We’ve had two User Experience and Information Architecture themed events in the Guardian’s offices this week.
On Tuesday we took over the regular Developer Drop-in slot for a UX drop-in special. We made tickets available for UX professionals, UX starters, and the “UX curious” – and the invite earned us a spot in the Birtspeak 2.0 corner of Private Eye.
Around 30 people managed to work out what was going on enough to join us in the afternoon for a peek at some of our work, some hands-on experience of some forthcoming products, and to listen to some short talks by Karen Loasby, Jonathan Richards and myself. I’ve blogged some notes from the talks, and Matt Gould has blogged about it too. The event was heavily over-subscribed, and so we plan to host a similar one in October.
Thursday evening we hosted a “predux” session for the British based speakers going to EuroIA later this month. “Predux” events give an opportunity to practice your talk in front of a small group of peers who provide a critique and advice to improve the presentation. It is a coaching technique the London UX community has used for several big conferences.
The EuroIA conference is the biggest event in the European IA calendar, and this year it is being hosted in Prague. There are still spaces available for the three-day event, which features talks by Luke Wroblewski, Margaret Hanley, Andrea Resmini and Eric Reiss, as well as workshops including “Agile UX” with Mark Plant & Matthew Solle, and “Alignment Diagrams” with James Kalbach. I’ll be there, talking about the IA of the Culture section of the Guardian website.
Finally on a UX and IA note, we are looking for people to join the team at the Guardian. You can download the job description and apply on the GNM Careers website. Applications close on Sunday 4 September.