You cannot not communicate
...especially when you are attending a barcamp and there are lots of interesting people with even more interesting thoughts. Being at the UXCamp in Berlin?almost felt like being thrown in a pit of creativity and problem solving. New methods, well known best practices as well as a bit of "touch" were thoroughly discussed and presented. Read the article and let me take you on a short trip back to the UXCamp. ...especially when you are attending a barcamp and there are lots of interesting people with even more interesting thoughts. Being at the UXCamp in Berlin almost felt like being thrown in a pit of creativity and problem solving. New methods, well known best practices as well as a bit of "touch" were thoroughly discussed and presented.
Petro and I flew in from Vienna and right after we arrived at the Erwin-Schroedinger-Zentrum we were greeted with an astonishing number of usability enthusiasts gathering for the key note. The first day started with a lot of interesting discussions and it was quite hard to decide where to attend.
Evalottchen was introducing us to the world of painted foxes, Romeo & Juliette and their affairs. She showed us how to draw things as we mean them and that small differences can have a deep impact. Sketches do a great job in letting customers understand complex topics and as humans are visual creatures, graphically outlining your concepts will keep them on your readers mind even longer. Right after the camp I had the chance to try to communicate to our customers using a lot of sketches and although I'm not really any good at drawing I loved to see how easy it was for non-technicals to understand my concepts and get an understanding of how the final product will look like.
Petro's and my visit to the UXCamp 2011 also marked the return of the Aloha editor and its approach to easy content creation to where it was presented one year ago. "Taking your users on a holiday", as our presentation was titled this year, means that the user should not feel as if he was stuck in the process of writing an article when what he really wants is to get his job done. Enabling him to focus on the goal and not on the process of getting there is one of the main features of the light interface of the Aloha Editor. The context aware architecture makes it possible to guide the writer through his tasks by freeing him from the clutter of feature stuffed interfaces.
The possibility of directly editing the DOM makes Aloha the first "What you see is what you really get"-Editor and opens a world of new possibilities for web developers. Letting content producers work on the "real" thing, meaning on the website itself and not in some CMS backend, is becoming state of the art and this is where one can really make a difference. This also made it possible for us to use a web site with the Aloha-Editor enabled instead of conventional PowerPoint slides during our presentation. Our audience seemed to be quite taken by surprise when we reacted and answered to alot of their questions by actually live-editing this web site. Then again, UXCamp 2011 kept us presenters on our toes throughout the whole event as well. Since UXCamp follows a barcamp concept, everybody had to put some work into capturing the crowds interest in order to even be able to get their ideas accross. It was nice to see so many presentation styles ranging from a talking banana via conventional slides all the way to MC Hammer. I will probably not be talking to my customers in a banana constume but I definitely got my head filled with new Ideas.
I am looking forward to see you all next year at the UXCamp 2012!
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