Our Week at UKOUG

Earlier this month, Noel (@noelportugal) and I (@joybot12) represented the AppsLab crew at the UKOUG Apps 14 and Tech 14 conferences in Liverpool.

I conducted customer feedback sessions with users who fit the “c-level executive” user profile, to collect feedback on some of our new interactive data visualizations. Unfortunately, I can’t share any of these design concepts just yet, but I can share a bunch of pics of Noel, who gave several talks over the course of the 3-day conference.

This first photo is a candid taken after Noel’s talk on Monday about “Wearables at Work.”

Photo by Joyce Ohgi

I was thrilled to see so many conference attendees sticking around afterwards to pepper Noel with questions; usually at conferences, people leave promptly to get to their next session, but in this case, they stuck around to chat with Noel (and try on Google Glass for the first time).

Here’s another of Noel taken by Misha Vaughan (@mishavaughan) with his table of goodies.

Photo by Misha Vaughan

The next photo is from Tuesday, where Noel and Vivek Naryan hosted a roundtable panel on UX. Because this was a more intimate, round-table style talk, the conference attendees felt comfortable speaking up and adding to the conversation. They raised concerns about data privacy, their thoughts on where technology is headed in the future, and generally chatted about the future of UX and technology.

Photo by Joyce Ohgi

This last photo is from Monday afternoon, when I made Noel take a break from his grueling schedule to play table tennis with me. The ACC Liverpool conference center thoughtfully provided table tennis in their Demo Grounds as a way to relieve stress and get some exercise (was a bit too cold to run around outside).

I put up a valiant effort, but Noel beat me handily. In my defense, I played the first half of the game in heels; once I took those off my returns improved markedly. I’ll get him next time! 🙂 A special thank-you to Gustavo Gonzalez (@ggonza4itc), CTO at IT Convergence for the great action shot, and also for giving excellent feedback and thoughtful input about the design concepts I showed him the day following.

Photo by Gustavo Gonzalez

All-in-all, we enjoyed the Apps 14 and Tech 14 conferences. It’s always great to get out among the users of our products to collect real feedback.

For more on the OAUX team’s activities at the 2014 editions of the UKOUG’s annual conferences, check out the Storify thread.