RSVP for the event.

While this movie isn’t specifically about UX, there is a hell of a lot of tie-in and an amazing amount of insight to be gained.

Here’s how the Objectified site describes the movie:

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Through vérité footage and in-depth conversations, the film documents the creative processes of some of the world’s most influential product designers, and looks at how the things they make impact our lives. What can we learn about who we are, and who we want to be, from the objects with which we surround ourselves?

Another great meeting in the history books! Thanks again to Mike Rhode & Cindi Thomas for doing a really engaging presentation on sketching for UX.

Here’s a round-up of artifacts:

• @deziner & @rohdesign | slides from the event [view]
• @tomhenrich | notes from event [view]
• @michaelseidel | photos of the event [view]

If you have additional stuff to add to the list, let us know!

Really belated, but we wanted to make sure that we posted a list of artifacts from our July 14 meeting on UX for mobile. For posterity. Know what  I’m sayin’?

• @adny | Andy Wright’s slides [view]
• @mmassie | Mike Massie’s slides [view]
• @tomhenrich | note from event [view]
• @michaelseidel | photos of the event [view]

What is came down to was that we were sick of each others’ voices, I think. We wanted to hear what others in the city had to say. To find out what they were thinking. What making their seams burst.

So we started the group. Contacted people. Got the ball rolling.

We had no idea what to expect. UX in Milwaukee has always seemed so segmented. It was like most UX practitioners and sympathizer were living in studio apartment-sized caves with all lines of communication to the outside world cut.

We wanted to reconnect people. Make things better, more vibrant, more fun.

The response so far has been overwhelming. Not to mention humbling.

Here’s the thing – we don’t want to own this baby. It belongs to all of us. If we’re doing things shittily or stupidly, we want to hear about it. If you have ideas for topics or presenters, lay it on us. Please!

We’re really grateful for everyone who has come to our first two meetings. And who has spread the word about what we’re doing. We’re still working out a lot of organizational kinks, so we’re happy you’re sticking by our side as we figure out what they hell we’re doing.

Our goal is to keep the meetings free and collaborative. That’s the only way we’re all going to learn more, which will help us do what we do even better.

Wouldn’t it be cool if people outside of Milwaukee started to notice the ripples our growing UX knowledge makes on the work we produce? If they started saying, Woah! Little ole Milwaukee really has its shit together. Who knew?

Our next meeting is next Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at Bay View Brew Haus (directions), 7pm.

On Facebook? RSVP for it.

Gretchen Thomas talks about how we must satiate people’s appetite for information, and how content strategy can do it. (Her slides. Follow on Twitter.)

• “People can read. And they want to all the time, especially online.” People are consuming information all the time and they’re doing it everywhere while on their laptops and phones (even while driving). Everyone does it, even our president.
• We must meet the demand for information. If we don’t, nobody will use our site.
• Content strategy is organizing and planning our communication to meet brand+business, user needs, sales+marketing, and technology objectives.
• Content strategy is essential for interface and design planning, social media, blogging, and ongoing website management.
• Without a proper content strategy, projects tend to fall into content delay syndrome, where copywriting, media creation gets pushed to the very end of a project rather than being planned as part of the interface. (Lorem ipsum doesn’t work!)
• Often projects end up with “Website Bolt-On Syndrome” where websites are hastily developed before thoughtful planning can occur. Future content and functionality becomes homeless and the overall interface becomes disjointed. This also often happens when websites are developed before they are planned.
  • Content strategy should come before picking the CMS, and there may be times the content strategist should be in the meeting to pick a CMS.
• CDS and WBOS is where you get home pages with titles like “Home Page.”
• Content strategy should at least include specific content to address, meta data/SEO keywords, a plant for content distribution, and an ongoing editorial plan for keeping content fresh.
• Content strategy is good for the your sanity! It makes sure the client, project team, and marketers are all on the same page, and know what the goal is. It promotes brand consistency, and ultimately helps end users.
• A content strategy can start out like a sitemap and go into wireframes with detailed information. With larger and more complicated sites, a content strategy plan may need to be a large detailed document laying out objectives page-by-page. The sitemap is a living document.
• Example: change.org redesigned around a comprehensive content strategy. There was increased user engagement, a better user experience, and increased traffic.
• Great user experience needs great content. Half-assed content will tear down the rest of the project.
• “Make great content a priority, and you’ll create something that actually matters.”

