Fluxible conference brings UX world to Waterloo Region

When you and your colleagues are heads-down and hard at it, opportunities can slip by unnoticed.

It’s a risk for any business, but especially for consumer-facing tech companies preoccupied by the race to be first to market with the next big thing.

If that describes you, Mark Connolly and Bob Barlow-Busch have a big heads-up: It’s called Fluxible, and it’s happening in Waterloo Region on Sept. 22-23.

Fluxible is a new conference focused on user experience, a crucial and fast-growing discipline that often makes the difference between a nifty invention sitting on a shelf and flying off it into the hands of eager customers.

Nowhere has interest in UX grown as quickly as it has in Waterloo Region, whose tech ecosystem has expanded well beyond hard technology and into the consumer-facing space in barely a decade.

As local UX pioneers with front-row seats to this happy explosion, Connolly and Barlow-Busch spotted and seized the opportunity to build a world-class event that’s easy and affordable for people here to attend.

I sat down with Mark and Bob for an in-depth chat about Fluxible, and about their own observations of the expanding UX universe in Waterloo Region and beyond. During our talk, they asked me to pass along this little perk: a discount code that will save you $200 on the cost of registration.

Q – What will the user experience be like for attendees of the Fluxible conference?

BBB – Multilayered.

MC – I’m glad you thought of that.

BBB – There is, in fact, an entire musical festival happening at the same time; that’s why I say multilayered. The Festival of Interstitial Music.

MC – It’s happening concurrently in time and space to Fluxible.

BBB – So that’s one way we’re making the experience a little unexpected.

Q – Okay, so . . .

MC – More seriously, it’s an ongoing work in progress. We’re working to achieve a few goals.

The initial reason we wanted to do this was multifold. One is, we just wanted to have a good time; two is, we wanted to speak to the emerging UX community within Waterloo Region and expose that community to the broader world, but also bring the broader world here; and we wanted to learn something and meet new people.

To that extent, we’re working on creating a conference experience that will support those goals. It’ll be mostly fun, because that’s what we want, but there’s also going to be a chance to meet and learn and have a good time.

BBB – I think an important part of that is, it’ll be a reasonably small event. We’re capping it at a maximum of 200 people.

All of our speakers are staying for the entire event as well. I mean, it’s not uncommon for speakers to parachute in, do a talk and then take off, right?

So, one of the great things about the conference experience will be the opportunity to actually hang out with, get to know, talk with, eat with, drink with anybody you want; speakers, fellow conference attendees.

We want it to feel like a party, actually. It’s actually a UX party, disguised as a conference.

MC – Absolutely. That’s our tagline.

Q – How has the local UX community evolved during your time in the field?

MC – It has come to be.

BBB – It’s true; it didn’t exist before. We’ve both been doing this work for nigh on 20 years now, I would say. We’re the old farts of the biz now.

From my perspective, back in 2000 or 2001, I actually looked at starting a local chapter of any one of a few different professional organizations that would cater to the design community.

There was CHI, there was UPA, recently rebranded as UXPA. At the time, I looked into establishing a local chapter of these and did a test event or two, and frankly, there just was not enough interest to support even a regular group of 10 people a month coming out to do it.

I noticed a strong correlation between that lack of interest and the similar lack of interest from local businesses.

It’s been my observation that Waterloo’s roots come far more out of hard technology, embedded technology; it used to be that very few companies in town made products that ended up in the hands of a consumer.

Given that, I think the importance of product design and user experience didn’t really matter so much at the time.

But, fast-forward, and over the last 10 years things have changed so dramatically.

I think it was six years ago now that I helped co-found uxWaterloo, which is the Communitech peer-to-peer, affiliated with the Interaction Design Association.

We did the same thing again – we said ‘Let’s do a couple of test events’ – and it’s like, wow, people came swarming out of the woodwork.

Ever since then, it’s been just a fantastic ride. We have a lot of fun doing it, and I think our biggest turnout was 200 people for an event once, when Scott Berkun came out. We packed the RIM theatre.

