What a newbie learned by falling down the mountain
New friends and first-time snowboarders at the Montues event in Tahoe.
I’ve just returned from the stunning mountains of Tahoe where I was lucky enough to participate in the first ever Epicurrence Montues event. Epicurrence is a design non-conference by Dann Petty aimed at getting creative folks out of their offices and into inspiring situations in nature.
In Jane Portman's recent InVision webinar, she outlined three primary points to aid other UI designers in making the transition to the business of consultation.
In this webinar, Chris Sweetland and Lauren Burley of Google reviewed their company's upcoming Android Pay offerings and their opportunities within the banking and financial landscape. These are my notes from the webinar, which I attended in July of 2015.
I've been learning a new skill over the last few weeks, Git. A new project at work has given me the responsibility to write and maintain a Style Guide for our main web application project. This, along with some freelance projects I'm working on, have made this new skill a very necessary one for me to pick up, as I'm working remotely with multiple teams on shared codebases. Here, I'm posting my initial notes and new concepts I've picked up while learning Git. Connect with me on GitHub @ll_coolray.
I've noticed more and more text-based web applications have been integrating support for the Markdown language over recent months. Most notably the project management software I use in my daily work week Pivotal Tracker. I attended a team Tech Talk on the subject hosted by my coworkers and what follows are my takeaways and notes from learning this new skill.
For our monthly "designer forum" meeting this month, the team decided to get together and watch Jeff Gothelf's introductory presentation of Lean UX. While we've all read the book at some point in time and practice these methods daily in the office, it's always great to get a refresher from the man himself. The presentation was given at the UX Immersion conference in 2012 and is now available to watch on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOJWss8_BVA. After the video, we all discussed together what we are currently doing and how we could improve our workflows and introduce new practices. Overall, this was a great team building activity and everyone left with a few new strategies to better integrate our UX design with the agile software development teams we support. My notes from the video and our discussion follow.
Josh Seiden, the Managing Director of Neo, delivered a webinar session on the role of Hypotheses in a Lean UX design environment. His description of the talk:
SXSW is a lot to take in over a few short days. Attendees find themselves up at the crack of dawn and operating at 100% until deep into the night. After some public transportation and a few short hours of sleep, the cycle begins again. This was my first year at the conference and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect beyond the crowds and tasty Austin food. By the end of the conference, I realized that I had underestimated both. The crowds of geeks and designers were teeming, while the food was simply incredible.
In Tuesday's live webinar with Nerdery Senior Developer and iOS expert Jon Rexeisen; Jon explained the significance of iOS 7’s content-first design philosophy and how it’ll affect your app. Here are my notes from the webinar: