I cannot wait to be in Copenhagen again. It's been a little over 5 years! More about it here http://www.euroia.org/

Keynote address:
Sylvain Cottong (Integrated Place, Luxemburg) will be speaking on the use of design methods to solve business problems. He will explore how these approaches, traditionally applied to digital, interface driven experiences, can be applied in service design, physical spaces and business management problems.

UX Tools:
Kat Roderick (Microsoft, SA) will demonstrate SketchFlow, a new tool for creating schematics (wireframes) for design and prototyping. She’ll also be giving away a few free copies of the software.

Forum feedback:
Jason Hobbs (jh-01, SA) will provide a welcome and introduction to the User Experience Forum. He will feedback on a workshop held earlier this year where various representatives of corporate, educational, media, marketing and agency industries gathered to understand their needs from the practice of user experience design in SA.

Please RSVP as soon as possible by emailing phillip@jh-01.com

Venue and directions:
FADA Building Auditorium, ground floor in the FADA Building (the Design School opposite the UJ Hotel School) on the Bunting Road Campus of the University of Johannesburg.

The campus entrance is opposite the Gas Works in Auckland Park. Enter in Bunting Road. Pass through the boom, take your first right into the first parking lot. Park and walk all the way down (heading North with the Hotel School on your right). At the bottom walk left over the pedestrian bridge into the Design School and FADA building.

About Sylvain Cottong:
After his studies in economics, Sylvain started to work for the first multimedia production studio in Luxembourg back in 1995. Along with interactive CD Rom productions the agency "352 Production" he also started to produce websites at the very early stages of the World Wide Web. Always interested in the usability, usefulness, desirability and business value of things, Sylvain then got interested in web usability and software usability on a more general level. In 1997 he became an independent consultant in user experience design and networked business strategies. During that time, he also was acting as an adviser to the Luxembourg government on eGovernment & knowledge management strategies as well on Internet communication.

In 2006, he founded integratedPlace, together with his partner Georges
Zigrand, who then came back to Luxembourg after 8 years of professional experience as an industrial designer in London.

IntegratedPlace is a design consultancy and a design management agency that
specialises in (user) experience design, social media communication, environmental design, service design and business innovation.

Sylvain has attended numerous international conferences in different areas of interest during his career and would call himself a "problem solver using design thinking".

About the SA UX Forum:
The Forum was started by Jason Hobbs several years ago to develop a local community of practice for user experience design in South Africa. The Forum exists through a Google Group and has meet-ups in both Cape Town and Johannesburg. Please feel free to join the group:
http://groups.google.com/group/sa-ux-forum

Please feel free to invite your friends. Please RSVP to phillip@jh-01.com

This event is being kindly sponsored by jh-01, Microsoft SA and The University of Johannesburg.

We'll keep you posted as results continue to come in.

Welcome guys!

BTW we are, as ever, looking to hire more user experience designers, information architects, interface designers and content creators...

jh-01 will be consulting in a UX capacity as well as assisting with a full IA redesign, interface look & feel overhaul and content delivery.

Enterprise IA is one thing but enterprise UX is another. And of course the timelines are just short of insane. Nonetheless we're loving the challenge and working incredibly closely with a client that's brave enough to use the UX process as the basis for the front-end of the roll-out.

Highlights so far: conducting just short of 100 user interviews and observation sessions in one week with a team of 7 individuals as part of our research phase.

For those of you who don't know Standard Bank they're the oldest Bank in South Africa and one of the ‘big four’ in retail Banking. They have a strong international presence though not in the retail space. This project will impact 9 million customers (both personal and business) and over 10 000 staff members. What a rush!

We're super super excited to also have Jodi Levine join us as a business analyst with vast experience, specialising in process design.

Welcome guys!

BTW, we're still looking for middle weight UX Designers. If you're interested please contact jason@jh-01.com

We're delighted to be building further in this vertical. Thanks DRAFT!

Photo's from our last meet up and the one in Cape Town can be found on our Facebook group

We'll update when this goes live.