We’re thrilled to give back to the community while doing something we love – building great user-friendly websites!

Photo courtesy of  http://transformfxfitness.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/jump-rope-tricks.jpg

We’re a long time sponsor of MESH because it attracts an interesting crowd and thought-provoking speakers. This year was no different!

Ryan Carson of Treehouse got things off to an exhilarating start. To our minds, his statements around university education struck a chord (and maybe a few nerves) in examining the traditional four year university degree. Key points from his talk were:

• The university system is  a racket that puts students in 100K of debt and doesn’t lead them to a job
• Forcing kids into $100K of debt is immoral
• The amount of student debt in the US exceeds the amount of credit card debt before the credit meltdown
• It’s a 4 year “education vacation” – where students are taking a break from actually acquiring the skills they need for employment
• Enter Treehouse – an organization that wants to improve tech education at low cost and as a result eliminate universities from technical education entirely – at the wallet-friendly cost of around $300

Provocative declarations when contemplating the future of education! Around the UM water cooler we wondered how Ryan’s model would address the broader value of a liberal arts degree. Can critical thinking, empathy, interpretation and navigating the social demands of the workplace be delivered by a Treehouse-style learning platform? These are factors we as designers and researchers consider essential – especially in our increasingly technology-focused world of work.

Another session we attended was Josh Benton on the Future of Journalism.  Much of the discussion centered on the crucial need for newspapers to find alternative revenue streams, and the increasing introduction of paywalls. Our main take-away was that paywalls have not yet proved effective for regional newspapers. Indeed, their biggest success may be in preventing current print subscribers from dropping their subscriptions because it eliminates the free web alternative. But this begs the question of if simply retaining current print subscribers is a sufficient outcome of implementing a paywall.

There were many other great sessions that you can read about in the MESH newsroom.

Hats off to the planners, sponsors and everyone who contributed to making MESH13 a stellar event!  Thank you and see you next year!

We love MESH because it brings together great people and all things digital.   The speaker line-up is stellar this year.  Instead of having one or two keynotes (like a typical conference) there are four “Keynote Conversations”.

Ryan Carson kicks things off talking about ‘The Evolution of Education..and what that means”.   It will be interesting to learn more about how the Internet is impacting the classroom and how people learn.

Joshua Benton from Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab is the second keynote of the day, talking about how journalism is impacted by the digital era and what it needs to do to survive.

On Day 2  JP Rangaswami  the Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com delivers a talk entitled ‘Publish, Search, Fulfill & Converse: The Future of Work and the Enterprise.    This will likely touch on how social networking and search engines impact how we gather and exchange information, and how that is transforming the way we work.  Definitely a topic of interest for most of us.

The last keynote speaker is Kyle Monson.  Kyle Monson is a founding partner and chief creative at Knock Twice, a tech marketing agency in New York and San Francisco.   His topic is centered on how brands have been told they must become publishers.  With so many media clients, newspapers and publishers on our client roster, this topic will be of real interest to our team

We’ve highlighted just four of the sixty awesome speakers but you can learn more here.   If you’re attending MESH be sure to stop by our table and say hello.  We’ll give you a free 5-minute consult on the usability of your website or app and a piece of candy!   See you next week!

We are a Friend of MESH

At Usability Matters, we are passionate about user experience, and create strategic solutions for our clients using UX tools and best practices. We use design research to validate and enrich our designs, resulting in the best possible product for our clients.

After 11 years in business, we have a stellar reputation in Toronto and beyond. We offer a dynamic and supportive working environment. We believe in work-life balance, as well providing a breadth of experience and education.

Our pride in our team and our work shows in everything we do.

The Opportunity

We need a graphic designer!

We’d like to add a new team member who can work with us to take our UX deliverables through the next step in the project: turning these into beautiful and compelling designs.

This role could also be described as user experience designer, web designer, graphic designer and/or interface designer.

The designer’s role will be to:

• Work with our Art Director to develop creative concepts based on a project brief
• Refine concepts and produce individual page mock-ups in PSD format 

We need someone who:        

• Has aptitude, experience and passion, in the graphic design field
• Has a strong portfolio of successful creative projects
• Is focussed on digital/interactive design (we don’t do print work)
• Knows how to work with a wireframe, and has experience collaborating with UX professionals
• Understands the sweet spot between business requirements and user needs and can bring this to life in the design of an experience
• Has demonstrated their ability to work within constraints – technical, business or other
• Understands how to present and communicate their recommendations and designs to client teams
• Is a college or university graduate in a related discipline or equivalent experience
• Has incredible attention to detail
• Is well-organized and efficient
• Can work independently but also coordinate with a team

Bonus points for:

• Solid experience cutting up PSDs into HTML/CSS/JavaScript using clean, compliant code – no messy stuff!
• Usability testing experience

You might be the right person if you:

• Can inspire and motivate colleagues and clients to achieve the best possible design
• Have a great client manner and are comfortable in any professional setting
• Know what’s trending but are more interested in innovating based on user needs
• Can think big, then roll up your sleeves and get hands-on
• Know the rules, and know when to break them

To fit into our team you’ll need to:

• Adhere and adapt to tight schedules and project conditions
• Be able to roll with the punches and adapt when things change
• Appreciate collaboration and encourage debate
• Have no problem pitching in where needed to get the job done
• Put your dishes in the dishwasher, not the sink

This opportunity may be filled by contract (minimum 6 months) or full-time, depending on the suitability and preference of the selected applicant. We are also looking for individuals to add to our freelance roster, so if you are a freelancer looking to pick up project-based work we’d be interested in hearing from you as well.

Forward resumes to recruiting@usabilitymatters.com.  Please include:

1. Portfolio or samples of relevant work
2. Your salary/compensation expectations

We are interviewing as we receive applicants and will close this opportunity when we’ve found the appropriate fit for our team. Hope to hear from you!

Usability Matters is so proud to announce that we are Silver Level sponsors of Girls Learning Code, the little sister organization to Ladies Learning Code.

There are many studies, statistics and articles you can find trumpeting Why technology is the future for girls, and as a company founded by women, supporting our future successors is something we are happy and eager to take part in.

If you know of any creative, 9-13 year old ladies, consider sending them to one of the GLC camps and watch what she can do!

With 2013 well underway we’re excited to announce the addition of two talented new staff to the Usability Matters team: UX designer Nick Crampton and art director Simon Coyle.

Nick Crampton joined us in the fall of 2012. Since then, he’s taken the reins on a number of UX design projects, honing and proposing new designs and UX concepts to our clients. He also moonlights as our resident DIY tech geek, encouraging us to experiment with Arduinos during lunch hour (and building some pretty funky interactive toys of his own).

Simon Coyle came on board more recently to help us with some of our larger projects. Simon’s previous client experience includes working with some of the biggest brands online today, so needless to say we’re pretty pumped to have him lend his expertise and artistic judgment to our current and future endeavours.

Welcome to the team, guys!

This year we were especially impressed by the number of sessions that drew attention to the human aspect of interaction design. Whether the topic was branding, data visualization, even cafeteria design, the speakers we heard made an exceptional effort to link these abstractions back to real human beings and behaviour, rather than limiting their talks to the latest tools and interfaces.

Here are just a few speakers from the conference that we really enjoyed. If you ever get the chance to hear them speak, we recommend attending!

Dan Saffer on Microinteraction: Designing with Details

The difference between products you love and tolerate are often the microinteractions you have with them.” – Dan Saffer

Interaction designer and author Dan Saffer gave an enlightening talk about how the tiniest details of an interface or interaction often exert a powerful influence on the overall user experience. While this isn’t necessarily a new idea, it was refreshing to hear someone to recontextualize the power of the little things in light of recent design trends that tend to focus on honing the Big Idea, overall strategy, and design thinking as a whole.

Jer Thorp on Data & Human Experience

Data artist and designer Jer Thorp managed to weave a deeply human motif into a talk about a very non-human, technical subject: data. By doing so, he reignited our fascination with data visualization, stoked our motivation to explore the latest tools (like Processing!) and got us excited about designing with data ourselves.

Thorp not only showed us inspiring, beautiful and functional instances of data visualization, he also touched on important technology and policy issues, including Big Data, open data, and public access to data — seamlessly entwining the functional, aesthetic, and social elements of data into one concise keynote.

Sarah Cantor Aye on Designing Everything but the Food

Cantor Aye’s talk on redesigning an elementary school cafeteria turned out to be a surprise high point for many conference attendees, including us. Her company’s elegant and outside-the-box solution to what school administrators originally thought was a food-waste problem resulted in one of the most fascinating sessions of the whole conference.

What we loved most about Cantor Aye’s story was the exceptional measures her consultancy (Greater Good Studios) took to get accurate data about the problem, namely, that the students weren’t eating enough of their food.

A less creative and user-oriented team might have resorted to surveys and focus groups to investigate this issue. Cantor Aye wired the entire cafeteria and prep kitchen up to video cameras to track student behaviour throughout the dining space. To find out how students perceived their food, they opted for the most objective data-collection method possible: having the students wear video-camera head-sets during lunch hour!

