The Experience Gap (UX Camp Edmonton Presentation)
I wanted to share the slides from my UX Camp Edmonton talk this weekend. The presentation is called "The Experience Gap," and its core idea is that there's a growing gap between the best experiences people have with technology and... | May 13, 2013
Event: Content Strategy for the Public Sector (April 11)
Before I started consulting 10 years ago I worked in the public sector in a variety of communications and web management roles. Talking with clients over the past year I've realized that many of them still suffer from the same... | Apr 2, 2013
Experience Maps: A Case Study
Last summer I received an email from Kent Grayson, a marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Kent had seen the experience maps we created for Comcast and was interested in writing a case study about... | Feb 12, 2013
nForm at the 2013 IA Summit
We're very excited to have two of our own speaking at this year's IA Summit in Baltimore. | Jan 29, 2013
Event: Making Sense of Web Analytics (Edmonton, Nov 27)
We're running a short-but-informative workshop in Edmonton on November 27. This one is on web analytics, and we'll have two speakers sharing their insights on using analytics to make better design and business decisions. Details and a registration form are... | Nov 14, 2012
Drop by Our Open House on October 24
This summer, after much searching and renovating, we moved our team in Edmonton to a new studio on 104 Street. We're having an open house on Wednesday, October 24, to celebrate. We'd love it if you'd drop by, see our... | Oct 15, 2012
Event: Transforming Government Web Strategy (Toronto - September 20)
Earlier this year we ran a sold-out seminar on public sector web strategy in Edmonton. We had fantastic feedback from attendees, so we decided to bring this event to Toronto on September 20. If you work on the web in... | Aug 29, 2012
We're Moving July 31
If you have trouble reaching us on Tuesday, July 31, it's because we're relocating to our new studio. Our telephones will be out that day but the team will still be available by email and on their cell phones. This... | Jul 27, 2012
UX Lisbon 2012: User Research Hacks Presentation
I was at UX Lisbon a couple of weeks ago to deliver a short presentation called "User Research Hacks." It's all about how we do interesting user research on small budgets, short timelines, and sometimes without the buy-in for more... | May 25, 2012
Google Analytics: Ammneh gets certified!
Web Analytics is not just about capturing statistics on the number of "hits" your homepage got last month, or how many people saw your latest campaign. Web Analytics is about knowing who your audience is, understanding how and why they... | Apr 11, 2012
Event: Transforming Government Web Strategy (April 19)
We're running an event in a few weeks for our friends in the public sector, as well as anyone who's interested in web strategy and user experience. All of the details and a registration form are below. We've capped attendance... | Apr 5, 2012
Designers!
Last year I set out to strengthen our design team. Demand for our user experience design services has been growing and our small-but-mighty two-person team was getting stretched. I'd planned to add one designer in January, but I found two... | Mar 15, 2012
Event: Information Architecture for SharePoint, January 24, 2012
Are you struggling to make your SharePoint website or Intranet easy to search and navigate? We're holding an event on Tuesday, January 24 in Edmonton that will help you plan effective and intuitive information architectures for SharePoint. I've posted a... | Jan 18, 2012
We're Hiring a UX Designer
We're hiring a user experience designer to work out of our Edmonton office. If you're interested and you meet the requirements, please get in touch--we'd love to talk with you! Job Duties Collaborate with clients, analysts and other designers to... | Dec 18, 2011
We're Hiring a Project Manager
nForm is a busy design/consulting firm with clients in Alberta, B.C. and Ontario. We're looking for a project manager to help keep our projects on track, our budgets under control and our clients happy. Job Duties: Manage schedules and workflow... | Oct 28, 2011
Event: Designing Better Applications, Websites and Intranets
Update: This is now sold out. If you're a designer, communications or marketing manager, IT manager or just a closet UXer, we're holding an event for you next Tuesday in Edmonton. It's called "Designing Better Applications, Websites and Intranets" and... | Oct 18, 2011
Kiiro is now open-source
We've decided to open-source Kiiro, the SharePoint-based project management and collaboration application we released in 2009. Here's a short description of Kiiro from my original post announcing the product: Kiiro is a simple collaboration and project management app for SharePoint.... | Jan 20, 2011
We're now at nform.com!
