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People for Research are proudly sponsoring NUX4. This is the first time we are sponsoring one of the annual conferences organised by Northern User Experience (NUX).

Ahead of attending the conference we wanted to learn more about the background of the event and the Northern User Experience community Barry Briggs, one of the organisers of the event, is involved with.

🎙 How did NUX begin?

The origins of NUX go back 15 years or so and are shrouded in mystery. I’m not trying to sound deliberately mysterious or enigmatic, it’s just that the original founders are no longer involved and the detail has been lost during the intervening years. However, I have spoken to a couple of the guys before in an attempt to unpick our history, and although what follows may or may not be 100% accurate, in the absence of anything else we’re choosing to accept it as our “origin story”.

Grab a cup of coffee, sit back and let me tell you more about us. Some time in the early 2000s, three guys from Manchester started an informal UX meetup: Steve Potts (now at the BBC), David Hawdale (last seen weaving his UX strategy magic at Ladbrokes) and Mike Little (of WordPress fame). At some point this meetup was loosely affiliated to UXPA, and may even have been called UXPA North, but no one seems quite sure. What is known is that, at some point, and for reasons long forgotten, they decided to break away from UXPA and rebrand as Northern User Experience.

As I understand it, this group had semi-regular meetups on and off for a few years, although I’m not sure what format the meetups took.

Fast forward to mid 2008… I’d not long started at Manchester agency Code Computerlove when I heard about a local UX meetup group that was struggling to find a regular venue. I had a word with my boss and we offered them the use of our office space.

At that point David Hawdale was still a regular attendee, but a new team handled the organisation side of things. Mike Little was still hosting the NUX website (and still is), but for all intents and purposes, the group had changed hands and was being run by a new team.

I started attending NUX meetups around that time, and sometime in late 2008/early 2009 I joined the steering group. Our meetups back then typically attracted 10 to 20 people and, if I’m being honest, it felt like the group was struggling a bit due to a lack of profile. However, having the PR weight of Code behind us, and my slightly more ‘in your face’ approach to social networking, meant that we started to grow from then.

The steering group gained and lost a few more members along the way, but by 2010 everything had changed, and everyone involved in NUX had joined sometime within the last two years (hence the story being lost along the way).

Around this time, Keith Doyle from the Manchester team moved to Leeds and we started a sister group there. Leeds has been growing steadily ever since and is now a similar size to the Manchester group. Both groups regularly get between 50 to 80 people at our free meetups and often sell out within a day or two of tickets being made available. Such is the demand for UX events in the north!

🎙 What was the motivation for organising the annual conference?

Our first conference, NUX One, was really just an attempt to bring the Manchester and Leeds communities together. It was a small affair – about 100 people – held in Bradford on a Saturday afternoon in October 2012. The speakers were people who’d already done talks at our local meetups, but whom we thought might be good to get back and put in front of a larger audience. I had been working in the States in the run up to the event so wasn’t heavily involved in it, but it was a great success and even though we didn’t know at the time it set the pattern for our future events, in that it was informal, affordable and really popular!

We hadn’t really considered a second conference until Susan Weinschenk posted this tweet in March 2013. Chris Collingridge from the Manchester team spotted the tweet and asked Susan what it would take to bring her to Manchester. Her response was something like “I’m free, but I need a room with 300 people”.

We were all huge fans of Susan’s work and we all owned several of her books, so this was too good an opportunity to pass up. We also realised pretty quickly that this event (imaginatively named NUX2) was going be a step up from NUX One, and that we weren’t cut out to organise something of this scale on our own.

That was when we started working with the amazing people at Manchester Digital and they’ve proved themselves invaluable time and time again since. They helped us with venue logistics, organising speaker travel and accommodation, and all the behind-the-scenes detail of a conference you might not realise exists as a delegate. I really don’t think we could have done it without them.

💭 “I’ve always felt that the 2013’s NUX2 event put our group on the map as a solid UX community north of the M25.”

I’m from Manchester, but I also spent a few years in Sheffield and Leeds. The north has always been close to my heart. The digital industry here is amazing, yet I do wonder if we’ve suffered from the inward-looking nature of the scene within the M25 ring road.

I’d hazard a guess and estimate that round 80% of our conference delegates travel from towns and cities north of Nottingham. I see the conference as an opportunity for us to bring amazing talent and internationally regarded speakers to the region at a price that is affordable to individuals, without them having to justify high ticket prices to their employers. £90 for a day ticket is pretty affordable. £400+? Not so much. Luckily we’re a not-for-profit community run by volunteers so we can afford to run events at cost.

🎙 What can people expect from NUX4?

More of the same, but different! We’re back at the Royal Northern College of Music again, but have learned a few things since last year. Based on feedback from NUX3 the main change we’ve made this year is increasing the breaks between speakers to allow delegates to network. To make this work, we’ve had to drop from eight speakers down to seven. Tickets are still £90, so to ensure we’re still offering great value to our delegates we’ve got a second keynote – Tomer Sharon from Google – to open the event, in addition to the incredible Sara Wachter-Boettcher, who will be closing the event.

