact they had on the research findings, with the clients, and with the designers.

Come hear our panelists share their experiences, and come share your own.  There will be plenty of time for open discussion.

PANELISTS

Amy L. E. Jones is Senior User Researcher at Convio, Inc, a software as a service company serving the nonprofit community.  She is also a co-founder of AustinUX, a loose affiliation of user experience professionals in Austin area.  As a user researcher, Amy sees her primary job as creating a sense of empathy between those who build software and those who use it.

Will Meurer is a UI Developer for Mumboe, where he does user research, interaction design, and UI implementation. He previously worked for Idera, in Houston, TX, and earned an MS in Information Studies from the UT Austin School of Information.

Tanya Payne currently holds the role of usability test lead at OpenText (was Vignette).   She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology and has worked in the usability profession for around 15 years where she’s worked as a consultant, contractor and permanent employee for hardware, software and telco companies.

AGENDA

7:00 - 7:30 Arrival and Networking

7:30 - 9:00 Panel and Open Discussion

EVENT DETAILS

When: Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Where: Texas Coworking, 200 E. 6th Street (3rd Floor of the Hannig Row Building), directly above B.D. Riley’s Pub

RSVP: http://austinupa.ning.com/events/a-panel-discussion-on-user (Note: If you haven’t signed up on the Austin UPA website, then you’ll need to - the link is on the upper right, and it’s free.)

Parking is available on the street (”Pay Station” spaces and metered spaces are free on weekdays after 5:30pm) and in nearby surface lots and garages. Street parking on Brazos between 4th & 6th, on 7th Street, and on San Jacinto between 7th and 5th are good bets.  Also see the map of Public Parking in Downtown Austin on Texas Coworking’s site.

The Austin Chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) is looking to put together a panel discussion on user research technologies.  We’re looking for 3-4 panelists to speak on the topic.  Each panelist would provide a 5-10 minute presentation on technologies (think Balsamiq, Morae, GoToMeeting, etc.) in user research and the impact they had on the findings, with the clients, and with the designers.  The rest of the time would be set aside for questions, answers and discussion.

Please email AustinUPA@gmail.com by Wednesday March 17^th if you’re interested, and if not, please feel free to forward this on if you know of someone else who might be interested.  We’re looking at conducting the panel on April 6th .

Thanks!

Julie Lowe

Austin UPA President

The Austin Center for Design exists to transform society through design and design education. This transformation occurs through the development of design knowledge directed towards all forms of social and humanitarian problems. The center explicitly tackles problems related to:

• Homelessness and transient housing solutions
• Healthcare access, affordability, and comprehension
• Nutrition, personal wellness, and consumption
• Education and job placement
• Poverty, as a general state of being
• Sustainability and environmental impact

The Center offers an innovative curriculum that repositions creative design education in the context of designing for the public sector. Students learn the interdisciplinary skills of creative design thinking, as applied to solving complicated problems of society and culture.

These skills broadly include divergent thinking, ideation, visualization, synthesis, prototyping, and the managing of complexity and data organization. Students use these skills to develop systems, services, products, and new business models that address pressing social issues.

Learn more at http://www.austincenterfordesign.com/

Senior User Experience Designer

Senior User Experience Designers generally work on software applications end-to-end, starting with user-centered design research, client goals, and product expert recommendations to develop initial requirements in conjunction with Product Managers, and then working with Engineering to take the application through paper prototyping, interaction modeling, low-fi and hi-fi mockups, user-testing of in-progress application development, and final usability and post-release user testing, all within an agile software development framework.

You should be passionate about customer satisfaction and customer success.

Apply online

Product Designer

Common Ground | Austin, TX

Overview of Product Designer Role:
The Product Designer plays a critical role in the development of new Common Ground products. Working hand-in-hand with Product Management the Product Designer will be responsible for defining the overall user experience (user interface and interactions) and developing detailed user stories describing the expected product capabilities. The UI design and associated user stories will then serve as the primary product requirements. With the initial requirements completed the Product Designer will work interactively with the engineering team in the production and delivery of the new functionality including direct assistance with the implementation of the user interface as needed.

Apply online

Sage is seeking a full time Interaction Designer/Software User Interface Designer for our campus in Austin, TX. You will be part of a team that is launching a new platform of web-based solutions for our award winning products.

Click the link below to apply:

http://careers-sage.icims.com/jobs/3044/job

]]> http://austinux.org/2009/10/27/job-at-sage-software/feed/ http://austinux.org/2009/09/14/stop-collaborate-and-listen-a-panel-discussion-about-communication/ http://austinux.org/2009/09/14/stop-collaborate-and-listen-a-panel-discussion-about-communication/#comments Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:01:48 +0000 amy http://austinux.org/?p=37 How do you communicate with stakeholders?  What about developers/implementers? What do you say, and what do you not say?  How do you create buy-in and get others to share your vision and get excited about it?

AustinUX and Austin UPA are hosting a panel discussion on collaboration & communication techniques that work.  Come and hear our panelists share their experiences, and come and share your own.

Tuesday, October 6th, 6:30 - 8:30, at Convio HQ in the Domain.    This is a free event, but space is limited.  Please RSVP online:

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/434397294

6:30 - 7:00:  Arrival and networking

7:00 - 8:30: Panel and open discussion

PANELISTS:

Edward Garana is the User Experience and Design Director of Hoover’s Online.  He leads a whip-smart design team and is responsible for the overall visual design and user experience of the Hoover’s site.

Jon Kolko is Associate Creative Director at frog design, and is the Editor-in-Chief of interactions magazine.  Besides working with entities that don’t believe in capital letters, Jon sits on the Board of Directors of IxDA, and is author of Thoughts on Interaction Design.

Paul Sherman is founder and principal consultant at ShermanUX.  He is a contributor to and editor of Usability Success Stories: How Organizations Improve by Making Easier-to-Use Software and Web Sites, and writes a regular column for the online user experience magazine UXmatters (UXmatters.com).

Robin Silberling has focused on user experience design for web applications and web sites for over a decade.  She has been on the forefront of interface design, working for both Apple and Netscape in the 1980s and 90s.  In this millennium, Robin currently serves as a Senior User Experience Designer at Open Text/Vignette software.

The panel will begin with four, brief presentations from local practitioners, describing what does and doesn’t work in there experience. Using the presentations to help frame the discussion, we’ll then spend the rest of the time answering questions, sharing strategies, and learning from each other.

Event information

• When: Wednesday, July 1 at 6:30 PM
• Where: Convio, 11501 Domain Drive, Suite 200, Austin, TX 78758 (map)

RSVP

Please RSVP using our listing on Eventbrite. Space is limited to 40 people.

Agenda

• 6:30 PM - Networking
• 7:00 PM - Introduction and panel presentations begin
• 7:40 PM - Open discussion
• 8:30 PM - Event ends

Speakers

• Jack Alford has been a usability practitioner at IBM for 29 years, after receiving a PhD in Human Experimental Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin.  Jack has worked at several IBM development labs, with responsibility for office software, operating systems, and system management user interfaces.   He is currently a user experience designer in the IBM Systems and Technology Group at IBM Austin, designing browser-based interfaces for several products that are in various stages of adoption of Agile methods, and is also a member of a Lean/Agile development process transformation team.  Jack is a member of UPA.  His non-work interests include sailing, organic gardening, and golf.
• Austin Govella has worked with agile methods since 2002. He is a user experience designer with Convio and co-authored the second edition of Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web with Christina Wodtke. He writes about better experience, better products, and better teams at his blog, Thinking and Making
• Hugh Morrow has been working on software GUIs for over 20 years, covering everything from tax software to enterprise dashboards. He currently works as a Senior UX Engineer at Borland, where the emphasis is on Agile development practices. Hugh’s background is in the design disciplines, but he is very involved in usability assessment efforts and is particularly interested in Contextual Inquiry as a means of gaining insight into user experience.
• Don Turnbull was an assistant professor with the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Don’s teaching and research focused on designing Web information architectures, information systems analysis, Information Retrieval the Semantic Web and Knowledge Management Systems.  In the nascent days of the World Wide Web, Don was the Lead Technical Architect at IBM Interactive Multimedia, working on the World Book/IBM Multimedia Encyclopedia and other large- scale information architecture design and development projects.  Don received his doctorate from the University of Toronto focusing on Knowledge Discovery (Data Mining) for Informetric and Behavioral Models of Web Use.

More info

For more info, please contact Amy Jones at ajones at convio dot com.

Come meet local interaction designers, usability researchers, and IAs.

I’m a technical writer, and I joined AustinUX because it seems that we shouldn’t forget to apply to documentation the same usability concepts that we use to improve user interfaces.  Obviously, not all of the recommendations can be ported into the documentation world exactly as intended for UIs, but especially with documentation moving away from a paper-based experience into an online one, it seems that tech writers should be paying attention to usability, too!

I’m hoping to get together a short article on documentation usability sometime in the next few months.  Of course, I was saying that a few months ago, so I’d recommend not to hold your breath.

Wendy Leiva

http://www.TheTechOfWriting.com