All in all, we had a fantastic time at Interaction 13 this year. Thanks again to IxDA for bringing it all together, and for having the conference right in our backyard.

Need help making your own digital or web project more accessible, easy-to-use, and human-friendly? We can help. Learn more about what we do at Usability Matters or contact us directly by phone or email.

BlinkedIn is what happens when you see someone’s LinkedIn pic for the first time and your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions…

As a member of the UM team, you will design strategic solutions for our clients using UX tools and best practices.

We want someone who is passionate about user experience and will share that passion with our team, our clients, and our colleagues in the field.

The Company

Usability Matters is a dynamic firm devoted exclusively to user experience. We are an established boutique agency with a stellar reputation in Toronto and beyond.

We offer a dynamic and supportive working environment. We believe in work-life balance, as well as providing a breadth of experience and education. Our varied client list affords us the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects across many industry sectors.

Our pride in our team and our work shows in everything we do.

We need someone who:

• Has aptitude, experience AND passion, in the UX field
• Is a college or university graduate in a related discipline or equivalent experience
• Has experience gathering requirements from clients for complex user interfaces
• Can provide high-level strategic recommendations on all aspects of the user experience, across various channels (web, mobile, social media)
• Can dive deep: designing the structure, navigation, functionality and interfaces of effective and engaging user interactions
• Can do this using wireframes, flow diagrams, conceptual models, IA diagrams and other deliverables
• Understands the sweet spot between business requirements and user needs and can bring this to life in the design of an experience
• Has demonstrated their ability to work within constraints – technical, business or other
• Has experience coordinating, running and reporting on usability studies and other forms of design research
• Understands how to present and communicate their recommendations and designs to client teams
• Has experience doing or overseeing visual design
• Can wrangle Word, Excel and PowerPoint
• Is an expert with Omnigraffle, Axure, Morae and/or other UX tools

You might be the right person if you:

• Can inspire and motivate colleagues and clients to achieve the best possible design
• Have a great client manner and are comfortable in any professional setting
• Know what’s trending but are more interested in innovating based on user needs
• Can think big, then roll up your sleeves and get hands-on
• Know the rules, and know when to break them

To fit into our team you’ll need to:

• Adhere and adapt to tight schedules and project conditions
• Be able to roll with the punches and adapt when things change
• Appreciate collaboration and encourage debate
• Have no problem pitching in where needed to get the job done
• Put your dishes in the dishwasher, not the sink

This opportunity may be contract or full-time, depending on the skills, suitability and preference of the selected applicant.

Forward resumes to recruiting@usabilitymatters.com.  Please include:

1. Portfolio or samples of relevant work
2. Your salary/compensation expectations

We are interviewing as we receive applicants and will close this opportunity when we’ve found the appropriate fit for our team. Hope to hear from you!

We need a talented and passionate interface designer. Someone who can work hand-in-hand with our team members to produce typical UX deliverables but also translate these ideas into compelling, engaging designs. Essentially we need a creative graphic designer with really strong UX chops. Someone who wants to remain hands-on in Photoshop but can extend into areas typically handled by a user experience lead.

This role could also be described as user experience (UX) designer, web designer, graphic designer or interaction designer.

We need someone who:        

• Has aptitude, experience and passion in the graphic design field
• Has a strong portfolio of successful creative projects
• Has experience collaborating with UX professionals
• Understands the sweet spot between business requirements and user needs and can bring this to life in the design of an experience
• Has demonstrated their ability to work within constraints – technical, business or other
• Understands how to present and communicate their recommendations and designs to client teams
• Has incredible attention to detail
• Is well-organized and efficient
• Understands how to communicate and collaborate with front-end developers

You might be the right person if you:

• Can inspire and motivate colleagues and clients to achieve the best possible design
• Have a great client manner and are comfortable in any professional setting
• Know what’s trending but are more interested in innovating based on user needs
• Can think big, then roll up your sleeves and get hands-on
• Know the rules, and know when to break them

To fit into our team you’ll need to:

• Adhere and adapt to tight schedules and project conditions
• Be able to roll with the punches and adapt when things change
• Appreciate collaboration and encourage debate
• Have no problem pitching in where needed to get the job done
• Put your dishes in the dishwasher, not the sink

This opportunity may be filled by contract (minimum 6 months) or full-time, depending on the suitability and preference of the selected applicant.

Forward resumes to recruiting@usabilitymatters.com.  Please include:

1. Portfolio or samples of relevant work
2. Your salary/compensation expectations

We are interviewing as we receive applicants and will close this opportunity when we’ve found the appropriate fit for our team. Hope to hear from you!