I’ve never attended CodeMash – this conference has one of the best reputations of any conference around. So I’m humbled to have been selected as a speaker, and excited to be here this week. This is a crazy good line up of people, the hardest part is all the people I want to go hear.. that are speaking the same time as me!

Thursday I’ll be speaking on Coding Naked – Unit testing those hard to reach places

This is a fun talk that has evolved over the last couple of years, and I really like hat it’s become. I go in to multiple scenarios that are challenging and give practical patterns and solutions for increasing your Unit Test coverage and effectiveness. (slides)

image

On Friday I’ll be talking about ways to Prototype, Collaborate and Innovate

This talk dips in to several of the techniques and “lessons learned” that we used and discovered when I lead the product design (UX) team over at GetThere (Sabre). This is a great talk for UX people, developers and product owners. Basically – anyone that needs to work with other people and improve how you communicate ideas. (slides)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings”
– Todd Zaki-Warfel Author of the Prototyping book.

image

If you’re around – please stop by and say hi! Also, stay tuned – this being my first year at CodeMash, I’m hoping to blog a little about each day just to capture my thoughts and takeaways.

See you there!

Image Credit:

AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by Josh Holmes

Always Be Learning – Grow Your Craft

September 21, 2017    Category: Blog   1 Comment »

I received a great question about the value of trying out new tools after my presentation earlier this week.

 

Side note: I presented at an internal conference that Quicken Loans organizes and hosts every year for the employees in our technology group.

It was HUGE. – Extra thanks to Paige and Derik for taking much better conference pictures that I did.

 

 

Here was the question.

I attended your talk yesterday, and was wondering if you had heard of this tool:

https://pencil.evolus.vn

clip_image002

It seemed desirable as it is cross-platform, and open source. Do you think it might be worth investigating in light of all of the other tools we already have at our disposal?

Thanks for your time (and for the talk, it was a good) ☺

I’ve seen this line of thing several times. Is it even worth learning something new, when I probably already have something that sort of does that?

Taking Scott’s advice (“Keep your emails to 3-4 sentences … Anything longer should be on a blog…”)

Here is my answer:

.. Thanks for pointing me to this! I have not looked in to this tool. However, when I led the UX team at Sabre, one of the goals that each member had was to research 1 tool or technique or practice every 6 months. Then to share it with the team. This became a monthly lunch that we would do together where someone would share the new thing they had discovered. Team adoption was NOT part of the goal.. just to learn and share. In fact, many times – the person sharing would end up saying something like … “and that is why this tool is not for us!”

It’s way too easy to work work work with our heads down and not realize the new options and approaches that are available and emerging in our fields. At Sabre, we didn’t have BulletTime – so this was one way we tried to encourage each other to look up from our work, and work on how we worked. 😉

So yes, I always encourage looking in to a new tool. You might not ultimately adopt that tool – in fact usually you won’t, but there will be value in learning what you like, new ways of doing things, and ultimately – growing who you are.

Side note: At Quicken Loans we set a side 4 hours every Monday afternoon to work on or learn whatever you want. We call this BulletTime, and it’s a great way to continue sharpening who you are. If you’ve ever seen me present on “10 Reasons Software Sucks” then you’ll know how passionate I am about continual learning. We’ve chosen to be in a field that’s always changing, it’s up to us to always be growing too.

image

Happy Coding!

image

I know I’ve mentioned before how great it is to work for a company that provides time to attend and speak at various conferences. This is a whole next level.. Quicken Loans Technology group puts on their own annual conference that is truly a top notch 1 day conference. In addition to the speakers listed on the web site, I’ve also heard the likes of Steve Smith and Jim Holmes will also be presenting – I’m so pumped to be attending this! (and completely humbled to be presenting).

At QL Tech Conf I’ll be giving a UX’y talk

I’ll be sharing some of the lessons learned from when I ran the product design UX team at GetThere. We’ll be talking about how we used Innovation Games, rapid prototyping and design studios to better collaborate build better products. I really like the topics covered in this talk because they don’t just apply to UX teams. We’ve used Innovation Games to help facilitate retrospectives, organize team work and all sorts of contexts. I’ve found the prototyping techniques I’ll be covering useful whenever I need to communicate an idea or concept. Super handy for all dev and UX teams!

