UX Review - a review

Last week I attended a new UX event in London: UX Review. According to the official description it gives UX practitioners old and new an opportunity to share and discuss their work, and receive feedback from other members of the community, which reminded me of UX Show & Tell. As I really enjoyed S&T events in the past, I was eager to attend. I was also secretly hoping to see some paper prototypes, mockups and sketches.

Speakers

There were three speakers presenting their projects: Paul Annett talked about AlphaGov, Nick Smith about emot.io and Jason Grant about his personal project management system.

AlphaGov

During his talk, Paul used the live site to present its functionality and talk about the design. The project was hacked in 10 weeks, so there wasn’t much time for any proper user testing. I wish I had read Leisa’s post about AlphaGov before the event (I found it on my Instapaper a few days later) – if I knew more about the project, I’d probably ask some questions.

Emot.io

Nick talked about his alternative to the Like button that allows to display other emotions. His presentation led to an interesting discussion: do people need to share their feelings? Is there too much hatred and anger in the internet already? Apparently at the moment the most used button is “indifferent” – either people don’t care or don’t want to share their feelings, and, to be honest, it doesn’t surprise me at all.

Project management tool

I didn’t catch the name of Jason’s project and I actually doubt it has one. This is a tool Jason developed for himself and it does everything: time tracking, scheduling, note-taking etc. It was created as a result of Jason’s Excel hatred, but I’m not quite sure how it differs from other project management and/or tracking tools. Also, the talk felt a bit like a sales pitch which is always a shame.

Event itself

The event wasn’t that busy – there were only about 25 attendees. It’s not surprising though, as the event was announced about a week earlier and it was something quite new. There were some empty chairs here and there, but somehow a small audience seems to be quite appropriate for that kind of event. Well, not that small, but still.

The thing that surprised me the most were drinks – there was cider! It was a nice change, especially that I’m not a big fan of beer which seems to be a default drink on most of the events. There were also doughnuts, yay!

From what I’ve heard the next UX Review is in the making, and I hope it will be announced early enough to attract more people. Adding it to lanyrd.com this time would be a good idea. I hope it will be equally – or even more – interesting and this time people will bring some paper prototypes and sketches… :-)

~Falka, 31 May 11