office in Notting Hill three days and from home two days.
What I loved most was seeing the results of my IA work so quickly implemented. My wireframes were turned into real pages within a couple of weeks in the semi-agile production environment. We built and launched sets of features for each module. There were many work streams to keep track of and shared interfaces between streams needed to be watched so we didn’t get version conflicts. It was a kind of or-ganised semi-agile chaos. The developers were in another country so I had to work remotely. I could finally get away from the documenta-tion-heavy approach required by universities and get into specifying things through prototypes using Axure and other tools. It really was about just getting things done any way I could. It was all madness and a welcome breath of fresh air—the can do attitude, the need to be self-sufficient, the pragmatism and the total lack of constraints apart from no money. This is where I really got to do interactive prototyping using
My first task as IA was to run
down the road and get some
milk from Tesco.
leading-edge tools and understand the commercial drivers behind web applications.
But I was still the lone practitioner and so much more so because of the small company size. I really hungered to connect with other profes-sionals. Luckily, I was in London and there were about 1000 people like me who felt the same. Now all I had to do was go out and meet some of them.
Starting London IA
Everyone was nice enough at UPA events but I was kind of a nobody working for a tiny company most people had never heard of. Small fish, very big pond. At least back in Christchurch, New Zealand, I would say I was working for the university and that got a bit of kudos. Most of all, I was shocked by how little IA and UX community activity there seemed to be in London. There were these IA and usability London mailing lists on Yahoo that only ever seemed to send out jobs. Then Paul Wheeler, bless him, organised a get-together to see what we could do about it. About a dozen of us from the Yahoo group london_ia met at the Wellcome Trust offices, which I would later learn had some of the lush-est muffins to be seen anywhere in London down in their café. I still owe Paul one of those. I really hope I get to buy him one someday. But I digress. We all wanted something better than Yahoo and I suggested Ning because I knew about it through MyVillage. I proposed, with a spark of creative genius, that the group be called ... “London IA”.
Back at the University of Canterbury, I’d started a tertiary web group for New Zealand but that was hard going. Being geographically separated was the main killer I think. We organised a conference that went well but after that, things petered out.
London IA was different though. It started out in August 2008 with about a dozen and grew steadily to 35 by invitation only. It pottered along for a few months. Then I opened it up to everyone and got a big
plug from one of the UX recruiters. There was a strong appetite for online interaction, pub meetups and something different. The group exploded to 300 or so and just kept growing and growing. Now it’s over 1000, thanks in no small part to the efforts of people like Matthew Solle, Martin Belam and Tom Coombs.
I “got” the way professional organisations and conferences were chang-ing for the better. It’s like the UX Bookclub idea, “low cost of entry” and
“everybody learns”. What made London IA work was:
1. There was nothing else like it at the time in London
2. People had existing relationships which they reestablished online
3. People had something in common—a strong common interest
4. People had a desire to connect that was driven by various things, not least of which is the feeling of being an isolated professional forging a new frontier
5. A base of engaged people with some useful content ticking over so there’s always something to come there for
6. Some events in the physical world to anchor on—even if they’re just meet-ups
7. Not plugging it or trying to grow too fast or being commercial
8. Letting the membership steer it
9. Being low cost
These things really helped me to understand what does and doesn’t work about setting up online communities. Being part of the group
gave me energy, hope and a hunger to learn and improve. It challenged my knowledge level and made me try new things.
Eventually though, all good things must come to an end, especially when UK Immigration changes your visa rules. We were hoping to make the UK our home for at least three years but it wasn’t to be. We had met up with my fiancée’s family, had Christmas in Devon, sampled Europe and made lots of great friends. So in June 2009, just as sum-mer was threatening to happen, we did a final road trip around the UK and left old Blighty, returning home to Christchurch, New Zealand via San Francisco. I didn’t dare expect to get a specialist UX role in Christchurch—a city of only 300,000 people—much less an agency one.
But I had been introduced to a Kiwi returning home and he in turn put me in touch with LeftClick who were hiring.
I now see this city I had lived in for 3 years previously with new eyes.
There are so many opportunities and so many great software compa-nies here. Now I’m learning even more and it’s almost like the hunger I felt when I started uni for the first time. That sense of being alive tells me I’m in the right place and that I’ve found the right career.
About the Author
Ken Beatson is Senior User Experience Designer at LeftClick, a digital agency in Christchurch, New Zealand. His path to agency UX has been via 8 years in university roles including web technical, project manage-ment and business analysis across Australia and New Zealand. In 2008, he was looking for a change and took the plunge moving to London with his fiancee in the middle of the credit crunch. He worked for a small internet startup and founded London IA, London’s largest net-work of 1000+ user experience professionals.
Ken is a Kiwi by birth and his travel experiences have taught him to make the most of the beautiful country he lives in—he enjoys hiking, roadtrips, ultimate frisbee and cooking outdoors. His other professional interests include data visualisation, content strategy, business strategy and professional online communities.
Hamburg, Germany