Friday, January 23, 2009

The first LA UX book club


There's so many excellent UX groups in LA and I'm thrilled to be part of a brand new one - the LA UX Book Club. We met for the first time at the Santa Monica library to discuss Bill Buxton's Sketching User Experiences. Our collective take on the book was that it was an epic sketch that needed editing. But it did provide a fantastic springboard for discussions about wireframing techniques, sketching as a tool vs as a deliverable, setting expectations as part of the design process, stealing time to sketch, the challenge of UX designing in agile, communicating and establishing trust with clients, and personas - useful or useless?

Check out some of the resources we discussed:
Balsamiq, the online wireframing app that makes your wireframes look hand drawn
GUI magnets for enhanced whiteboard sketching
• 3 book recommendations about communicating and pursuasion: Crucial Conversations, On Dialogue and Nudge
...and if you decide to skip the book, do check out Bill Buxton's talk at Interaction 08 (thanks for the link Elise!)

2 comments:

mark vernon said...

can you check out iplotz.com as well?..online navigable mockups and wireframing. cheers, mark

Lea Ann said...

Thanks for letting me know about iplotz. I will definitely check it out.