Starting today our domain name is nform.com. This means our email addresses will now end in @nform.com and our website is http://nform.com. (You might not have noticed, but your browser was just redirected from nform.ca to nform.com.) Last week we... | Jan 19, 2011
We're Hiring a User Experience Designer
We hiring a User Experience Designer to work out of our Edmonton office. If you're interested and you meet the requirements, please get in touch--we'd love to talk with you! Our ideal candidate will come from a web design or... | Oct 14, 2010
Some Recent Work
It's been a busy year so far here at nForm. We've been lucky to work with some great clients on exciting projects, and we've just published short case studies on two of those projects. Have a look and let us... | Aug 31, 2010
Recent Launches
We've had two recent launches that I would like to share with you. Information Services Corporation of Saskatchewan URL: http://isc.ca Timing: Launched in January 2010. This project took exactly a year from start to end. Goal: The project goal was... | May 4, 2010
Introducing Parachute: Backup your Basecamp files in minutes
Today we’re releasing a new product called Parachute. Parachute is a simple Windows XP/Vista/7 application with one purpose: to back up your Basecamp files. As long-time Basecamp users we realized there was no easy way to get the files... | Apr 14, 2010
Explain IA
This is our submission for the ExplainIA competition put on by the IA Institute. It was a really fun project to work on - you should go check out the other submissions as well, if you haven’t yet. Lots of... | Feb 5, 2010
Farewells
This month Jess McMullin and Toby Spendiff, two friends and long-time employees of nForm, are leaving to pursue new adventures. | Jan 21, 2010
Introducing Scott Baldwin
We are thrilled and excited to announce that Scott Baldwin is joining our nForm team! We want to extend our warmest welcome and introduce Scott to our friends, colleagues, clients, and community: Scott has a passion for understanding the intersection... | Oct 28, 2009
Edmonton UX Book Club - Wired to Care (A discussion with the author Peter Mortensen)
"This is the story of how companies, and indeed organizations of all kinds, prosper when they tap into a power that every one of us already has: the ability to reach outside ourselves and connect with other people. And... | Oct 19, 2009
Content Strategy at CanUX with Kristina Halvorson and Rahel Bailie
We have two great content strategy speakers this year at CanUX, Kristina Halvorson and Rahel Bailie. Each bring a unique perspective and plenty of experience and knowledge to the topic. Last week I sat down with each of them individually... | Oct 15, 2009
We are hiring again: Intermediate-Snr Interaction Designer / Information Architect in our Toronto office
As an nForm consultant, your primary responsibility will be gathering business and customer insight and translating that insight into concrete plans and prototypes, such as conceptual models, interaction flows, wireframes, and functional specs. You will work with clients, their users,... | Sep 4, 2009
[Press] Kiiro: SharePoint-based Collaboration That Just Works
ReadWriteEnterprise published a nice piece on Kiiro a couple of days ago. In an article called "Kiiro: SharePoint-based Collaboration That Just Works", Steve Walling writes: "Kiiro is one of the best-looking and easiest-to-use SharePoint tools we've seen to date.... this... | Aug 28, 2009
Introducing Kiiro, Simple Project Management and Collaboration for SharePoint
Long-time readers will know that we've been working on a project management and collaboration application for Microsoft SharePoint. We're ready to release the product, and we've even picked a new name: Kiiro. Kiiro is a simple collaboration and project management... | Jun 18, 2009
CanUX 2009
We're excited to offer CanUX, the Canadian User Experience Workshop in Banff on November 12-14, 2009. Save the date, since we're putting together a world-class program that offers incredible value. Canada's best user experience event combines a breathtaking venue and... | Jun 16, 2009
Web Strategy Summit Starting Line-Up
Yesterday I posted the starting line-up for Web Strategy Summit speakers. (The official session descriptions are over at the Web Strategy Summit site if you want to read through them.) But I wanted to write a few words here about... | Mar 12, 2009
Edmonton UX Book Club!
We are glad to announce the start of Edmonton UX book club! The Edmonton UX book club is for local user experience practitioners who want to expand their knowledge of user experience and meet with the UX community. The... | Mar 7, 2009
Web Strategy Summit registration Open!
Hey everyone, Web Strategy Summit registration is now open. Woot! The full WSS conference runs on May 5th, and it will cost you just $399 before March 20. Four half-day workshops run on May 4th and are priced at $299... | Feb 6, 2009
Web Strategy Summit Submissions Due Saturday
We're working hard on finalizing the workshops and registration for Web Strategy Summit this week. The program is really coming together and I'm looking forward to sharing more details in a few days. But in the meantime, one important... | Jan 26, 2009
Announcing the Web Strategy Summit (May 4 & 5, 2009)
For the past couple of months we've been planning a unique new event and we're excited to pull back the curtain on it. The Web Strategy Summit is a two-day conference for web managers, executives, IT managers, developers and... | Dec 16, 2008
The Big Trading Card Give-away
Over the last two years we've produced a set of UX trading cards to give away at conferences. We've got cards for ethnography, card sorting, experience maps, sketchboards, wireframes and a variety of other methods, tools and techniques. The... | Nov 25, 2008
CanUX 2008: That's a wrap!
Earlier this week we wrapped another successful CanUX workshop/conference. Around 85 people from Canada and the US (but mostly Canada) gathered in Banff to talk about user experience, design, creativity, teamwork and a multitude of other topics. (There was also... | Nov 21, 2008
We're Hiring: Business Development Manager
Update: We've filled this position. We're looking for a Business Development Manager to help us grow our existing professional services business and our emerging product sales and licensing business. We've never had (or needed) a business development person, but we... | Nov 10, 2008
Swimlanes session at CanUX
I am excited to share with you a method and fancy deliverable at CanUX this year, known as the Swimlane Document. This is the deliverable that I blogged about earlier this year, and the same one that won the IA... | Oct 21, 2008
CanUX 2008: Late Registration Deadline is October 22
We've been hard at work over the last few weeks finalizing the CanUX 2008 program, pulling together materials for UX Bootcamp and brainstorming ways to make CanUX '08 the best ever. If you're thinking of registering, the prices go up... | Oct 16, 2008
CanUX is XPLANED
Everyone here at nForm is excited that Dave Gray, CEO and founder of XPLANE is coming to CanUX. XPLANE does very cool work, making complicated information understandable by creating visualizations. If you want to get a sense of what that... | Oct 14, 2008
Who wants an iPod shuffle?
I have a green 1GB iPod shuffle on my desk that's leftover from one of our earlier promotions. This Friday (October 10) I'm going to give it away to one of our newsletter subscribers. If you're not already subscribed, consider... | Oct 7, 2008
CanUX 2008: Meet the Microsoft Surface UX team
We just got news that Lisa Anderson and Dennis Wixon of the Microsoft Surface team will be joining us at CanUX to deliver the closing keynote. Large-scale multi-touch interaction design is becoming more and more popular (anyone watching John King's... | Sep 29, 2008
Midori is now in Beta!
Our project management add-on to SharePoint called Midori is now in beta. The website is up at http://www.getmidori.com. If your organization is managing projects and is considering leveraging SharePoint, Midori may well be the ideal solution. We are in beta... | Sep 24, 2008
We're Hiring: Senior/Intermediate SharePoint Developer
We are looking for a Senior or Intermediate .Net SharePoint developer to join our rapidly expanding team focused on our Midori product also client engagements. If the job description below sounds like you, please drop us a line at careers@nform.ca.... | Sep 19, 2008
New article - Tagging: Emerging Trends
A few months ago I compiled a couple of presentations plus some material from my book into an article on emerging trends in tagging for the ASIST Bulletin's special issue on information architecture. They published it a few weeks ago,... | Sep 9, 2008
We're Hiring: Senior Visual Designer
Update: This position is now filled. Over past few months we've found that our clients and projects (in particular Midori) need the skills of an experienced interface/interactive designer. So we've decided to bring on a Senior Visual Designer to round... | Aug 20, 2008
CanUX Registration now Available
We're thrilled to open up registration to CanUX, the Canadian User Experience workshop in Banff, Alberta, Canada. Running November 16-18, 2008, CanUX brings together world-class experts for three days of in-depth conversation and activities. Registration begins at 1:00 pm with... | Jul 31, 2008
Keynoting KM Australia
I'm really excited to be heading to Melbourne today to keynote KM Australia. I get to speak at a lot of conferences and this is one of the most interesting events I'll attend this year. Melbourne at Night by sobriquet.net... | Jul 16, 2008
Book Excerpt: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging
Over on Peachpit.com you'll find an excerpt from chapter two of my book, Return on Investment: Seven Business Benefits of Tagging. Here's a taste: Let's look at one important side of the value-centered design equation: return on investment. Whether you're... | Jun 23, 2008
CanUX 2008 speakers and dates
We're excited to announce our lineup for CanUX 2008. Dave Gray, XPLANE; Brandon Schauer, AdaptivePath; Luke Wroblewski, Yahoo! and LukeW Interface Designs; the Banff Leadership Arts Ensemble, and the nForm team, with more to come! Join us November... | Jun 18, 2008
Plug: Check out EightShapes' documentation workshop on August 8th
Our friends at EightShapes are putting on a one-day documentation workshop in Washington, DC, on August 8th. Dan and Nathan are the go-to guys when it comes to design documentation and this workshop is a great opportunity to learn about... | Jun 16, 2008
DemoCamp + Midori
We'll be at Edmonton's second DemoCamp tonight showing off Midori, our SharePoint-based project management application. Midori was built by Toby and his team (they've been working on it in stealth mode for a while now). We began using it internally... | May 20, 2008
Swimlanes for the Win!
