There will be no Refresh Detroit meeting in July; we’re taking the month off. Hey it’s summer! We’ll be back in August.

But, if you’re thinking you won’t have any idea how to spend all that free time, we’ve got some suggestions for you from the good folks at O’Reilly. No matter if you’re a jQuery guru, PHP developer, MySQL ninja, or project manager rock star, you’ll find some good tips in the following online webinars.

All you need to do is register. Did I mention the webinars are free?

• Five jQuery Mistakes You’re Probably Making in Your Project, presented by Jonathan Sharp July 13 @ 10am PT
• Flexible Scaling with CouchDB Replication / Or how I learned to stop worrying and love Eventual Consistency, presented by J. Chris Anderson on July 14 @ 10am PT
• Cloud Independence with Dasein Cloud, presented by George Reese on July 16 @ 10am PT
• MySQL Upgrades With No Downtime, presented by Sean Hull on July 27 @ 10am PT
• The Upside of Downtime: How to Turn a Disaster into an Opportunity, presented by Lenny Rachitsky July 29 @ 10am PT

Check the O’Reilly Webcast page for on-demand videos of past webcasts and more upcoming live events.

I was recently lucky enough to attend the 2010 UX Web Summit at Washtenaw Community College in Ann Arbor. From Facebook, to Yahoo, to the person who literally wrote the book on card sorting, the list of speakers was a veritable who’s who of UX professionals.

The day started with a joint presentation on “the first 15 minutes”  by Daniel Burka, Director of Design for Tiny Speck, and Rob Goodlatte, from the Facebook UX team. Next up was M. Jackson Wilkinson of LinkedIn, with a presentation on the seven core principles of product strategy for UX designers.

This discussion moved into a presentation on remote user testing by Juliette Melton of Deluxify. The morning session ended with a presentation on sustainable UX by Nick Finck of Blue Flavor.

After a break for lunch, the afternoon session started off with a presentation on card sorting by Donna Spencer, who wrote the book on the subject.

Next was a joint presentation on mobile web design by Jenifer Hanen, mobile web designer and developer, and Cindy Li of Yahoo. Last, but certainly not the least, was a presentation on practical prototyping by Sidebar Creative’s Dan Rubin.

For the sake of time and space (I took nine pages of notes, single-spaced), I won’t go into detail for all of the presentations. Instead, I’ll give you three things that I found incredibly helpful:

1. Rob Goodlatte told a short story about a user test that essentially changed the design of Facebook’s sign-up process. Watching a participant struggle in a user test brought the Facebook UX team to their “AHa!” moment. Facebook is about connecting users to people in their lives. Period. This realization lead to a significant change in the design of Facebook’s sign-up process.
2. M. Jackson Wilkinson’s seventh core principle regarding product strategy is to “sweat the important details”. If nothing else, take one part of your product and make it seem like magic (make it so easy and useful that users won’t know how you did it). A well-designed and usable product nurtures and develops trust.
3. Dan Rubin’s explanation of his prototyping process on a recent project brought up an important point about users and their tasks. When designing or redesigning a website, clarity must be paramount. It is more important than anything else that users are able to find a clear path to accomplish their task.

   Something that goes hand-in-hand with this is the implementation of Inherent Value tests. Find out what users love so that you can protect it. Don’t destroy something that works because it seems old. “Familiar” is not synonymous with “old”. Keep the things that users like. They’ll be happier and it will make less work for you in the long run.

So here they are, three of my favorite concepts. Of course, there were many many more. Every single speaker had amazing insight (and some very quotable phrases).

I look forward to another UX Web Summit in hopeful anticipation. Here’s to another fantastic Web Summit with great conversation and, hopefully, pants!

Of course, this year’s summit would not have been possible without the generosity of our sponsors. A big thank you to all of you for making this happen! Thank you,of course, to all of the speakers! Also, a big thank you to  Deborah Edwards-Onoro and Environments For Humans for making this available to those of us in Ann Arbor!

In mid-July, I (Dennis) will be flying “home” to Michigan for my brother’s 40th birthday! So since I’ll be in town, Ross and I are organizing a “Usability Tweetup” in Ann Arbor around 7pm on Saturday, July 18th. Hope you can join us!

• What: “Usability Tweetup”
• When: 7pm, Saturday, July 18, 2009
• Where: Ann Arbor Brewing Company in downtown Ann Arbor [Google map]
• Why: To discuss web usability, web accessibility, Twitter; socialize; drink beer

Note that this is the night of the last day of the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair.

It was an honor to see Refresh Detroit mentioned in a recent blog post by AdaptiveBlue as “One of the Best Tech Events in the US”.  Two other events in the Detroit area were mentioned including the Detroit Startup Weekend and the Ann Arbor TECH cocktail.  Of course we know there are many other great events in the Detroit area, if you have more to share please do so in the comments here.

Those of us who participate in meetups and groups such as Refresh Detroit do so for many different reasons.  We enjoy networking, continuing education opportunities, or sharing our knowledge with like minded individuals.  What other things draw you to groups such as this?  We’d like to know not only how to stay current and relevant to you, but how to stay “one of the best” in this area!

If you’re interested in finding more great events in the Detroit area, here’s a short list of resources to start with:

• Meetup
• Upcoming
• Eventbrite
• Gary’s Guide
• a2geeks: Events

We hope to see you at our next event!

We will be skipping December for a meeting, because of the holidays and people’s schedules not being the norm. We will be back next month though, so you won’t have to wait long.

I don’ t think we have any set topic or presenter scheduled so feel free to leave comments on what you think would be an interesting topic or if you would like to present.

Everyone have a happy holiday!

Next Page »

Search Site:

Sponsorship Opportunities

• Categories:
  • Articles
  • Book Reviews
  • Contests
  • Events
  • Jobs
  • Meetings
  • News
  • User Experience
• RSS Feeds:
  • RSS
  • Comments RSS
• Site Usage:
  • Sitemap
  • Access Guide
  • Login