In short: some big personalities, talks on user research, conversion optimisation, the “internet of things”, all kinds of other good stuff. Oh, and a closing keynote that we’ve been reliably informed will stop you in your tracks.

🎙 Looking back over past conferences, what is your favourite moment or experience?

Walking on stage to welcome delegates to NUX3 and seeing 572 faces staring back was one of the most terrifying moments of my life, but it also felt like a defining moment for NUX. It was by far the largest thing we’d tried, and it seemed like we’d pulled it off! It made all the sleepless nights and the countless emails, tweets and panicky Skype chats with Rick Threlfall (from the Manchester NUX team) and Rachel Thompson (from Manchester Digital) worth it.

The feedback from the event was amazing, and it really felt like we’d managed to bring a world class UX event to the north of England. I was very proud of what we achieved. Seriously, check out the photos!

The scale of the conference has grown dramatically each year: NUX One was 100 people; NUX2 was 400 people and NUX3 was just under 600. It was important to us that throughout that growth we kept the spirit of what made us NUX. We were never a formal, corporate-backed entity and we’ve always had a slightly – how can I put this? – “shambolic” element to what we do. Happily, people have always cut us a little slack for our mistakes due to us being small, grass-roots, community-driven and ultimately well meaning. As our events have grown, it would have been easy for the personality of NUX to disappear under a sheen of ultra-slick professionalism. I’m not sure if it’s by luck or by design, but I’m pleased to say that I think we’ve managed to retain that open and honest, if slightly shambolic, nature. There’s no danger of any ultra-slick professionalism with us.

🎙 What are NUX’s plans for the future?

NUX2 and NUX3 were both single-track seminar-style events, but after NUX3 we had a lot of people asking about multiple-track events, or even workshops. Also, we were conscious that our last two big events were both in Manchester, leaving Leeds a little underrepresented.

After some initial investigation by Kimberly Bottomley and Lucy Buykx from the Leeds team we decided we’d try a multiple track workshop event other there, killing several birds with one stone. In the spirit of keeping our events affordable to individuals, we ran June’s NUX Camp at cost, meaning that tickets for the day were only £50. To make this happen we relied heavily on the good will and generosity of our four workshop facilitators. We asked a few cheeky favours from some amazing people, and happily they all said yes!

People’s good will and generosity has been a reoccurring theme for us over the years, and indeed Chris Collingridge wrote a blog post about The Power of Yes shortly after NUX2. We’ve been really lucky to have support from some very lovely and very talented people.

I may be one of the more vocal/visible members of NUX, but I’m just one of a team, and we have tried to create a group ethos of being open, informal, personable and non-egotistical. As we grow and expand into new cities it may become harder to manage that, especially when some of us are geographically quite dispersed and we don’t really get to spend much time together in person. Luckily, all our volunteer organisers are also open, informal, personable and non-egotistical, making the job of enforcing our brand values that much easier!

On the subject of growth, Ian Franklin from the Leeds team spent some time working in Newcastle last year and met with some awesome UX people up there. Those conversations resulted in the creation of a Newcastle group. NUX Newcastle had their first meet up in May of this year and have been going from strength to strength since.

Shortly after that we were approach by Joanne Finch about starting a group in Liverpool. She had previously been involved in the UX Liverpool group, but it hadn’t got the traction she’d hoped so after a few months of inactivity she approached us about starting again with a fresh team under the NUX brand. They had their inaugural NUX Liverpool event at the beginning of August and are planning their next one for early October. They’re a really enthusiastic team and all indications are that they’re going to be very successful.

As I’ve mentioned before, the larger a community becomes, the more it risks losing the very essence of what made it what it was in the first instance. The last 12 months have seen us grow considerably and there are still things we can refine in all areas of our activities (meetups, conferences, workshops). Also, there are only a few cities along the M62 that have enough of a UX design scene to support a regular community group, and we’ve pretty much got the big ones covered now.

Personally I’d like us to spend the next 12 months supporting our two newest groups while they establish themselves.

Having said that, we are looking into the feasibility of doing another NUX Camp workshop event in Leeds mid-2016, and there will probably be an NUX5, but beyond that? It largely depends on what we have the energy for!

Sometimes people forget that everyone involved in NUX is a volunteer. I can’t stress this enough. Like most people that run community groups, we do this alongside our day jobs for no financial reward. I’m a big fan of grass-roots and volunteer-run community groups like ours, and having been involved in NUX for the last seven years, I am all too aware of the commitments involved. Anyone that does this deserves a big pat on the back, a large drink and a lie down in a quiet room.

I just hope Steve, David and Mike like what we’ve done to their baby!

 


 

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