So, it’s really changed, and interestingly, you can see the correlation between that interest in design and user experience, and this interest in the field driven by the local companies, because we have so many companies now – not just the startups, but the established ones – who are building products that get into the hands of end consumers.

Suddenly all this stuff really, really matters. It’s strategically so important now.

MC – And I can suavely segue into mentioning our sponsors.

I mean, Google here started out as a small startup, obviously, but now they’re doing major development work here, and it includes doing UX work here. That wasn’t the case even a couple of years ago.

For RIM, obviously, user experience has always been important to them, but has become more visibly important to them in the last few years.

BBB – More competitively critical too, for sure.

MC – Our sponsor Harris, as well, they’re doing design work here for that company’s products.

BBB – Quarry is another sponsor.

MC – And obviously design is a huge part of that organization.

And nForm.

BBB – They’re a boutique design, information architecture agency in Edmonton and Toronto.

The sponsors who have stood up are a great example of how interested people have become in the subject.

So, it became a not-very-difficult decision to host a conference here.

MC – Although we dithered about it for a long time. ‘Well, should we do a conference, Bob? Yeah, let’s talk about that.’

There was a good year of that, and then we just finally decided to pull the trigger.

It wasn’t hard to do, and then people jumped on board really quickly.

Q – How important is it to make this not just a local event, but also a world-facing one, where you bring people in from outside?

MC – From our perspective, we wanted to introduce the community here in Waterloo Region to the UX world at large, but it was also important for us to bring the outside UX world to Waterloo Region, because there are people doing related work in this region who haven’t had a chance to get that kind of exposure before.

So, we deliberately set out to bring speakers from the larger world.

A few examples: Daniel Szuc, an Australian based in Hong Kong, jumped on board right away. We actually spent some time with him talking about his conference experience, running UX Hong Kong.

Patrick Hofmann, he’s actually from Kitchener, but based in Sydney, so it gets weirdly circular. Patrick was very happy to come back. He works for Google in Sydney and he was a very early committed speaker to Fluxible, and we’re thrilled about that.

A really neat one, which took us a long time to get sorted out, is Dan Gärdenfors, who is a designer with RIM, formerly with The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), which RIM acquired, and who were a very well-known design consultancy based in Sweden.

We’re thrilled these guys are coming to town because it’s going to be a chance for people to see what’s going on beyond the region. And that’s in addition to the various people coming down from Toronto, from Edmonton and all over the States.

We’re bringing the world here because we want people to go, ‘Wow, look, there’s a bigger world; we can be a part of something more than Waterloo Region.’

BBB – Over the years as organizers of uxWaterloo, we’ve had the opportunity to go to a lot of top conferences all around the world – North America, Europe, China and so on – so I’ve seen personally the value of really connecting and meeting with people in UX globally.

For me, that’s always been a really important goal of this, to kind of help the local community experience that same feeling of being part of this global movement.

It’s been our suspicion, based on our experience with uxWaterloo, that not a lot of people in town get the opportunity or choose to go to conferences outside the region.

Occasionally, we’ve had a handful of members of our own group go to conferences out there and then come back and help do a teach-back, maybe, to everyone here, but it’s generally been a pretty small proportion of folks who do that.

We saw this as an opportunity to say, ‘Well, if people can’t, for whatever reason, go, let’s just hold one right here.’ Then you don’t have any excuses.

MC – And there’s a bunch of reasons for that, too. There aren’t a lot of UX-related conferences in the area. There’s nothing in Waterloo Region, and there’s rarely anything in Toronto, surprisingly, or Canada as a whole.

Travelling to Lisbon or London or Hong Kong isn’t something that most companies can afford to do. We wanted to make this thing as stupidly affordable as possible so that it would reach as wide a range of people who were interested in UX as possible.

BBB – It’s actually a point to reinforce. People may not realize, actually, what a steal this is.

