Next week in PDX

It's a big week in Ptown for techy/designy types. In addition to these formal events, I hope and assume there will be plenty of impromptu meet-ups in bars around town. If you know of other things let me know! See you all there. Tweet me if something fun happens and you don't see me there:



Wednesday-Friday 20-22

WebVisions

Tuesday 19th

Schmooze Networking Event
at Grand Central

Schmooze

Wed 20th

Mobile Social Webvisions

Thursday 21st

The Dawning of the Age of Experience

presented by Jared Spool

Refresh Portland

Friday 22nd

Show and Tell PDX


The Whuffie Factor: Reading & Discussion by Tara Hunt
at Souk

Wednesday 27th

WTF is Social Media

Lessons from the Volatile

I just submitted a proposal for Ignite Portland. The topic is about applying what I've learned working with essential oils to design and the creative process. Sound interesting? I think so. Now I just have to flush it out.

If I get in this will be my first presentation outside of work since high school. Kinda crazy. Hope I can do it:)

You can check out the full list of proposals here. If you participate in the voting (which you can) I hope you will vote for me and John from MilkMuny (because his presentation will be truly inspiring)

Ok, sorry for the slowed posting lately, I have a bunch of balls in the air right now, but they are all providing me with good writing ideas (if I can get around to it!)

Portland UX Book Club - Thursday!

Portland UX Book Club will have it's first gathering this Thursday. Woot! I'm feeling excited to get this thing started. It's been a few month since I decided to start the Portland chapter and it's been fun watching other clubs roll out across the world.

Our first book, Back of the Napkin by Dan Roam, isn't a UX specific book but a fun one that adds to the skills important for those of us out there practicing UX in all it's many forms. I'll be interested in hearing what parts of the book (method) are resonating and have practical application for other UX peeps.

If you are coming please RSVP or if you can't make it this time join the Google Group to stay informed.

Data Visualization Ptown Style

I attended the first Data Viz group last night it was less and educational experience and more a night of posing questions, which was kinda fun. I was super impressed by the turn out and the variety of folks who had a true interest in this sort of thing. So wonderful!

Here are the little sparks I took away and am thinking about:

*Expressing ideas vs. Expressing data

*Making a connection with someone or something that generates ideas is a good interaction, and could be called art.

*What types of things can we as designers do to develop your trust in the data?

*Try to merge the gap between useful and beautiful.

*Reduce the time it takes to understand.

*Clients don't understand what they are paying for. Could data viz give them something to appreciate?


I also wanted to mention as I did last night, if you are into innovative ways to display a ton of information in a beautiful and useful way I would encourage you to spend sometime with State of the Salmon created by local agency Periscopic. I caught a presentation of it at PDX Show and Tell a while back. There did happen to be a woman from the agency there last night and she spoke up once I mentioned the site, she will hopefully be presenting at the next meeting.


This article was making it's way around twitter today too.
Data Visualization Is Reinventing Online Storytelling



(image is from State of the Salmon)

UX Book Club Portland!

Woot! Woot!

We are getting UX Book Club going here in Portland. The first meeting is April 16th at 7pm.

So Join the Group, get the Book and RSVP.

As you can tell I am a little excited about this. There are so many books I want to read, but with all the stuff I do it's hard to fit them in, so this is my opportunity to force myself to make time.

We tried to pick a fun first book. We are hoping to rotate between more theory stuff and practical stuff. I would also like to see us take a larger text and read it over time, covering just a couple chapters each time we meet.

What are your ideas?

webvisions

let the networking begin

I attended my first networking event a couple weeks ago. It was pretty good. Met some nice people and got hooked up with a volunteer gig with the AMA My teams' project is working on the Big Brother Big Sister website. We have our first meeting next week. I'm looking forward to meeting the people on my team.

I'm working hard to settle into my new design/ux community, you can't just sit at home and make a happy career.

Yesterday I had drinks with the el presidente, as he calls himself, of a little web agency. It was pretty interesting to talk with him about how the work I do could be scaled down, to be implemented in really small projects. At first i was a bit stumped. How do you add Ux practices to a 5, 10 or 15K web project? Would there be enough value to make it worthwhile, can the practices be scaled down that much?

I think it can and why should big sites be the only ones to benifit from user centered design and strategic information architecture? I'm going to try and create some packages for smaller size jobs for him. If you have any ideas or thoughts let me know.

why

why the pillow?

• i need a place to log the ideas and thoughts i get while falling a sleep. i get some really good ideas when my head is on a pillow.
  
• much of the content here maybe fluff.
• it could be a metaphor for a good user experience. i'll have to write about that later and it might be fluff.

why a blog ?

• people are writing and talking about user experience stuff all over the place and i need a place to log these conversations. i thought others might like to see my list of articles and links.
• blogs are a good way to meet people and i am trying to meet fellow industry people in Portland Oregon, where i just moved this summer. hi!