NUX Newcastle – 24 March 2016 – Designing For The Gap

NUX Newcastle meet-ups are kindly sponsored by Sage and Orange Bus.

NUX Newcastle November 2015

For March we’ve changed our week (go on the 17th to Get Digital North East!). We’re proud to welcome BBC UXer (and fellow NUX organiser) Barry Briggs to Newcastle.

Designing For The Gap

UX as a discipline is made up of a number of micro-disciplines: information architects, interaction designers, user researchers, visual designers, etc. It seems like new titles are invented every few weeks, and during a project many of us wear multiple hats. It can be difficult to straddle these often conflicting roles, and to bridge the gaps between them. Added to this, we’re only human and it’s natural that we get drawn towards the activities we enjoy. On a good day we might be able to spot this happening and mediate our actions accordingly, but if we’re not careful it can be all too easy for us to gloss over the tricksy stuff in favour of the shiny, the sexy or the seemingly simple.

However, complex systems have many nooks and crannies that are easy to miss and if we don’t deal with them early on, the bits that we miss, that we don’t know, or that we subconsciously gloss over will come back to haunt us.

Over the last couple of years I’ve developed an approach that helps ensure these tricksy areas of our systems don’t fall between the cracks.

Using an approach that combines the documenting of system flows and user journeys iteratively alongside key stakeholders, domain experts, business analysts, designers, developers, and other disciplines, I’ve found a way of capturing what happens between our pages, so we can design for the the whole system: for the happy paths and the edge and problem cases, and so we can design for the gaps.

About Barry

Barry Briggs aka Quiffboy Barry is a Senior UX Architect at the BBC with over 15 years’ experience working in the web industry. During that time he counts himself lucky to have worked in agencies, client-side and in-house, with some of the best teams in the north-west, on numerous successful high profile projects for global brands, across a wide variety of sectors. He’s a usability obsessive, one of the Northern User Experience (NUX) team in Manchester, a chronic perfectionist and a would-be evil scientist. In-between all this he spends far too much time in his quest for the perfect quiff.

Twitter: @quiffboy

Running order

6:00 – 6:30 Free beer and soft drinks provided by our sponsors Sage and Orange Bus.
6:30 – 8:00 Talk by Barry Briggs – Designing for the Gap
8:00 – 8:30 Open discussion, suggestions for upcoming NUX Newcastle talks, and networking. And pizza!
8:30 – late To the pub! We’ll be just around the corner to The Ware Rooms.

Tickets

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