User eXperience or UX has to be one of the buzz words of the year, and it seems when it comes to creating the ultimate surfing experience everyone from marketing agencies and pr people to designers and developers wants to get in on the act.

Such a hot topic, had to the the subject of a Supermondays session soon or later, and Joanne Richardson of Orange Bus certainly did it justice this month. Not only did Joanne curate the session, arranging talks from Graham Morely of graphic.ly and Th_nk’s Director of Ux, Lee Alan, but she also presented herself, apparently presenting for the first time, although you wouldn’t have guessed it from her delivery to another full house, this time at Gateshead Colleges Baltic Campus.

The general messages that came from all three speakers was that User eXperience didn’t have to be expensive, but that it should be considered, and that it should be an  iterative process, that is to say that it should be reconsidered and revised after each phase of design and development.

For me it was really refreshing to hear the speakers talking about adapting and simplifying, and avoiding feature creep.  These days its all to common to see companies adding more and more bells and whistles to sites, without considering whether they actually add value to the user.

I’m going to leave you with Joanne’s closing comments UX is about user stories and about creating “Happy Experiences”, and a reminder from the team that if you missed out on Supermonday this month, then you have a second chance to get out and do a bit of social networking with SuperSummer this Thursday.

Presentations: Start up UX – Graham Morley , A day in the life of a UX designer – Joanne Richardson

Book Recommendations: The Design of Everyday Things - Donald Norman , Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks - Luke Wroblewski , Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability – Steve Krug ,

Online Resources: pivottracker , patterntap , iconfinder , konigi

I booked my  TEDx Newcastle ticket, based solely on the strength of the TED brand and my experience of what Herb Kim and his Codework’s team had done with the Thinking Digital Conference. To be honest, I’d booked the first day tickets were available and not had a chance to look back at the site to see which speakers had been confirmed or what they were going to talk about. I’d heard on twitter that the bgroup’s Chris Stainthorpe was doing something, as was UX expert Andy Budd, but that was about all I knew.

TEDx North

If you’re not familiar with TED, firstly where have you been the last few years? (its a pretty big conference!) but let me tell you a little about it, it stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, and its about as close as you get to a religion in the tech community. It started in Long Beach, California in 1984 and has grown to include a second annual global conference in Oxford. The conference in fact has been so popular that they started making the talks freely available to everyone via the internet under the tag line “ideas worth spreading”. Thousand of people now watch these files online each day, but the organizers realize that watching them online individually wasn’t the same as watching them within a social setting, so they came up with the idea of TEDx where the video could be watched communally on a big screen with friends and colleagues, the way the talk would have originally been delivered. TED licensed the rights to hold independently organized TEDx events around the world, mixing watching classic archive TED talks on the big screen and hearing new speakers live. These new talks are then in turn added to the archive to be watched around the world. Anyway here a short video from the organisers;

Now that you know about TEDx,  you’re probably wondering about how TEDxNewcastle went. Well it was held at the Tyneside cinema, one of my favorite venue in the region which was a great start! The food at the tyneside is usually pretty good, as is the quality of their AV, and the odd little bar on the stairs kind of pushes everyone together, so its not bad for networking either. Having been to a few events this year, I found myself amongst friends,which was nice, but I also met a few people that i’d only ever spoken to over twitter and a few new faces as well.

For me it was an exceptional event as many of the speakers talked about UX or user experience. UX is an area close to my heart, as you probably gathered i work in a public art gallery, and we take user experience very seriously, regularly looking at our own service offering and how we can improve it. What inspired me, was how some of the ways that the speakers had taken this on board and found ways to express it visually, or to influence users perceptions and openness to UX.
Chris Skip did an interesting talk on privacy, emphasizing that while its great to share that you need to at least consider what the implications of sharing your data, images and video may be. Its very easy to give away enough for your identity to be stolen and once something is shared its pretty tough to get it back, so share but do it sensibly. I think my favourite quote from his presentation was to be “beware geeks with gift” – very true Chris!

Herb Kim and Chris Stainthorpe discussing privacy

The conference ended with the great news that Herb had also secured a licence for an event next year probably around June in Gateshead.

Related posts: TEDxNewcastle Am I being brainwashed
Related photos: davidcoxon on flickr