UX Australia is Australia’s premier user experience design conference, that took place in Canberra, on August 26-28. The conference encompassed many aspects of user experience design, including core topics such as information architecture, interaction design, information design, content, visual design & strategy as well as the design of physical objects.

Itsme was invited to the conference in order to show the work done by the interaction design team.
The presentation started contextualizing the innovation potential of Itsme and the “stories and venues” metaphor with reference to the traditional OS, up to the description of the basic conceptual aspects of Itsme.
Then, moving from the visual model that represents Itsme, it described the structure and articulation of the interface as well as the nature and behaviour of the interactive elements, how items are manipulated by user at interface level and the overall look and feel. It ended with the description of the design process, an highly iterative process, based on a participatory design methodology, that alternates activities dedicated to research and investigation, sedimentation, assessment trough participatory process.

Image taken by “Ruth Ellison“

View more documents from “itsmesrl“.

After the conference we collected  positive feedback form the audience. Vicky Teinaki, from Johnny Holland Magazine, was very enthusiastic about our project, as you can read on her post on the magazine blog. Rook in the Garret gave on her blog a very exhaustive description of our presentation. As first instance we were a bit taken a-back by looking at sketchnotes from Matt Balara (find it on his UX Australia sketchnotes), but we understand that it is another point of view, coming from a guy who made a presentation focused on Agile methodology at the conference. In response, I would like to say that an OS based on a completely new metaphor requires a strong conceptual framework, hence starting from scratch, not to forget that the aim was to present and explain the design process of this on-going project. We are in parallel developing the OS and putting our efforts in super structuring the actual linux back-end. So in response to his notes, the beef is coming. In the meanwhile, I would like to invite him to have a deeper look into the project.

If you want to find out more on what was presented during the conference, have a look at the conference program and at the UX Australia’s slideshare group.

Tags: conference, Design, interaction, UXAUSTRALIA

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