Margot Bloomstein talks about what content strategy is, how it’s sexy, and helps fight the weird. (Her A List Apart article. Follow on Twitter.)

• Content strategy is: “Planning for the creation, aggregation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable, and appropriate content in an experience.”
• “Content strategy can help you communicate as a designer — and through design.”
• “Content is the real reason people use the web.” They want to find your store hours, comment on a post, publish their pictures, research, etc.
• Good content strategy makes for a more coherent projects. It gives everyone on the project a shared goal, and ultimately helps build a cohesive user experience.
• Content strategy starts from putting together a “message architecture”:
  • What do you need to communicate your brand?
  • List of adjectives that describe the business and brand.
  • Prioritize key messages
  • Use real copy. (Don’t use Lorem ipsum!)
• Words are cheaper than comps! Content strategy saves time and money for the design budget.
• You can get things done in fewer revisions.
• Content strategy offers clients predictability.
• Content strategy offers clients predictability: they can plan for what will be needed: photo shoots, gather testimonials, you can anticipate all the different content types that will be needed, clients can write to exact specifications and character counts.
• Content strategy offers predictability for you: design for specific content types and character counts. Anticipate structure for user-generated content. The designer can create more interesting templates because you can anticipate and design for content types and even exact character counts.
  • Example: If the designers know that descriptions and summaries will be within a specific length, then they can design exact spaces for the content so all the different content types fit together on the page.
• Content and visual design that shares a message architecture creates a more consistent, richer user experience.
• Content strategy should offer editorial style guides: Sentence structures that fit with a brand, word to use and not use.
• You can anticipate content types in your design, and even design for exact character counts!
• Content strategists can empathize with the information architects and project managers. Figure out what content you already have, and what is needed. (After all, how can you budget by page count if you don’t know how many pages you need?)
• Content strategy needs a quantitative and qualitative content audit:
  • What content is there already?
  • Is it structurally consistent? Does it fit the brand? Is it current, appropriate, and relevant? Is it good? Does it even work?
• “Content strategy informs more thorough, comprehensive sitemap, and wireframes.”
• How to sell content strategy to the client:
  • Not wasting money (they want to say something, right?)
  • Content strategy isn’t just writing,
  • Copywriting doesn’t hit the strategic questions
  • In-house writers lack an outside perspective.
  • Helps write brand consistent meta and ad copy.
• Content management should be considered a workflow solution to carrying out the content strategy.
• Effective use of social media is not just about advertising the brand, it’s about engaging with the audience: 1/3 self-promotion, 1/3 about others, 1/3 general helpful information. “Good conversation demands good content strategy.”
• Content strategy plans for the future. By developing editorial style guides and an editorial calendar, it keeps content fresh, and keeps all new content (via blogs, social media, etc.) consistent with the brand and overall message.
• Good content strategy creates more air-tight solutions, saves time/budget, cohesive user experience, higher conversions, and makes everyone happier.

If you missed the meeting or just want to spend some time revisiting it, here are a few links for you to get frisky with.

• @gforce414 (Gretchen Thomas) | presentation slides on Slideshare
• @thebestsophist (Bernard Yu)| reflections on the event
• @tomhenrich| reflections on the event
• @lightburn | photos from the event
• @michaelseidel | photos from the event
• Twitter #mkeux & #mke_ux hashtags

If you have any thoughts or images you’d like to share, let us know!

Thanks to everyone who attended. Hope to see you again in July! Details to follow.

There has been some really good momentum and excitement within the Milwaukee tech community about the group. (Our Facebook group is up to 43 members & we have 41 Twitter followers!) We’re stoked to see how that translates into a live, in-person meeting.

