User-focused lunchtime meet-ups
Our Website and Communications team are hosting regular lunchtime sessions for staff interested in making websites, products and services useful and user-friendly.
Format
The sessions are divided into two parts:
- a presentation on a user experience-related topic (around half an hour)
- a 45 minute discussion forum, where the group sets the agenda.
The meet-ups are open to all university staff to exchange ideas and get help in the field of user experience.
Past meet-ups
At our first meet-up in October, UX (user experience) Consultant Marty Dunlop joined us to speak about guerrilla user research. Marty advocated for why we should not let time, budget or responsibility get in the way of engaging with our users.
Letting the guerrilla loose session blog post
Stephen Denning from User Vision joined us in December to speak about designing intentional user experiences.
Designing intentional user experiences session blog post
The discussion that follows the presentation uses the Lean Coffee approach. This format encourages attendees to:
- generate discussion topics
- vote on which ideas to talk about
- talk about each top prioritised item for 5 minutes
- vote after 5 minutes on whether to continue talking about the current topic.
“The simple voting mechanisms built into the Lean Coffee method ensured we discussed the most relevant topics, and we moved on quickly when the conversation began to run out of steam. I thought the regular 5 minute segments helped keep the discussion relevant, focused, and well-paced.”
January meet-up
Our next meet-up is scheduled for 25 January 2018 in the Central campus.
Guest speakers Clare Barnett and Hilary Brownlie from Registers of Scotland who will talk about the complimentary roles of business analysts and user experience professionals.
You can book a place to attend on MyEd:
Book a place (EASE login required)
Business analysis & user experience: read more on the meet-up
(Ed. this article was originally published on 10 Jan, 2018)