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Everyday Git

Ever wish you could collaborate on a project without tossing your code back and forth via FTP? Have you ever wanted to test a new feature or design without messing up Subversion? If you have, look no further than Git; the distributed source control program that’s taking the development world by storm.

Join us as we introduce you to Git from the ground up using examples that you can use in your workflow everyday.

• Watch presentation (Livestream)
• Download slides (PDF)

January 22nd, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• Carlos Rodriguez is a Rails developer at Planet Argon and one of the organizers of Refresh Portland.

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Inside the web in Japan

As you know, Japan is a country surrounded by the sea. This feature makes for a lot of unique things like Sushi, Samurais, Zen and so on.

There are also many unique characteristics of the Japanese web:

• Why do Japanese people use Yahoo more than Google?
• Why do Japanese people use Mixi(SNS) more than Facebook?
• Why do Japanese people watch the web from cell phones more than laptops?

Let’s look at the actual Japanese web – how the country’s unique background appears – and discuss ways for designing interfaces and features based on people’s behavior and cultures.

• Watch presentation (Livestream)
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February 26th, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• Hajime Kobayashi is the front-end engineer at LUNARR, Inc. in Portland, OR. 

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Culture Shift - A place at the Long Table

How companies are changing structure to create better problem solving environments.

The creative and business problems of tomorrow will not be solved by the same business and agency structures of today. Substance’s David Lowe-Rogstad will take you under the hood of how some companies are shifting their entire work style to create a environment that is culturally suited to solving the complex design problems that businesses face. David will show how they approach the responsibility of being creative at Substance and how that has enabled them to always do better for their clients.

We had some trouble with the streaming video, so click here to watch a recorded version.

• Download slides (PDF)

March 26th, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• David Lowe-Rogstad is the president and chief evangelism officer of Substance, a digital brand and creative company located in Portland, Oregon.

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Designers <3 jQuery

jQuery: it’s so hot right now, and its ease of use is making it the JavaScript library of choice for designers everywhere.

Learning jQuery can give you a greater depth of knowledge in creating rich user interactions on the web, allowing you to design with these interactions in mind.

Buck Wilson will take you for a ride through the history of JavaScript on the web, why jQuery has seen so much success, and how jQuery speaks the language of designers.

All aboard the jQuery train! Choo choo!

• Watch presentation (Livestream)
• Download slides (PDF)

April 23rd, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• Buck Wilson is a designer and developer at Jive Software. Prior to working at Jive, he co-founded Jotlet. Buck has written a number of tutorials on the subject of jQuery, including his latest: “jQuery for People Who Can’t Code Good”.

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The Dawning of the Age of Experience

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.

However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, “Go do that voodoo that you do so well.” Today’s business environment forces us to build multi-disciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements.

In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs.

He’ll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

• Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business
• Is learned, but not available through introspection
• Must be invisible to succeed
• Is cultural
• Is multi-discplinary
• Thrives best in an “educate and administrate” environment

You’ll see examples of designs from Apple’s iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

• Watch presentation (Livestream)
• View slides (Slideshare)

May 21st, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• Jared M. Spool is the founder of User Interface Engineering, the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world. Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year.

  (Photo via Jesper on Flickr)

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User Experience and Healthcare

Blogs, wikis, social networks and other web2.0 tools are being used increasing to share information and connect with others, in the healthcare industry.

While this is significant for an industry that has not taken advantage of digitization until now, how does the new technology work with the user needs? How do we design products and applications that could benefit us all?

Join me for a presentation where I will share my learning’s on:

• Designing around user needs
• Unique challenges faced while designing for the healthcare industry
• Process for doing a quick usability review

• Watch presentation (Livestream)
• View slides (Slideshare)
• Download slides (PDF)

June 25th, 2009, 6:30 PM at Jive Software

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• Sheetal Dube is a Senior User Experience Consultant at Evantage Consulting. For more than a decade she has enjoyed making technology products more user-friendly. Lately she has been working with physicians and nurses on a number of Healthcare projects.