Community

Since moving from British Columbia in 2004, I’ve called Kitchener-Waterloo my home. Through university and my formative professional experiences, I’ve come to love the community of students, professors, and researchers; the community of practicing designers and product managers; as well as the general community of artists, engineers, and citizens alike. See below some of the ways I’ve been able participate in the KW community.

uxWaterloo (ongoing)

uxWaterloo is the local Waterloo chapter of IxDA and a Communitech P2P created in 2007 by Mark Connolly and Robert Barlow-Busch. In 2017, Mark asked me to take the reins with him as Bob was taking on new amazing opportunities at Google in Waterloo. Currently, at over 1400 members throughout the local Kitchener-Waterloo region, we host monthly meetups where local and remote designers can showcase their craft. We also try to organize site visits where the community can see the different ways design is organized “in the wild”. Check out some of the recent events on our meetup site.

Fluxible UX Education Summit (Upcoming in 2019)

Upcoming for the Fall of 2019, I was asked to help co-organize the Fluxible UX Education Summit. This is a 2-day event focused on outreach to local high schools to build awareness about design as a profession and the local post secondary programs in the field. Day 2 will focus on design education and how local universities and programs can prepare students to be UX leaders in the field and how practitioners continue creating opportunities to challenge themselves and grow in their career. We’ll mix perspectives between students, practitioners and educators and set up follow-on activities for a better continuous dialog between local industry and the education institutions.

SYDE348 Guest Lecture, University of Waterloo (2019)

This past Winter 2019, I was approached by one of my previous instructors at the University of Waterloo after one of my co-op students recommended that I run a lecture and activity on unmoderated testing. In the 2.5 hour session, the class and I looked at how unmoderated testing compares with moderated testing techniques, when to use which technique, and the different products that exist to support unmoderated testing. For the short activity, students broke up into groups to run unmoderated studies with each other. This gave the students first-hand experience on the mechanics of this technique.

CS548 Industry Panel and Reviewer, University of waterloo (2018)

In 2017, along with several other practicing designers in Kitchener-Waterloo, I was asked to support student teams in CS548 at the University of Waterloo to develop problem statements and conduct design reviews for their course project. For this, I pointed the course instructor in the direction of customer problems I was aware of within the Fairfax portfolio (pet care, insurance, restaurant and retail). I was assigned three teams that chose to focus on those problem areas. For those 3 teams, I helped review initial ideas based on results from their customer interviews and competitor product testing. The we worked together to define a concept and scope their prototype. Each team in the program developed unique and promising solution ideas. I was really proud to see what the students produced at their final poster showcase at the end of the semester - certainly a lot of learning and reflections on what it takes to design a great product.

Masters of Business Entrepreneurship and technology (MBET) Practicum supervisor (2017)

Every year a cohort of MBET students do a 3-month practicum with local industry partners to share their skills and gain first-hand industry experience. In 2017, the Lab got involved and proposed a project to explore ways to better engage retail customers with solutions focusing on chatbot technologies and we were paired up with a team 4 eager students with a diverse skillset. We met weekly for 3 months going through the designing thinking process to better understand customer needs and where Fairfax retail brands might be falling short of customer expectations. From that we generated some ideas, then prototyped and tested a chatbot solution. The concept they created contributed a lot to the Lab’s thought process and the students became familiar with the stages and some of the methods of design thinking. The results of the project was presented by the students to the participants in the Future of Retail event attended by executive leaders from multiple retail and restaurant companies within the Fairfax family.

High School Challenge Day (2017)

In a shorter engagement, the Lab was asked to participate in the bi-annual High School Challenge Day in Waterloo Region. For this we worked with with students to develop ideas to improve low-points in the family restaurant outing journey. Students were asked to apply emerging technology that they felt was the most interesting. Notable ideas included gaming consoles at the waiting room or at the table to pass the time and an iPad app to educate customers on food nutrition and the supply chain. Students got a glimpse into the design thinking process and how working together on a team can be an effective way to generate innovative solutions to a targeted problem.