Conferences exactly of this format – sometimes even half the length – are twice the price, typically, so we’ve done everything we can to really make this affordable.

All of our speakers are volunteering their time; we’re not paying anybody, for example, which is a huge thanks to them, because these are all folks who regularly get paid to go and teach workshops and so on.

MC – We’re covering all their expenses, obviously, but they are doing this as a way giving back to the broader UX community, and they’re doing it here.

BBB – So it is something worth reinforcing, that it’s a total steal.

MC – It’s stupidly inexpensive; I mean, it’s just almost embarrassing.

BBB – We’ve talked about how there’s such a spike of interest in UX locally, because of the success of everything we’ve been doing for the community here, but the reality is, we have a real shortage of people who would stand up and say, ‘I’m a UX designer’, ‘I’m a UX researcher’, ‘I’m a UX practitioner’, and have really good experience to back it up.

I’m expecting a lot of people at the conference to be folks who totally understand user experience, are really fascinated by it and want to move their careers into that direction, but they may not have had a lot of experience or opportunity to do stuff about it yet in their own jobs.

So I think it’s worth acknowledging that we know that, and we’ve designed it in a way that there’s a lot of great content there for people who are looking to break into the field. It’s a fantastic opportunity to do it, because, guess what, this is your tribe, right? This is everybody, and what a great investment in your career to come in and spend the whole weekend getting to know people, not just from around the world but here in town.

MC – I love the big-tent metaphor, because obviously we designed this thing for designers, practitioners and researchers, but we expect there will be developers or product managers or marketers – anyone who is peripherally interested is going to get stuff out of this.

We wanted to make it accessible to those sorts of groups that have a stake in user experience.

BBB – Marketing is one that you wouldn’t think of as being a good fit for a conference like this, but it really is, because the user experience right now, if you’re doing anything online, kind of is your most powerful marketing weapon.

It’s the one a lot of companies are struggling with the most – you know, ‘What should this product be? How should it behave? How should it look? How should it make people feel? How do we create this stickiness in the product? How do we get people to feel it’s a delightful experience?’

That’s marketing.

Q – For people who don’t work in UX, it can look a bit like magic; it’s a key part of the tech world, but it leans to the artistic and creative side. What is it like to be a UX person working among engineers in a place like Waterloo, where hard tech has been such a fixture?

MC – I think the answer to that question is going to depend on who you ask.

Bob and I will have different answers because we have slightly different backgrounds and different experiences.

I’ve got a fine arts degree, but I know how to code, so I work side-by-side with the development teams that I’m building products with.

As it happens right now, I’m writing a lot of code on a project; at other points in the lifecycle or project, I’m doing a lot of other, more-obviously-UX-related things, like doing design, creating wireframes, doing customer interviews and other things.

So it depends, but for me it’s lots of fun, because on a really strong team, you’ve got a range of skills and experiences that, when you put them together, make for a team that creates great stuff.

If you all respect each other and understand those strengths and weaknesses, you’ll build amazing things.

For me, the experience is, ‘Wow, this is fun, I get to build stuff, and when I say ‘make it red,’ they’ll make it red because they trust me to make it red.’

BBB – One of the most fun things about this as a career is the fact that you get to live between those two worlds. You have one foot in technology and engineering; one foot in the humanities.

There’s a lot of psychology in this job, a lot of art as well, and a lot of social sciences. So, it’s actually a great sweet spot for somebody who kind of enjoys all of that and doesn’t like to just pigeonhole themselves into one slot.

MC – I know developers who are interested in user experience and want to move in that direction, and they’re great to work with because they want to soak it up. It’s wonderful.

BBB – It’s not uncommon to see this migration from one side to the other. We each know a lot of people who started out just as engineers and developers and, for whatever reason, maybe ended up working on projects that had a lot of user-interface component in it, and they realized, ‘Wow, I really love this challenge.’

Other developers have the same experience and go, ‘Whoa, I hate that and never want to do it again; give me the back-end technology.’

But the people who find themselves attracted to the user interfaces often keep going, and they become some of the most passionate advocates of interface design and user experience. And it goes the other way, too.

People may not have started out as coders but they discover that they love it, and look for opportunities to code as much as they can.

So, it’s a whole continuum, and if you’re in this field, you’ll find a spot for yourself somewhere along that continuum.

MC – I’ll just generalize and say that whatever direction you’re coming from, if you’re genuinely interested in what other people are doing and what other people on your team are doing, there’s all kinds of opportunity to learn and grow and do different things.

You read about the stereotypical [attitude], ‘Well, the engineers, they’re not listening to what the designers want’, that kind of stuff.

I have not personally experienced that to a great extent; I’ve found that with the developers I work with, if I’m open and work closely with them and listen to their thoughts on how a product should go together, I make better products and there’s no friction.

There’s opportunity. If you’re open-minded and open-eared and you go out and ask questions, there’s all kinds of opportunity to learn and grow and change.

Q – You’ve already alluded to this, but how important is UX to the future of this region’s tech community?

MC – I think it’s critical to the success of the products that are being built in any community, but certainly in this community.

It makes the difference between an interesting technology and a great product.

If you take a look at the high-profile companies who are doing work here, UX is integral to the success of their product.

I mean, Google is doing so much mobile stuff here in Kitchener-Waterloo, with UX people working here; the products are not imaginable without that.

RIM, as they move toward BB10 and wanting to make this next leap into the future, they need UX; it’s critical. They acquired an amazing design consultancy and they already had an amazing set of designers and researchers.

It’s critical to their success, but it’s critical to the success of the companies in places like the Communitech Hub or the Accelerator Centre.

Take a company like Sortable, who were recently acquired. We know Alex at Sortable; we worked with him at Primal. Their success was, to a large extent, technologically driven, but to an equal extent, it was based on a UI that actually delivered meaningful experiences to their users.

They would not have been able to have the success they’ve had without devoting that time and energy to it.

I’m going to say right now – and I don’t think Alex will mind this – but Alex Black at Sortable was the very first person to sign up for Fluxible. I don’t think we’ve even told Alex that yet.

We’ve got to get a present for him.

But what I’m getting at is, Alex is a hardcore CS person, but he realizes, as do the other folks at Sortable, that user experience is critical to their success, and they went out of their way to make sure that it would happen.

BBB – It’s the difference, as Mark said, between building a product and putting something out there and seeing adoption. User experience is all about delighting people and getting them to just absolutely love this thing that you’ve built.

So yeah, it is essential to this region. And we’re at a moment in time, I think, where we’re going to have to sink or swim, which touches again on ‘why now?’ for this conference.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that just about every week, we get an inquiry from a company in town who is looking for a user-experience designer, and they’re really, really hard to find.

The schools in town are waking up to this opportunity, and there have been some really neat programs created, say, at UW in the last couple of years. But the reality is, we don’t have any academic programs in town that really turn out people who can hit the ground running, and that’s probably one factor in why there’s a bit of a shortage of talented people here.

It usually means trying to hire someone from outside of town, so this, hence, touches on another one of our goals for Fluxible: to get the eyes of the world on K-W.

Everyone’s heard of Waterloo Region, but they probably have no idea that there is a growing and thriving UX community, so we want everyone to look and go, ‘Oh wow, there was an amazing conference that happened there’, and ‘Wow, look what happened’.

So, when local companies are trying to hire for these roles, they will hopefully have just a little bit of an easier time convincing people to contemplate this region as a place to get a job.

Q – Can you each give me a brief bio of your UX career?

BBB – We’re so old, this will take forever.

MC – Yeah, when I started is kind of a fuzzy place.

I started in the early ‘90s. I had my own design company that started off being print design; then I got into doing things with MacroMind Director and HyperCard early on; and then when the web came along I started doing web work. I did my first paying web work in 1994, and by the end of the decade I was exclusively doing that stuff.

I was a partner in a consultancy called Convivia Interaction Design. We were focused totally on user experience. And then in 2000, I went to work for one of my clients, a company called Maptuit, and stayed there for a few years.

I worked for another few years at a company called Platform Computing, doing grid computing solutions, and I was designing stuff. They were recently acquired by IBM, and Maptuit was recently acquired by Telogis.

I wanted to be in Waterloo, though, and those companies were in the Toronto area. The commute was not fun.

I was having trouble finding stuff down here, and finally came here to work for a while with Primal Fusion, which is where Bob and I met, and for the last few years I’ve been working at Karos Health.

At Karos we do health care software, and obviously there is a human factor involved in that area.

Oh, and I help Bob with uxWaterloo. We rouse rabble. Or, I rouse rabble and Bob calms them down again.

I’ve taught a couple of design courses that are sort of related to user experience at the universities, one at Waterloo and one at Laurier.

Q – So you’ve spent most of your career as a designer?

MC – Yes, absolutely.

Q – Okay. Bob?

BBB – Similar trajectory, but it comes from a different place.

I got started in the early ‘90s as a co-op Waterloo student. My degree is in English, rhetoric and professional writing, and I actually still remember the exact moment when I started to step in this direction.

It was my very first day on a co-op term in Ottawa at a technical company, and as an English RPW student, the jobs at the time were in technical writing, and that’s what the job was.

Literally, on that first day, I started doing some technical writing, having to explain some piece of software, and I remember just kind of throwing my hands up in the air and going, ‘This is ridiculous.’

And I walked over to the developers and just had a conversation about, ‘Can we change the way this software is designed and functioning, because if we do this, then we don’t have to write any of this stuff that I’ve been asked to write right now.’

So for me, that was the light-bulb moment. It was like, ‘Wow, if you have to explain to someone how a product works, the design has failed.’

MC – Troublemaker.

BBB – Yep, totally.

So that’s the story of my career. I always insinuated myself into the product design from that very day forward, and it didn’t take long before I was basically full time doing user-interface design.

User experience wasn’t a term that existed until maybe eight years ago, something like that.

MC – ‘Insinuate’ is an interesting word. I’ve always insinuated myself into development teams; the design viewpoint and mindset is an integral part of it.

Q – So did you just pick up the design skills along the way, then?

BBB – Yes. A lot of reading, a lot of workshops, going to conferences.

The best way, though, is to get yourself a job where you get to work next to people who are awesome designers to begin with, so that was kind of what I did.

In terms of a quick summary of where I’ve worked, I had my own consultancy in the ‘90s for a while.

Things got interesting when I went to Belgium for a couple of years and worked for Sony, doing interface design there. It was in Brussels, just around the corner from NATO. It was so cool.

Then I came back here. The reason I came back was that I had an opportunity to work with the team at Quarry and help establish their interaction design and usability group. So, it was a new service area at the organization.

I was there for eight years doing that; a lot of fun and I learned a lot.

Then I went to Primal to head up some design there. As Mark said, that’s where we met.

Currently I’m a partner at ArtBarn here in town.

In terms of other connections to the UX community, we’ve talked about uxWaterloo, so I started that about seven years ago, and also have done a fair bit of speaking at conferences around the world, and have contributed chapters to a few books on user experience, particularly about how to do user customer research and translate that into your product design.

So that’s a whirlwind tour of me.

MC – Sort of a theme throughout this conversation has been that you talk about university and going to school and learning something there, but the cliché is that the really important thing you do is learn how to learn. And everything that Bob and I have experienced in our careers reinforces that.

School was a starting point, but your career is defined by how you learn and what you grow into over the course of it, not by where you started.

So, you really can do anything. I shouldn’t be doing surgery, though.

BBB – I’ve always said for me, the most important attribute of a successful designer, but frankly a successful-almost-anybody, is curiosity.

MC – Why do you say that, Bob? Sorry . . .