At MIGANG (Michigan Great lakes Area .NET Group) I’ll be speaking on Dependency Injection

image

image

I love this talk. This is the talk I gave in Ft. Worth where someone commented “Had me laughing so hard I could hardly eat my nachos.” I went for nearly 10 years in my professional development career before I adopted a DI approach to authoring code… the techniques that I’ll be showing have had the single greatest impact on how I write software today. I’ve been giving this talk, in one form or another, for several years now. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by, we’ll hit up the local pizza place afterwards and have a great time!

image

Last week I got to announce an upcoming talk that I will be giving in Denver, 10 Reasons your software sucks Denver Road Trip Edition! Well my Denver road trip has now turned in to a Colorado road trip as I will be speaking the very next night at the Boulder .NET User Group. This will be a fun night. We’ll be digging in to a very different skill set than most developer talks – looking at tools to help Prototype, Collaborate and Innovate using sketches, prototyping tools and Innovation games.

image

Slides

Some of the resources we’ll be digging in to are:

Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book, the Innovation Games, and Designing the Conversation (Awesome workshop guide by my friend Russ Unger)  you’ll get the meat that I’ll have to leave out of my *relatively* short talk.

image image image

 

If you’re in the area – come check it out both talks!

image

Slides:  http://www.slideshare.net/calebjenkins/prototype-collaborate-innovate

 

This is one of my favorite talks.

I first gave it at the Big Design Conference last year, and then at the Tulsa Tech Fest this year. Come learn about how we used Innovation Games, Sketching and Prototyping to collaborate with our customers to create awesome products when I was the UX product design manager at GetThere.

I’ll be touching on techniques from the Protyping Book, Innovation Games and using Microsoft PowerPoint and Indigo Studio from Infragistics to rapidly prototype ideas.

I’m excited to give this talk again – I presented at the last two Dallas TechFest events.

  • I was excited to see this conference come back!
  • more excited to be invited to present (awesome)
  • and even more excited that Jared Spool will be delivering the opening key note (even more awesomer!!).
  • You could say I’m pretty excited. Smile

Apparently I’m not the only one.

According to the Dallas TechFest twitter account – they completely sold out this week!

 

If you haven’t picked up Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book and the Innovation Games book you’ll get the meat that I had to leave out of my short talk.

image image

 

I hope to see you there tomorrow, find me and say “hi”  – let’s talk about all things Agile, UX, .NET and have a great time.

Enjoy!

image

Two years ago I gave the key note at the Tulsa Tech Fest – it was a lot of fun and I’m excited to be presenting there again this year!

This year I’ll be giving 3 talks.

image

Scaling Scrum with UX and other Key Players

Scrum is the most popular Agile framework in the world for effective team collaboration on complex projects. Scrum provides a small set of rules that create just enough structure for teams to be able to focus their innovation. Scrum is optimized for teams for teams of 5 to 9 people. Making Scrum work with larger teams or in large enterprise environments brings its own set of challenges. This talk presents 3 patterns used on enterprise teams to scale Scrum effectively with global teams.

Update: The Slides are now on slide share.

image

Modern Web Development: Testable WebForms with Model View Presenter Pattern (MVP)

The world is moving towards ASP.NET MVC.. but what about your legacy WebForms development. What are the things you can do today to make your WebForms more testable, reliable and even increase the SEO and usability of your WebForms. This talk will walk through applying the Model View Presenter pattern to your ASP.NET WebForm applications and introduce you to some additional enhancements that Microsoft has made to WebForms recently to make your site and life that much better!

Update: The slides are now on slideshare.

image

Prototype, Collaborate, Innovate

A UX Story from the worlds most used white labeled travel site. How we use Sketches, Prototyping and Innovation Games to collaborate with our customers and experience innovation breakthroughs.

Update: The slides are on slideshare!

 

Hope to see you there!