Jess, Yvonne, Dennis and I just wrapped our annual trek to the Information Architecture Summit. It was, as always, a fun and stimulating event that gives us a chance to re-connect with old friends and make some new ones. This... | Apr 16, 2008
Survey: Should we sell our UX Trading Cards?
The number one question I've been asked about our UX Trading Cards is where people can get more sets or last year's set. If you'd like to have us reprint and sell the cards, please let us know by taking... | Apr 14, 2008
We have a Winner!
Thanks to everyone who responded to our trading card suggestion contest. We've selected VML rockstar Amy Silvers' suggestion of Search Analytics as our winning entry. Amy will receive a copy of Gene Smith's book Tagging: People Powered Metadata for the... | Mar 14, 2008
nForm's 2008 UX Trading Cards Contest
I'm finishing up the copy for our 2008 UX Trading Cards for this year's IA Summit, and thought it would be fun to involve the community in coming up with ideas for one of the cards in the deck. We'll... | Feb 27, 2008
Tagging 101, my Northern Voice presentation
I thought I'd post the slides from my Northern Voice InternetBootCamp talk Tagging 101. If you're new to tagging this is a good place to start (Common Craft also has a great video Social Bookmarking in Plain English). | View... | Feb 23, 2008
nForm Kicks Off Conference Season
We're getting into conference season, and nForm will be at a few events over the next few months, from our own backyard to around the continent and all the way to Melbourne, Australia. We'll be at Northern Voice, the IA Summit, DocTrain West, WebVisions, Voices that Matter, NEOS, UPA 2008, and KM Australia - come say hi if you're there too. Dates and links after the jump. | Feb 14, 2008
nForm heading to Miami for 2008 IA Summit
We're excited to head to Miami this coming April for the 2008 IA Summit. We've got a workshop, 3 talks, and a panel. We're also sponsoring the conference and offering trading cards again...look for some exciting news there soon. | Jan 25, 2008
Jess makes the London Times
A couple of months ago Jess wrote an open letter to Apple's board suggesting that Jonathan Ive be considered as a successor to Steve Jobs. The London Times just picked up on this meme in their article One step from... | Dec 10, 2007
Four spots left for CanUX - register soon!
It's been insanely busy at nForm HQ over the past couple of months. I've been writing a book, Jess has been getting ready for his European tour, the team has been working away on assorted projects, and we've been busily... | Nov 2, 2007
We're hiring: Business Analyst
As a business analyst, your primary responsibility will be research and discovery that drives business, customer, and technical insight. You will work closely with clients, their customers, and others using interviews, workshops, and other methods to develop understanding of both the big picture and the details. You will use this insight to develop clear vision, requirements, and functional design for client systems. Your work will create the foundation for successful projects... | Sep 21, 2007
Jess McMullin delivering keynote at Italian IA Summit
I've been invited to share some thoughts as a keynote speaker at the Italian IA Summit in Trento, Italy on November 16-17. It looks like a great lineup is coming together there...I'm excited to see what else is on tap.
I'll be speaking about the Business of Experience, sharing thoughts on business fluency and how user experience practitioners can increase their influence in the organizations they work with.
| Sep 21, 2007
Jess McMullin speaking at German IA Conference
I'm excited to announce that I'm joining some other fantastic people November 9 and 10 in Stuttgart for the German IA Conference. I'll be sharing a talk about user experience, design thinking, and innovation and offering a half-day workshop on... | Sep 17, 2007
UPA2007 REDUX: Becoming a Usability Coach: Proving Success One Champion at a Time
After speaking at the UPA annual conference in June, one of the attendees asked if I could do a redux for her colleagues over lunch. I agreed and we are opening it up to anyone else who might be interested.... | Aug 29, 2007
Farewell to Trevor
Trevor van Gorp was nForm's first hire, and after almost 3 years he's moving on to other opportunities. We've appreciated his humor, his Ahnold Schwarzenegger imitations, and his contributions to the practice. Thanks for the last 3 years, and we wish Trevor the very best in the future. Check the full entry for a secret nForm prototyping technique ;-) | Jul 25, 2007
We're hiring: Interaction Designer / Information Architect
As an nForm consultant, your primary responsibility will be translating business and customer insight into concrete plans and prototypes, such as conceptual models, site architectures, interaction flows, wireframes, and functional specs. You will work with clients, their users, and nForm colleagues to understand, define, and solve problems to create business and user value through designing fantastic user experiences. | Jul 23, 2007
Globe and Mail on the Social Web
Today's Globe and Mail has a good article on the social web (that just happens to include a photo and a couple of quotes from me). The story covers Forrester's social technographics model, Web 2.0 and how companies can engage... | Jul 18, 2007
Becoming a Usability Coach presentation at UPA2007
I just came back from UPA2007, where I gave this talk: For those who attended my talk and either sent in their feedback or talked with me about it afterwards, thank you! I had a great time meeting up with... | Jun 21, 2007
Yvonne Shek speaking at UPA 2007
I'll be speaking at the UPA annual conference next week in Austin, TX. The title of the talk is: Becoming a Usability Coach: Proving Success One Champion at a Time. This talk is aimed at UX professionals who feel that... | Jun 5, 2007
A few announcements
Are there better ways to spend Friday afternoon than writing up some neglected company news? Sure there are, but they all make me feel guilty. Here, then, are a few minor announcements: CanUX 2007 is on. We'll be announcing our... | May 18, 2007
Jess McMullin invited to speak at Adaptive Path's UX Week
I'm so excited to finally be able to share that I'll be speaking at Adaptive Path's 2007 User Experience Week conference in Washington D.C. this August. I'll be talking about Smoothing the Way: the Designer as Facilitator. Thanks to Sarah Nelson and the rest of the Adaptive Path crew for inviting me to share some of the thinking and practice here at nForm about building buy-in and consensus across different project stakeholders. | Apr 30, 2007
Jess McMullin speaking in Orlando at DigitalNow
I'm off to Orlando next week to talk at the DigitalNow conference. My presentation is "Why Methods Trump Methodology, and Other Execution Secrets for User Experience Success". I'll be discussing some user experience foundations, UX implications for Web 2.0, talk about best practices for tackling web projects, and how managers can avoid common pitfalls and create teams with the right skillsets. | Apr 5, 2007
New article on social software
I just published an article called Social Software Building Blocks that covers some of the research I did for my recent IA Summit workshop. It looks at the seven building blocks of a social software system and features a nifty... | Apr 4, 2007
IA Summit Trading Cards - Sneak Peek
Last week I announced that we're sponsoring the 2007 IA Summit with a user experience trading card game. The cards are printed, we've got some fabulous prizes, and I'm excited to see things move ahead.
Here's a snapshot of some of the proofs,,, | Mar 17, 2007
PaidPOV Update
Last summer I introduced PaidPOV, a web-based research recruiting product we're developing. Here's a short description of the product from the post on my blog: [PaidPOV is] a tool for research recruiting that will make setting up usability tests, focus... | Mar 12, 2007
nForm sponsors IA Summit with UX Trading Card game
I'm excited to let people know that we're sponsoring the upcoming 2007 Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas. And this sponsorship deal isn't just that we spend some money and get our name on the program - we're running a... | Mar 7, 2007
We're hiring: Junior Designer
Join an experienced, smart team that works with a range of clients, from the Fortune 500 to leading public sector institutions. As a junior interface designer, your primary responsibility will be to create production visual designs following senior creative direction, wireframe specifications, and visual style guides. | Feb 21, 2007
Building Web Applications Workshop in Banff
From March 2-4, I'll be at the Building Web Applications workshop at the Banff Centre. The workshop is part of the Banff New Media Institute Accelerator program and is being put on by Digital Alberta. It sounds like it's going... | Feb 5, 2007
Introducing Portholes
After several months of development (and occasional neglect as we tended to other work) we finally rolled out version three of our website this afternoon. I'm calling this design Portholes, because the small images on the main pages are like... | Jan 29, 2007
Accelerator Workshop
Jess and I will be doing this workshop on workshops at the IA Summit pre conference this year. Although we have been using this method for quite some time now, the idea came to me during CanUX 2006, when one... | Jan 23, 2007
IA Summit bound
Jess, Yvonne and I will be headed to the IA Summit at the end of March. It's in Vegas, but it won't be a vacation (at least not until the end). Here's what we'll be up to: Social Information Architecture... | Jan 18, 2007
Toby Spendiff joins nForm
A few months ago we welcomed Toby Spendiff to the nForm team. Toby came from Upside Software where he helped architect their product and managed dozens of developers through several major product releases. We're delighted to have him. He's a... | Dec 1, 2006