First up we’ve got Rahul Choudhury (@rahul) and Martin Kool (@mrtnkl) flying over from the Netherlands to give us a talk on Q42‘s Handcraft, a web app that helps you create HTML prototypes.

Second up we’ve got Tara Etherington (@mspants) from Ribot giving a talk on Prototyping with Adobe Fireworks.

Third up we’ve got Kieron Leppard (@kieronleppard) from Sapient Nitro giving a talk on the prototyping for a recent project called “Share Happy”: an unusual vending designed to engage and entertain rather than sell. As Kieron will explain, traditional wireframing doesn’t really work in a project like this, and other approaches are needed.

Finally, we have Nate Bolt (@boltron), president of Bolt | Peters, co-author of Remote Research and designer of Ethnio, who will tell us the ins-and-outs of remote recruitment and research. A fun packed evening, for sure.

Talks will be 20 minutes long, giving you plenty of time to chat to the speakers, socialise and drink free beer. That’s right.

Please note: this event is in July. We are not doing an event in June.

Update: we’re delighted to announce that July’s event on Practical prototyping will be sponsored by Sapient Nitro, who are very kindly paying for the venue, beer and snacks!

Mat will be talking about his experiences implementing Agile and UX at the British Film Institute and the key things that UX practitioners need to consider when embarking on an Agile project. Mat will be coming from a UX/IA perspective rather than from an Agile one.

Mat is a freelance UX and Project Manager, you can find out more about him on his website or follow him at @mat_walker

Howard Sandford – UX benefits of using REST/Agile

Howard’s team built Linden Lab‘s billing engine with RESTful API interfaces for all the various clients, he will discuss how the team battled with SCRUM/Agile with teams across Europe, Singapore and the USA on a 1.5 year project, and how their back-end RESTful design helped the front-end guys deliver their presentation layer.

Follow Howard at @Howard_Sandford

Johanna Kollmann – UX & Product Owners

Johanna will share both her personal experience with Vodafone, and references to other expert practiotioners (eg Tim McCoy) with whom she’s been working on this topic.

Johanna works at EMC Consulting

You can follow Johanna at @johannakoll

Mark Plant – [talk title TBC]

[this talk will be announced later, on @uxbri]

Mark is Associate Director and Head of LabExperience at Lab49, London where he defines and designs interfaces for trading applications where 1 frequently means 1 million.

You can follow Mark: Blog, Tumblr, @uxplant

New to Agile/Scrum?

We’re assuming that most people will have a basic understanding of how Agile works so that the speakers won’t have to talk much about the process. That said, if you’re not au fait with agile you might find @hamids’ SCRUM in Under 10 Minutes video useful (scrum is a popular agile method).

Glenn Jones: What a UX Designer needs to know about Solr

Solr is a popular open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Glenn Jones’s talk will introduce Solr from a User Experience Designer’s point of view. It will take a look at how Solr’s faceted search can be used to design powerful language-based features:- from user-driven tagging to autocompetion. Also, the talk will try to answer the question of what kind of User Interfaces Solr tends to lends itself to. This is a fairly introductory talk aimed at a non-technical audience. You can follow Glenn on twitter at @glennjones

Tony Russell-Rose: User Experience Design at Endeca

Endeca was an early pioneer of faceted navigation systems, and made its name selling enterprise search and business intelligence applications. You’ve probably used Endeca’s search UIs on sites like dabs.com, hmv.com and autotrader.co.uk.

Tony Russell-Rose is User Experience Manager & Principal Consultant at Endeca. We haven’t yet had final confirmation on Tony’s talk topic, but it will most likely to relate to the
Endeca User Interface Design Pattern Library or the Dimensions of Search Experience. You can follow Tony on twitter at @tonygrr.

Possible third mystery speaker!

We might just be able to get a third speaker lined up in time. We’ll tweet about it on @uxbri and update this blog post when we find out more.

James Morse of Matchbox Mobile – Designing for Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7 introduces some new ideas and opportunities for designers. We will explore how Windows Phone 7 differs from other mobile platforms, and share our experiences and prototyping techniques in creating designs that fit this new platform and its clearly-defined design paradigm.

James has been designing for a wide range of disciplines for over 15 years.

Early in his career he began to focus on user interface and user experience design in the emerging PDA and smartphone markets. His work for clients such as Microsoft, Tesco, Motorola and Verizon put him at the forefront of small-screen user experience design. His designs have been seen and enjoyed by tens of thousands of professionals and consumers, including early adopters of the USA’s first Windows Mobile smartphone.

