UXCampLondon 2012 Highlights

If there’s something else that’s abundant in London this summer apart from rain, it’s interesting UX events. Last Saturday, three members of the Webcredible UX team (myself, Yeevon & Richard) braved the rain and made their way to an annual fixture of the UX events calendar, UXCampLondon 2012. If you’ve never been to UXCampLondon, the best way to describe it is as the ‘open-mic’ version of a UX conference. There’s no pre-set schedule, and all attendees are encouraged to pick a time slot and host a presentation or discussion. Invariably, this results in a widely varied schedule covering everything from the core to the fringes of User Experience. Some of the sessions we liked this year were (in no particular order):

• Eva-Lotta Lamm ran a mini-tutorial on sketching people – you can take a look at some of my sketching attempts
• Cennydd Bowles took an in-depth look about what context means for experience design – we like some of the sketchnotes from Cennydd’s talk and looking forward to his book on ‘Designing for the Wider Web’ (coming in early 2013)
• Stuart Cruickshank delivered half an hour of hilarious stand-up comedy presentation explaining how you can look to your family and the world around you for inspiration – not just UX ‘gurus’ (no slides from this talk, as Stuart is worried that some of the jokes he made about his family would get him disowned!)
• Michele Ide-Smith showed how a company can successfully run a live UX lab at a tradeshow to increase engagement with their customers and get valuable feedback (see also Michele’s detailed blog post on this topic)
• Angeliki Chrysafidi and Pascal Raabe demonstrated ‘Live Wireframing’ – a technique for collaboratively sketching mobile apps on a whiteboard while simultaneously viewing the wireframes on a mobile device
• Lukas Fittl described how to use the AARRR metrics to highlight where a digital product needs improving

We’re proud to have sponsored UXCampLondon this year, and we’d like to send our thanks to all the volunteers who put a lot of hard work to make it happen. All the best for UXCampLondon 2013!