2016: Year in review
2016 was a very special year for our LadiesThatUX Melbourne team and our community: We hit a bunch of significant milestones including our meet-up group grew from 100 to over 650+ members, we have been successfully running talk panels and other inspiring events with some of Australia’s top female industry leaders, and expanded our organising team from 3, Remya Ramesh, Gemma Sherwood and Sabine Selbach to 5 ladies with our newest additions Sarah Pan and Louise Sporton.
February 2016
We kicked off the year with a casual breakfast catch up at Bowery to Williamsburg in February. This was a great opportunity to understand what type of events our community is interested in. We listened and these are the results:
April 2016
In April, we were thrilled to have Angela Bode, Service Design Lead at Studio Thick as our first guest speaker of the year at Deloitte Digital! Angela talked about Human-centered design in Government and shared a handful of service design projects that she has completed with the Victorian Government.
May 2016
One of our top notch events of 2016 was the Second Anniversary Meetup in May with featured speakers and panel discussion hosted by Zendesk. We had an amazing line-up of female speakers, and the event attracted over 120 attendees.
Kirsten Mann, — GM Global Design & Experience, Aconex shared tips and tricks on how you can avoid becoming overwhelmed when you take on the challenge of a UX Lead or Manager role in her talk “Don’t sink: soar! How to make your mark as a new UX Manager”.
We all make mistakes, it’s part of the fun of being human! Megan Dell, Head of UX at 99Designs shared her top five mistakes as a UX practitioner and what she learned from them.
If you missed our anniversary meetup, you can watch our event highlights on YouTube.
July 2016
In our July meet-up, we were lucky to have 2 amazing ladies, Amelia Schmidt, content strategist at Weave and Emily MacDonald, service designer at Deloitte Digital as our guest speakers.
Amelia opened the event with her talk about “Personas! What are they good for?” in which she explored how personas differ between industries, key mistakes people make, how they are regarded now and how to get the most out of them. Followed by Emily’s talk “Co-designing with stakeholders” where the audience learned about tips and tricks from Emily’s past experiences on how to gain and maintain stakeholder momentum on UX and service design projects.
August 2016
The month of August saw us joining forces with the wider Melbourne UX meetup community. Coinciding with UX Australia, UX Mega Meetup was created. Rohan Irvine from UX Gatherings guided us through the evening’s events at Zendesk.
The evening opened with a ‘UX Dictionary’ game activity run by Daniel Neville from Prototypes & Popcorns. ‘UX Therapy’ was the topic of our panel with Denise Jacobs (Creativity Evangelist, The Creative Dose), Ashlea McKay (UX Agony Aunt), Rhett Luciani (Product Designer, Zendesk) and Catherine Hills (UX Lead, ANZ) moderated by Sarah Pan.
Viveka de Costa has written a good summary of the panel discussion as a medium article “Challenges at work? It’s just a Terrifyingly Beautiful job…” which you can read it here OR if you’re visual person check out Justin Cheong’s brilliant sketch note below:
Special thanks to the co-organisers from UX Gatherings, Prototypes & Popcorn, UX Design Group of Melbourne and all our amazing volunteers!!
Oct 2016
In October, we organised a bunch of lightning talks with featured speakers and panel discussion at Redbubble on the topic ‘How to you persuade your organisation to invest in UX?”
Gemma Sherwood, UX Lead at Intrepid Group opened the night by sharing her career journey — from Graphic Design to UX and Abla Hamilton, UX Researcher at Redbubble talked about how small things can help you sell user research.
The talks were followed by a panel discussion with with our special guests Jasmine Kaul (Senior Digital Content Producer, Victorian Department of Health and Human Services), Jane Nguyen (Delivery Manager, Redbubble), and Sarah Pan (Senior UX Designer, IE Digital) moderated by Remya Ramesh (Experience Design Lead, Seamless)
Viveka de Costa has written a summary of our October meetup as a medium article “How do you persuade your organisation to invest in UX?”— you can read it here.
Nov 2016
In November, we were thrilled to be a part of Melbourne’s entrepreneurial community at Melbourne Startup Week, a annual conference that builds momentum and opportunity around entrepreneurship.
Dec 2016
Lastly, we wrapped up this amazing year with a end-of-year party with fellow UXers from Melbourne and beyond at the Beer DeLuxe in December.
Plans are already underway for our future events, but we’d love to have your feedback on past events & ideas to make our community even bigger & better in 2017. We promise our LTUX Melbourne survey will take a few minutes of your time to complete!
