On 5 May I attended the Tech Nottingham June 2017: Common Ground & Visualisation event at Antenna, Nottingham presented by Adam Field and Gemma Cameron, the first Tech Nottingham event I had attended.
CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS: THE COMMON GROUND WE DON’T KNOW WE DON’T HAVE BY ADAM FIELD Our cultural blind-spots can lead us to assume that others see things the same way we do. In this talk I would like to encourage us to challenge our view of what can be assumed when communicating with anyone about anything. Examining a case study of a Korean interacting with telephone banking security, I will invite you to consider how what we assume is normal can give negative experiences to our users.
VISUALISATION: USER STORIES, KANBAN BOARDS AND ANALYTICS BY GEMMA CAMERON We all use tools to visualise and radiate information. In this talk we look at the different ways of visualising, why we’re using them and if there’s another way.
Adam’s talk gave an insight into Korean culture and how seemingly simple security questions can pose problems plus what we can do to help this as software engineers. There were some interesting insights from other attendees about people from different cultures they had worked with. It’s usual for me to talking to colleagues based anywhere in the world but I don’t spend as much time designing user interfaces that have to work for everyone.
Gemma’s talk presented information on ways of collecting information, putting designs onto paper (or computer) to represent something in the real world. I’d never considered using comic strips to represent user stories before! This was interesting because we’ve recently started using an electronic Kanban board for working on software defects. I hadn’t realised I’d already created several Information Radiators by creating graphs and large text presentations of development environment and SQL Server information shown on a communal TV in the office.
Links
https://digitalblog.coop.co.uk/