UXPA NJ

From the January 11, 2013 email newsletter “Free User Experience Podcasts: Brought to you by User Interface Engineering”:

With so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices. This often is not the case.

Chris Risdon, Adaptive Path’s Lead Experience Designer, emphasizes that a customer’s journey is about their relationship with an organization, not these disparate experiences. Designing in silos creates an amnesiatic environment. Oftentimes, the different parts of an organization aren’t talking to each other, subjecting a user to redundant experiences. For example, when a customer repeats account or service information to a call center representative after having already entered it into an automated system.

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From the January 11, 2013 “Free User Experience Podcasts: Brought to you by User Interface Engineering”:

Responsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.

A huge part of mobile experience is performance. Though connectivity speeds are increasing on mobile, shrinking your desktop site to fit on a mobile screen isn’t the best option. Jason says that this is an often overlooked aspect of responsive design. Most of the concern is around how a site renders on various devices, but the importance should fall on the entire experience.

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From the last update I sent in early December – All, it’s hard to believe the year is almost over. It feels like I am only just now coming up to take a breath since the “interface” information fair back in mid-November. FYI the event was a definite success, yielding ~30 student email addresses and many good conversations and connections. You can find a photo gallery of the event in the prior post to this. Before I continue however, a few important announcements for the new year!

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I’ve been thinking about the rest of my year as president, and our current lack of an official “board”. In as short of a space as possible, I want to outline my plan through next summer.

1. January 2013 – run an “Entry Level UX” event, with either Creative Group or NTT Data or both. This would not solely be targeted to Rutgers students, as there are many current members who come from different backgrounds and often ask at meetings “how do I get in??”.

2. March 2013 – second run of the “interface” UX information fair at Rutgers University. I hope to gain sponsorship and partner with ~4 corporations to create a larger, more interactive fair with actual booths, a better poster session, video content, and more of our members involved as representatives of their respective job titles.

3. May 2013 – hold a one-day mini-conference with ~4 speakers/sessions! This might work better in early June, and perhaps on a Saturday. Maybe follow the model of Asbury Agile. At the conference, priced around $30, each attendee would become a member of UXPA NJ for the year, and at the end we would have a vote (with quorum) to modify the bylaws (finally) and elect new positions for July 2013-June 2014 including President, Vice President, Secretary/Treasurer, Webby Person, Job Board Manager, and as many other volunteer positions as we can fill.

4. Per the conference fee, I would also like to address the issue of determining who is in fact an “active” member of the chapter by implementing a $12 annual fee (included in conference registration fee), payable either as $6 for 1/2 year or $12 for 1 year. PayPal can manage it as a subscription so we can start to build up a steadily growing emergency fund to cover baseline costs like hosting and food, if nothing else.

While fully recognizing the financial situation of many who are unemployed, this would not preclude anyone from attending meetings, but simply from being an “active member” of the chapter which implies voting rights, eligibility for being an officer (you must also be an official UXPA dues-paying member to hold a position), and other official etceteras.

I’m certainly open to feedback! But from an organizational standpoint, I think that is where we are at and the best way to address the issues we face now so we can move forward.

5. We will continue developing our relationship with Rutgers by establishing a Rutgers “section” of UXPA NJ which will have mirror positions of President, Vice President, and Secretary/Treasurer. This will give students something to put on their resumes, and give them practice in participating in a formal organization with some amount of responsibility. Giving them room to work independently means that they may schedule their own meetings and events aside from the main UXPA NJ meetings, with an obvious focus on the student population and their own needs, wants and preferences. This may in the future turn into an actual funded student organization, but that would be up to the section president to make happen.

If anyone has any spare cycles, the things we could use most in terms of help right now are: planning for the January event, communicating with the Rutgers students who signed up at the UX info fair, and generating content (such as an event write-up of the information fair) for the website.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing your comments!
Ben Bakelaar, President, UXPA NJ