As Creative Director at Matchbox Mobile he continues to be driven to develop, adopt and improve best practices for handheld device user experiences, and his growing portfolio of work testifies to his unique experience and industry-leading skills in creating designs that bring out the best in every platform.

You can follow James on Twitter at @parlando

Robert Douglas of Ribot – Designing for multiple platforms

Rob will talk about designing across, and for, multiple touchscreen platforms using Ribot’s recent suite of Tesco apps as a case study. How do different form factors, operating systems, and interaction paradigms inform the design of real I-want-to-use-it-every-day apps? How do you take the constraints (and opportunities) of differing mobile devices and design interfaces that, for the user, feel like they belong on the device and as part of their life?

Robert Douglas is a UX designer that loves nothing more than prototyping and getting something real into peoples’ hands. He’s fairly new to mobile, coming from a web background where he most recently lead the Design & UX team at Rightmove. Since joining Ribot a year ago however, he’s worked on projects for Intel, Tesco and a number of other partners.

He’s interested in the future of mobile web/apps and how, as these devices pervade our society, we ensure they’re engaging, useful and usable.

You can follow Rob on Twitter at @anucreative

Trevor May and Tom Hume of Future Platforms – Launching on devices that don’t exist

You can follow Trevor on Twitter at @antikewl and Tom at @twhume

Part 1: X-Ray Listening and Elephant Whispering with Judy Rees

Judy Rees is known as The Elephant Whisperer because of her uncanny ability to probe beneath the surface, and encourage people to reveal their innermost thoughts and feelings. This information comes from the subconscious ‘elephant’ rather than the conscious ‘rider’ and drives at what people actually do (rather than what they say they intend to do).

Her approach draws on almost 20 years experience of news journalism, with surprising insights from the world of psychotherapy and coaching. She is the co-author of Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds, and creator of a new home study course “Intelligent Influence”. Judy has been introducing these techniques to the UX community for the last year, speaking at UXCamp London and at two London UX agencies.

Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds co-authored by Judy Rees

Part 2: UX Brighton community discussion

UX Brighton has been going for about two and a half years now and we’d like to hear your feedback on how it’s going, and especially to gather ideas for what we can do in future.

Judy has offered to lead the session and use some of the listening techniques discussed in her talk.

This is an opportunity to tell us what you need from UX Brighton, what issues you have with working as a UX practitioner and help us become more useful to you.

There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when almost everyone involved with UX research had a background in Psychology. Back in those days, the term “User Experience” didn’t really exist, and the nearest discipline was Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Back then, you learned about new developments in the field by reading long, boring looking photocopies of journal articles and conference proceedings. Things were different. There was a massive gulf between the theory-laden academic researchers and hands-on web designers.

I don’t for a minute want to go back to those days – the quality of design on the web was far lower. Most websites were ugly and hard to use. But, for all its flaws, the HCI community knew how to share research findings effectively. This knowledge has been massively diluted the transition from academia to industry.

When you read about UX research on the web these days, most reports have more in common with a press release than a piece of Psychology research. If it’s on a fashionable topic or if it’s reported by a famous figure, it’s reblogged and retweeted a vast number of times, without critical evaluation. This is bad.

In “proper” Psychology research, you always…

• Ensure the study is reproducible: you should report your study in such detail that anyone, anywhere can reproduce it and independently analyze it for its strengths and shortcomings. This is the cornerstone of all good research, and I can’t overstate its importance.
• Clearly explain all the shortcomings: you should never gloss over the weaknesses in your study design. In fact, you should focus in on them. It doesn’t matter if your study itself doesn’t deliver interesting patterns, so long as you explain what went wrong and the weaknesses in your experimental design. “Failed” studies are still very useful to read about, as your peers can learn from your mistakes.
• Define your variables: even industry standard terms like bounce rate are defined differently, depending on who you speak to.
• Share the data: interview transcripts, data logs, everything goes into an appendix or somewhere online where people can critique it. Never hide behind percentages, and never, ever dress up small-scale qualitative usability studies as more than they really are. Even if you use an eye tracker.
• Never cite a secondary source without reading the primary source: for example, if you want to refer to the famous Jam buying study in Barry Swartz’s Paradox of Choice, you go read the primary source (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000), critically evaluate it yourself, and then reference both primary and secondary sources in your write-up. It’s your responsibility to do this, to avoid misunderstandings being amplified and rebroadcast.

The fact is, UX researchers in industry are never going to follow all of these maxims, because they can’t. They’re NDAed or financially motivated to keep at least some of the details secret. They’re probably not even given the time to write up their work in this level of detail for internal use. This is the reality of industrial research, and I’m not arguing that it needs to change.

My point is that you need to be highly aware of the shortcomings of the information that’s shared in our industry. Many of us are living on a diet of press releases and ‘top ten tips’ articles. The “UX Myths” meme has gained some traction lately (mainly thanks to Zoltán Gócza & Zoltán Kollin), which is good, but you shouldn’t rely on soundbite articles to tell you why other soundbite articles are wrong. If you do this, you’ll always be on the back foot.

You may not consider yourself an Applied Psychologist, but if you’ve ever designed something while thinking about user behaviour, then you are, by definition, an Applied Psychologist. You’re just not necessarily a very good one. Yet.

Official documentation

• Windows Phone for Developers – a hub for all info from Microsoft, although it feels somewhat sparse at first glance
• MSDN official documentation for Windows Phone 7 – covers all API’s and classes provided by Windows Phone 7, as well as highlighting differences between platforms
• MSDN Visual C# Developer Center
• Windows Team Blog – occasionally updated with the latest release news and tips

Getting started learning Windows Phone 7

Here is video introduction to the platform, covering a simple hello world app to get you started:

Then check out:

• Start here on the Windows Phone Team blog – this introduces the main training kits and links to downloads of the latest release of developer tools
• Windows Phone 7 with Mike Harsh – A recent discussion on the platform with hints and tips (Aug 2010)
• Building Windows Phone 7 Applications with Silverlight Part One, and Part Two – 2 part presentation from MIX10 introducting the tools and skills needed to get started with Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 (from Spring 2010 so slightly out of date)

Learning C#:

• C# Yellow Book – before learning Windows Phone 7 you need to get to know C-sharp, this free e-book is a great place to start
• C# cheat sheets – once you’ve learnt C-sharp, these handy cheat sheets will serve as a useful reference. My favourites are this in-depth one from corecsharp,  a comparison of C-sharp and the same features in other languages and one for the basics with lovely code coloring. The site also covers XAML, LINQ, .NET and Silverlight along with anything else you can think of

Using Visual Studio efficiently:

• How to refactor code using Visual Studio part 1, and part 2 – videos on how to use VS to automatically refactor code
• Application Development in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Walkthroughs – hints and tips on how to get the most out of Visual Studio and save yourself time and effort

Learning Windows Phone 7:

• The free e-book Programming Windows Phone 7 – this appears to be a Microsoft sponsored book which is currently in development. You can download new chapters as they become available (11 are present in the latest release) and the e-book will remain free to download on completion.
• WP7 Training Kit – includes selected videos and hands on tutorials to provide a complete Windows Phone 7 training course
• The aforementioned XAML, LINQ, .NET and Silverlight cheatsheets
• ScottGu’s Twitter Client training excercise
• Windows Phone 7 for iPhone developers – Jesse Liberty has a course of tutorials aimed at iPhone developers over on his blog
• Windows Phone 7 tutorials by Compiled Experience – an on-going series of tutorials focused around a range of sample apps. Topics covered include use of the device API’s, MVVM pattern, best practices, isolated storage and more. Well laid out and easy to follow.

Tips for designers:

• Designing a flexible user interface
• Windows Phone 7 Design resources – UI Guide and design templates

How to figure out what class libraries are available on Windows Phone 7, doing so is sadly nightmarish and highly confusing:

1. Look at the full list of Silverlight classes
2. Remove those listed as unsupported
3. Show your bosses this list, which provides a summary in english of what is/isn’t supported
4. Here are some classes which are supported (but not all classes)
5. Supported Silverlight features which behave differently in Windows Phone 7
6. Windows Phone 7 specific classes
7. All Silverlight classes, some of which won’t be available (see above)

Video sessions introducing topics and providing tutorials (in order of release, newest first so most relevant):

• Inside Windows Phone Series – ongoing series of videos on Windows Phone from Channel 9, ‘Watch  exclusive interviews with the designers, product managers and developers coding the Windows Phone OS and developer platform’
• Windows Phone 7 Jump Start training videos – 12 hour course in Windows Phone 7 Development
• Windows Phone Design Day recordings – Series of sessions from Microsoft presented in August 2010, focus on designers
• Silverlight Screencasts Windows Phone 7 section which currently has 4 screencasts covering the basics
• Microsoft TechEd Online Windows Phone 7 – all the Windows Phone 7 sessions from the TechEd conference which took place in June 2010
• MIX10, March 2010 – watch all the sessions online from MIX10 in March 2010, with around 10 on Windows Phone 7
• General Videos on Windows Phone 7 - an unorganised but comprehensive collection of training videos
• YouTube videos on Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight

Events

• PDC10, Oct 2010 – Microsoft PDC conference in Redmond, WA. All sessions to be streamed online, promises plenty of Windows Phone 7 sessions in the second track. Also a good opportunity to meet US developers. $1000.
• Windows Phone 7 User Group in London & Silverlight UK User Group – events to be announced on a semi-regular basis
• Windows Phone 7 Developer day, free event in Manchester (UK), 7th Oct 2010

Keep on top of things and find solutions to problems

Use these forums to ask questions and keep an eye on solutions you could use:

• Official Windows Phone 7 Forum
• Silverlight for Windows Phone Forum

Subscribe to these blogs:

• Windows Phone 7 coding – an independent blog collecting lots of tutorials on niche tasks and solutions to tricky problems
• Peter Torr’s Blog – regular posts on WP7 development
• The wp7 daily – twitter newspaper focusing on WP7

Get listening to these podcasts:

• The Silverlight Podcast – the past few weeks (as of August 10th 2010) have seen plenty of episodes focusing on Windows Phone 7 with lots of dev tips, reviews and news
• Yet another Podcast – Jesse Liberty’s new (as of Sept 20th) WP7 focused podcast

Check these twitter accounts for the most up-to-date info, news, latest blog posts, development tips…

• Ckindel (Key player in the future of Windows Phone App development)
• wp7dev (The twitter account of the Windows 7 dev team – not updated as often as individuals accounts, but the key stuff should be on here)
• Odedran (UK head of consumer marketing for Windows Phone)
• keyboardP (enthusiast who often retweets intetesting posts and tutorials)

Code libraries and toolkits

• Enterprise Library 5.0 provides additional classes focused on generic patterns and practises that are good to follow included logging, cryptography, exception handling and validation
• Silverlight for Windows Phone toolkit provides additional controls, components and utilities for reuse and now has a Windows Phone 7 release. Informal documentation can be found here and here, you can also watch Inside Windows Phone Episode 5 – Windows Phone Silverlight Toolkit.
• A collection of Windows Phone 7 controls – a list of links to controls found in a range of locations
• Mobile Advertising SDK for Windows Phone – easily incorporate ads in your apps with this Microsoft plugin (more info here)
• MVVM Light Toolkit provides additional tools to enable you to easily code using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern which keeps the View and Model separate and allows for more flexible coding, also explained by Jeremy Likness hither and Jason Dolinger thither and in 3 easy steps
• .NET Extension Methods Library is a set of object extensions enhancing objects such as String, Object, DateTime etc. These are all from a print magazine, meaning the code standard should be reasonable.
• A range of Windows Phone 7 sample apps and extensions
• Patterns & Practices – Windows Phone 7 Developer Guide – an early release of a best practice guide for WP7
• Find more extensions at CodePlex, Microsofts Open Source code hosting platform

Posts on general concepts I’ve found useful

• Getting diagnostic output from Windows Phone 7 (console.log doesn’t work on WP7)
• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Client from Microsoft’s dev guru Scott Guthrie
• Cheat Sheet for Unit Testing on Windows Phone 7 and How to build a Windows Phone 7 app using test driven development – introduces concepts of unit testing for Windows Phone 7, contrary to the location given in the tutorial you should locate the unit testing toolkit here, also beware – examples are incomplete.

Achieving specific tasks

• Progress bar optimisations by Jeff Wilcox – part 1 and part 2
• Peter Torr’s Introduction to Places – Advice on application structure and the concept of places, pages and screens
• Saving State execution model best practices – tips on how best to save users state in your apps
• Don’t forget to encrypt your Windows Phone 7 data – a guide to WP7 security
• Working with photos – accessing images on the device from within your apps
• Managing Trial Applications for WP7 – advice on managing trials in your apps (video here)
• Using the accelerometer – different ways of taking advantage of the accelerometer on the device
• Panorama Tricks – 3 posts so far from DevDave on using Panorama in apps, including Using XAML for your background. Get a full introduction to Panorama and Pivot by watching Inside Windows Phone #6 – Panorama and Pivot are in the house
• Tombstoning Simplified, less duplication
• WP7 Gestures cheatsheet

Performance tips

• Creating high performance Windows Phone 7 apps white paper
• WP7 Developer Tips and Tricks – Jeff Wilcox sent out a bunch of tweets on performance optimisations and Tim Heuer captured them, hear Jeff discuss Performance of Windows Phone 7 on the Hanselminutes Podcast
• Watch Inside Windows Phone #3 – Optimizing Windows Phone Silverlight Apps
• Building high-performance Silverlight Apps on Windows Phone 7
• Silverlight Performance tips from MSDN
• Optimising graphics for Windows Phone

Even more links

Windows Phone 7 resources – Indyfromoz has been even busier than me, there’s a huge number of links on his page and I’ve not had time to go through them all but they look well chosen. This could be the most comprehensive list out there!

Goodreads.com is social cataloging service for books. In this post you will see how they’ve used the friend spam dark pattern, but how they’ve also failed to make it go viral. This makes it interesting to carry out a post mortem and work out what they should have done. Let’s take a look:

Above you can see where it starts. One of my twitter friends has tweeted about goodreads.com. I wonder what that is, maybe I’ll just click on the link…

OK now I’ve been taken straight to the Twitter oAuth page. There’s no warm up, no foreplay, they go straight for penetration. Twitter users are increasingly savvy, and it turns out this approach has been quite ineffective. If you run a Google Updates search, you’ll see this “viral” adoption campaign is only generating a few tweets a day.

As such, it’s evident the Twitter oAuth page is a crap landing page for their campaign. People are seeing it, thinking “Woah, that’s weird”, and then leaving. This is a GOOD thing for the Twitter ecosystem. The whole point of this page is that it should make people stop and think twice.

OK so let’s see what happens to those users who proceed:

Now I’ve clicked “Allow”, you can see I’ve been automatically registered and logged-in to Goodreads.com: a very slick implementation of lazy registration. Now let’s take take a close look at the page. All of the checkboxes are preselected, and the very bottom checkbox reads “Share goodreads with my 644 twitter friends who are not on goodreads yet.”

If you click “add friends”, the system sends out a bunch of emails on your behalf, and then uses your Twitter account to post a tweet. This is the friend spam dark pattern in action:

Goodreads simply don’t make it clear what will happen when a user leaves the “Share goodreads with my twitter friends…” checkbox ticked. The fact that it’s preselected and buried at the bottom of the page makes even more of a dark pattern. The only way a user can find out what’s happened is by looking at their own Twitter feed. This is naughty.

There’s nothing wrong with posting tweets for users *if* they know you’re going to do it. Twitter’s Application Developer Terms of Service expressly states “Don’t surprise users” and “Get users’ permission before: sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating through your application does not constitute consent to send a message.”

So Goodreads are breaking Twitter’s rules, and it’s all down to the wording of that checkbox label. Let’s compare the goodreads “dark hat” pattern to the firstfivefollowers.com “white hat” pattern:

With firstfivefollowers.com, the user can clearly see what is happening. No room for misinterpretation.

So what are Goodreads up to? I think you’ll agree it looks more like clumsy design than malicious intent. It’s a double loss situation for them: they get their brand name associated with sleazy friend-spam practices, yet it doesn’t deliver for them. All they need to do is add a nice landing page, then use the firstfivefollowers.com white-hat design pattern and they’ll be home and dry.

Cennydd and James will discuss the experience of writing a UX book, from the proposal and the money to the workflow and personal sacrifice involved. They’ll talk about what publishers are looking for from potential authors, how to make a strong business case for your title, and how to come to terms with the alien practices of print publishing.

• Undercover User Experience Design on Amazon UK

Cennydd Bowles leapt into the world of user experience eight years ago and hasn’t shut up about it since. He now works for Clearleft in Brighton and moonlights as a UX blogger, mentor and community evangelist. Cennydd is a regular public speaker (SXSW, IA Summit), a widely published writer (A List Apart, Johnny Holland, .net magazine) and co-conspirator of the UX London conference. His first book “Undercover User Experience”, written with fellow Clearleftie James Box, has just been published by New Riders.

• Cennydd’s blog

James is a self-confessed ‘user experience professional’. Part information architect and part interaction designer, when he’s not crafting sandcastles on the beach, James crafts websites that are fun and easy to use.

• James’ blog

2) Simple & Usable – Giles Colborne

Giles will talk about his views on simplicity, how he came to write the book, the books that inspired him and the design and writing choices that he made and how they influenced the final form of the book.

Giles, has been designing interactive user experiences since the early 1990s and it’s about time he did something useful like writing a book.
When he’s not doing that he he’s busy with cxpartners, a design consultancy based in Bristol and London that specialises in web and mobile user interface design for companies such as Marriott, Nokia and eBay. Giles and Richard Caddick founded cxpartners in 2004.

I couldn’t help but repost this Aaron Levenstein quote from Brand Autopsy. I’ve been thinking about writing a post on the death of critical thinking for a while, but this pretty much sums it up. Statistics – and research in general – is carried out by *people*. People have motivations. Understand their motivations and you understand a lot about what they have done (either unwittingly or deliberately) to achieve the results presented to you.