Here’s the thing
We want mkeUX to be as participatory as possible. Take our first presentation with Margot Blumstein & Gretchen Thomas, for example. It’s about Content Strategy.

CS is getting quite a lot of buzz in the broader tech world, but it doesn’t seem like something that crops up much in Milwaukee.

Is it something you’re familiar with?

• If not, what do you want to know about it?
• If yes, what seems like its benefits or shortcomings?
• Have you employed a good CS within your organization? How’d it go?

We want everyone to feel like they can take the podium and get everything off their chest. We don’t want the meeting to break up just because the speakers have said their part. If it means convening at a bar or coffee shop to talk about it more post-meeting, that’s awesome. Perfect.

If you have some thoughts or questions prior to the meeting, leave a comment here. We’d love to get the conversation going in advance.

It’s a mystery
Exactly how everything will play out is a big question mark at this point. If you have any suggestions on what has or hasn’t worked with other groups you’ve participated in, let us know! We want to learn from what’s happened before – this will help us make OUR meetings as good and valuable as possible for everyone.

LAY IT ON US! We want to hear your thoughts. On everything. For serious.

I had a conversation with some co-workers today about development cycles and how there is a fundamental need to re-test the user experience of these products at every phase and we may see some sweeping changes come out of those tests at every 3 month cycle.

They looked at me like I was crazy.

I told them that we had a grand opportunity to really hone the UX of this product and iteratively improve upon it mid development.

More looks of disbelief and questions like “Well, we will take care of the UX in phase 1 right?” “How much can really change in 3 months?” “You mean you’re not putting together a rock solid UX out of the gate?”

I assured them that I was going to put together the best UX I could with phase 1, but there are going to be more features and applications added in later phases that may affect the UX. I also mentioned that we will actually get to see how people use this product on a daily basis after phase 1 launches. We will have an opportunity to address some user concerns if we stay on top of it. And finally I talked about the speed at which technology changes and if we adopt new technologies through the life span of this product we may be able to change the UX to accommodate these new technologies. (Multi-touch for example.)

The lights started to get a bit brighter in the room as more people started to understand the concept of iterative UX design. It’s no different than iterative development cycles, I told them.

Companies have a tendency to think that UX happens at the end of the first phase or iteration of their product. From then on it is just “bolting on” features and functionality. Development evolves and moves forward and the next thing you know it has been 2 years and they haven’t touched the UX.

Now instead of introducing rolling changes and enhancements to the user experience and information architecture, the company does a massive overhaul of the entire product to better incorporate all the bolted on features and functionality ripping the UX/IA carpet right out from under the user’s feet.

This is a mistake that happens far too often. It is our jobs to change that mentality. As UX professionals it is our responsibility to change the mindset of “once the UX is designed and developed it is done for good.” We need to show our clients, customers and employers that we can save them money and help increase user satisfaction by re-testing and tweaking the UX at every development cycle.

A bit of history

We (@yellowledbedder & @michaelseidel) have been mulling over the idea of starting a really informal UX group in Milwaukee for the past several months. Why? Because we we learn most when the walls of formality are smashed—when we can pop the tops on a few beers and let the ideas ping-pong.

That’s what mkeUX was born out of. A need to learn and hangout all at once.

What is mkeUX?

We’re a people in the Milwaukee, WI area who care about collaborating and sharing knowledge in order to create killer user experiences.

Our driving principal is that there are no experts. Everyone knows something. Or lots of things. Or can come up with an new take on things.

Our meetings are a place for  Milwaukee’s UX community to swap ideas in order to grow our collective understanding of how to create soundly-built websites and apps that users get.

We really hope you’ll join us and contribute to make this thing more awesome than we alone could have imagined it being.

More info

There’s a ton more I want to say about our philosophy, etc, but I know you don’t want to read it all in one blast! So keep your eyes open for upcoming posts.

We’ll dish it all, ya’ll.

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions! The best way is to follow us on Twitter and send a DM. We have short attention spans.

- @mke_ux
– @yellowledbedder
- @michaelseidel