Ok, I’m late.. like really late on posting this – so late, in fact, that the Big Design Conference 2014 is right around the corner! I realize that’s it’s been a year since I’ve updated my blog (sorry about that). A LOT has happened in the last year and I hope to post about some of those things in the near future. Until then, here at least is part of my attempt to play catch up.

Last year I spoke at the Big Design Conference. It was my 5th time speaking there. I continue to be impressed by the organizers and growth of this conference. The Big Design Conference is quickly becoming a “go to” international UX conference.

One of the highlights from me, is that I got to take my entire team to the pre-conference workshops. I attended the “Workshop Workshop” – basically the awesome Russ Unger was teaching facilitation techniques while also teaching some of the team exercises from his “Designing the Conversation” book. I’m always leery of trying to teach two different things at the same time, but Russ pulled this of beautifully.

I spoke on prototyping and collaborating, sharing some of the techniques that we were using at GetThere (I spent last year leading the UX product design team for GetThere). Here are the slides from my talk:

 

If you haven’t picked up Todd Zaki Warfel’s Prototyping book – go get it! Between his book and the Innovation Games book you’ll get the meat that I had to leave out of my short talk.

image  image   image

 

Enjoy!

Workshop Agile + UX

November 12, 2011    Category: Events   No Comments »

image

Big Design Week starts Monday, and we’re thrilled to announce that our own Caleb Jenkins has been asked to help present on Wednesday’s workshop! He’ll be digging in to the dicey topic of UX and Agile with Brian Sullivan and Jim Carlsen-Landy. We’re looking forward to hearing how these three present together. They all come at Agile and UX teams from slightly different angles. Jim has managed UX teams for a couple of years at a company that was an early adopter of agile practices, and Brian will be walking through hands on techniques to get scrappy with your UX research, design and deliverables.

Caleb will be focusing in on some of the misconceptions that exists between the agile and UX worlds and specifically how teams can scale Scrum with UX teams. It’s going to be awesome! Check out the full week’s schedule, and if you haven’t done so yet, there is still time to register.

See you there!

UX + Agile

May 13, 2011    Category: Blog   No Comments »

image

Jared Spool published a great article yesterday titled “Essential UX Layers for Agile and Lean Design Teams”.

Jared talks briefly about proliferation of agile approaches in software design and user experience (UX) design and contrasts that to the Big Design Up Front approaches of the past, he then goes further in describing, not only User Stories, but several other layers of UX design and how each layer differs in scope and purpose from the other layers.

we frequently saw the successful teams talking about these other layers all through development. When a team member would produce a deliverable or design sketch that wasn’t quite matching the direction that the other team members imagined, the team would step back and talk about the other layers, trying to figure out where the disconnect came from. Because the team established the layers together, based on research they jointly conducted, they found it easy to collaborate on creating coherent experiences that regularly delighted their users.

It’s a great read, and I highly recommend heading over to the UIE site and reading the full article. You might also consider subscribing to the UIE podcast BrainSparks.

imagech

If you’ve never heard Jared Spool speak live, he’s a great presenter and is always thought provoking and memorable, our chief mentor will be presenting at the same conference as Jared in July, The Big (D)esign Conference is July 14th – 16th – Hope to see you there!

Thinking about games…

February 25, 2010    Category: Blog   1 Comment »

Stephen was the first person that really got me to think about game theory as it relates to general application design. Then my friends at Improving Enterprises introduced me to Luke Hohmann and his Innovation Games approach to product management and games like “buy a feature”. I’m certain that their is much more work that needs to be done in this field. Think about it. Game theory flips “traditional” usability on it heels. Every application that I’ve ever worked on “easy to use” was one of the requirements. In games, “too easy” is a negative. Challenging, engaging, rewarding and FUN are the goals the rule the day. This talk by Jesse Schell really drove this point home for me.

Carnegie Mellon University Professor, Jesse Schell, dives into a world of game development which will emerge from the popular “Facebook Games” era.

– Enjoy!

« Older Entries

Search

Subscribe

Enter your email address: